The Spirit of French Music

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LIBRARY OF MUSIC AND MUSICIANS

Edited by A. EAGLEFIELD HULL. Mus. Doc. (Oxon.)

THE SPIRIT OF FRENCH MUSIC

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LIBRARY OF MUSIC AND MUSICIANS

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French Music of To-day. By G. Jean-Aubry.

Earlier French Musicians. By Mary Hargrave.

Musorgsky. By M. P. Calvocoressi. Translated by the Editor. With musical illustrations and a portrait.

The Orchestra and How to Listen to It. By M. Montagu Nathan.

Cyril Scott: Poet, Musician and Philosopher. By A. Eaglefield Hull.

Short Studies in the Nature of Music. By Herbert Antcliffe.

Music of Spain. By C. Van Vechten.

Josef Holbrooke and his Work. By George Lowe.

Music and the Romantic Movement in France. By Arthur Ware Locke.

Handbook of Orchestration. By F. G. Fidler.

How to Enjoy Music. By Herbert Antcliffe.

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To Monsieur André Messager

TO MONSIEUR ANDRÉ MESSAGER

My Dear Master,

An artist favoured by the Muse that inspired of old Grétry, Monsigny and Boïeldieu has every right to the homage of a book in which the praise of French music is sung.

It would have been enough for me to have inscribed your name at the head of these studies, had I had no motive but this for dedicating them to you. But your generous welcome of the first musical work for which I sought a public hearing gives me another motive—gratitude. My prayer is that I may deserve well enough of musical art for it to be said that in giving me access to this second career you have not served it ill.

Is this the time to give ourselves up to such dreams? When the majority of French families are in mourning, while War continues to reap its harvest of the youth of this country, ought we writers and artists to devote ourselves passionately to our work? Yes, more than ever we should. After the cataclysm the needs of human nature will be unchanged; a long privation will have rendered them more pressing. What we do goes beyond the sphere of utility. But the need of truth and beauty lies closer to the heart of humanity than the need of what is useful; and a period which does not satisfy this superior need, or which only provides it with clouded and alloyed satisfactions, is a period in which many things are not well, in which what are called practical interests themselves suffer deep injury. This truth is applicable to all civilised peoples, and eminently so to France. Our works represent the most precious part of the nation's capital, the part whose decline would bring with it the decadence of all other parts. A France whose culture did not turn out the finest products would be a France that the world would hold in slight esteem; or rather the world would not recognise her; not receiving from her those unique gifts that it expects, it would be little disposed to seek out the more ordinary products that she would offer. Our work, then, is something higher than useful, yet it has utility. It is the radiation of our letters and our arts which will open world-routes to our merchants and our ships.

To work then! Let us work with an ardour redoubled by grief and hope. The dead who have saved us require of us that we add to our duties and labours those which awaited them. Let us work, striving after that perfection for which the conditions of modern existence are, alas! none too favourable, but which remains nevertheless the strict law of our professional sincerity.

Foreword

FOREWORD

I mean this book to be a small treatise of musical taste; an experimental, not a dogmatic treatise, made out of the observations to which a somewhat close analysis of the work of the masters has led me. The subjects of the six chapters of which it is composed do not form a real historic sequence; they are: Grétry, Rameau, the Modern Italians, Meyerbeer, Wagner the Poet, Wagner the Musician I have chosen and brought together these subjects, because the reflections and lessons which spring from them seemed to me the most pertinent and illuminating to set in opposition to certain contemporary errors. I hope in a subsequent volume to speak of Lulli, Monsigny, Boïeldieu, Berlioz and the French schools of the second half of the nineteenth century. Thus there will be provided a sufficiently consecutive view of our national music from the time of Louis XIV. to our own day. But my aim, let me repeat, is to act as critic rather than historian, and to guide, as far as in me lies, public taste in a certain direction.

I venture to call the tendencies by which I am inspired French, and I do so with absolute conviction. And yet I have not asked myself what is French and what is not. It is a question that should not be asked. One is certain that the reply will be inadequate. It is right to be French in everything: but one must not be so of set purpose. That is the right attitude. The French spirit, French taste—these are things that do not define themselves, do not put themselves into formulæ. It is not that they lack body and reality; on the contrary their reality as we see it in history is too much alive, too overflowing—and how should we recognise it in history if we did not feel it stirring within us? There is nothing more real, more distinct, than the physiognomy of an individual, especially if a superior personality shines through his features. But that is a thing that is felt and cannot be defined. It is the same with the French spirit. It is a living individuality. Should it happen that under the action of disturbing or depressing influences it deviates from its natural line or falls into a state of weakness, it will be no remedy to set before it some sort of theoretical or abstract model of itself to which it must studiously conform. It will be far better to bring back to it the contact and sentiment of the works that it created in happier times when it enjoyed the plenitude and lively vigour of its strength. Nothing could be better calculated to renew its lost or wearied vital energy, to kindle again the flame of its activity.

Chapter 1

CHAPTER I

GRÉTRY

HIS LIFE, WORK, AND IDEAS

If it be true, as people are fond of saying, that Comic Opera is of all musical forms the form most distinctively French, then there has never been a more French composer than Grétry. Grétry is the king, the god of comic opera.

His greatest rival is Monsigny. And Monsigny undoubtedly has sweet and tender touches that are peculiar to himself. But Grétry has more life and strength.

Of all his works Richard Coeur de Lion is the only one that is still performed, so that the acquaintance of Grétry can only be made nowadays by reading. Even for that one must go to a library, unless one happens to be a Croesus possessing the wherewithal to acquire the magnificent edition of his works produced by the illustrious Gevaěrt under the auspices of the Belgian government. The piano editions published about fifty years ago by Michaělis are exhausted, and one hardly ever comes across them. I have been told that shortly before the war the enemy publisher Breitkopf bought the plates. There remains then this great Belgian edition which provides keen pleasure for the music lover. There is the orchestral partition, followed page by page by the piano score, a text of which the accuracy and value are guaranteed by the mere name of Gevaërt; there are full notices by Fétis and V. Wilder,—all these are to be found in this monument of learning and taste. I have spent many hours with them. I have read Grétry’s literary works, those three volumes of Essays and Memoirs, so delicate, charming and diversified; also the excellent work devoted to the master by Michel Brenet, which gives us, besides learned analyses of all his operas, a biography adorned with pleasant documents. My studies and the reading of these works have made me an enthusiastic admirer of the composer of Richard. My aim will be to outline, if only sketchily, some features of his genius and his art. They were adored by our fathers, and deserve to be so by ourselves. Time may have taken off the freshness of some of Grétry’s productions, but, if we consider their general effect, it has in no degree tarnished their first brilliancy. They will appear younger and more full of savour than ever when restored to the theatre

I

André Ernest Modeste Grétry was born at Liège on the 11th February, 1741. His grandparents, Jean Noé Grétry and Dieudonnée Campinado had married against the wishes of their families, who had punished them by leaving them to themselves; from this had resulted a certain loss of social standing which the happy couple endured with cheerfulness. They had set up as innkeepers at Blegny, a hamlet near Liège, and on Sundays Jean Noé used to set the peasants dancing to the sound of his fiddle. No sooner was his son François able to hold a bow, than he began to help his father; the little fellow was so talented that at twelve years old he gained by competition the place of first violin in the church of St. Martin at Liège. He was soon to become the most eminent violinist in the town. He too made a marriage of affection, but more lucky than his father, he forced the consent of his future wife’s parents, though they considered his position too humble or too uncertain. This was the father of the great Grétry. Here then we see at least one family in which the famous law of hereditary progress is faithfully observed. The village fiddler begets the leading violin, and the latter gives the world the composer of operas.

André’s early infancy was passed chiefly in the country with his grand-parents. I like to imagine that old Jean Noé was still playing dances, and to find in the memory of these village Sundays the source of inspiration at once so gracious and so lively, so sturdy and so elegant, so rustic and so dainty, with which the musician of Colinette and of Richard was to depict and animate the gaiety of peasants making holiday.

It was a great grief to the child to leave Blegny when his father put him in the choir of the collegiate church of St. Denis. There his existence was divided between the duties of choir boy, and music lessons, which he received with his comrades from a very rough master. He left St. Denis at the age of twelve, and next received private tuition from a musician named Leclerc, whose gentleness and kindness he praises in his Memoirs. The desire to compose was born in him, and he was considerably excited by the representations of an Italian troupe who were touring the large towns with the opéra bouffes of Pergolesi and Galuppi. This troupe spent a year at Liège, and Francois Grétry got the boy admitted to the orchestra. Coming into touch with Pergolesi’s work was a revelation to him. On hearing the Serva padrona, André (as he writes) nearly “died of pleasure,” and the idea that he too one day might compose operas threw him into ecstasies.

He had a very fine treble voice. Having resumed his place in the choir of the collegiate church, with his musical sense exalted and instructed by the Italians, he made an extraordinary impression as a soloist. The musicians of the orchestra in which his father was first violin, began to play pianissimo the better to hear him. A canon, a great music lover and a rich man, M. de Harlez was filled with enthusiasm and promised the young virtuoso whatsoever material help he might need to develop his talents. But the boy was eager to establish himself as a composer. He wrote, without any knowledge, a motet and a fugue: in his Memoirs he confesses that he had pilfered the ideas from various pieces, but had altered their form and given them new turns to render them unrecognisable. His father thereupon decided that he should study; he placed him at first under the direction of Renekin, organist at the church of St. Pierre, and afterwards under Moreau, organist at St. Paul’s. Renekin, delighted at his pupil’s happy nature, was inclined to guide him with a loose rein. Moreau, a stern master, would have liked to drive him into hard studies of musical science. He greeted coldly the faulty attempts of the little genius, whereas Renekin had revelled in them and had played them on his organ. Grétry paid more attention to Renekin than to Moreau. In that he was only following the natural tendency of a period of life which usually prefers facility to discipline when it has the choice. Unfortunately in his case this was not merely a youthful negligence, and in the years that followed he never learnt the necessity of severe studies in his art. At Rome where he spent eight years, we shall find that his school work remained superficial and incomplete; so much so that when he left that town his master Casali recommended him to a colleague at Geneva in these curious terms: “I am sending you one of my pupils, a perfect ass in music, and knowing nothing, but a pleasant young fellow of good character.” “Ass” is more than an exaggeration, and beyond all doubt the man who saw in a Grétry only his weakness in counterpoint reveals himself to us as a pedant. It is none the less true that Grétry had reduced his apprenticeship to too limited a field. Criticism is obliged to take note of this, because of the vast resources of invention and expression of which these gaps in the technical structure deprived a genius marvellously endowed by nature.

Let us not however delude ourselves as to the significance and extent of such gaps in the case of Grétry. We have seen other great musicians possessing more genius than craftsmanship and being more or less seriously hampered thereby in the manifestation and realisation of that same genius. But with them this technical insufficiency was associated (strangely enough) with what one might call an insufficiency of natural musicality, or sense of music. Berlioz for instance. He abounds in eloquent and poetic inve , in great ideas: but he writes badly; his music sounds hard: his “crust” is hollow, hard, tough. That is not the case with Grétry. He is fully and subtly a musician. All that he writes sounds agreeable, his technique is pure: his melody, which is sometimes of the utmost grace and beauty, and which in general recommends itself by a rare justness of accent and expression, is attached to the movements of a bass that is easy, neat and elegant. To what point then does our reproach, or one might far better say regret, apply? To the narrowness, the relative meagreness of his technique, to a certain lack of richness and variety in the harmonies of his lyre. Our pleasure is in no way lessened thereby in places where richer combinations were not needed. But when, not contenting ourselves with the pleasure of so many delicious pieces, and scenes, we step back a little to judge the general effect either of Grétry’s work or of one of his works, we cannot console ourselves for his not having possessed craftmanship to that degree that makes the greatest masters and produces works that are armed at all points against the blows of time. It seems to us that he was meant for such work, that he was born to achieve larger flights, constructions of greater breadth and more sustained. There is a perceptible contrast between the strength, the often masterly completeness of his ideas and the exiguity of the dramatic field in which they are produced and flourish so successfully. We have his efforts in the grand style (Céphale et Procrès, Andromaque, etc) in which superb elements of invention do not attain an effect worthy of themselves, because the style of the mass of the work is not kept up to the same level. We have his conceptions of dramatic music as he has set them out in his Memoirs, conceptions in which boldness and even largeness of scope are not what are missing, and in which one feels that some internal force is bubbling up, for abstract reasoning would not have sufficed to form them. Under the form of a dream of the future he describes a thousand enrichments that theatre music might receive from the hand of a great symphonist without changing its nature. Someone has remarked, not without justice, that this dream was indeed a prophecy, to be realised in the person of Mozart. But there is my point—I believe that Grétry, if he had gone through a greater and more complete school, would have been a French Mozart, and the true corollary to Rameau.

II

The young artist’s most ardent desire was to spend some years in Italy. The generosity of his Mæcænas, the canon, and the existence of a Liège college at Rome facilitated the accomplishment of that desire. The college used to give hospitality to eighteen young students and artists, natives of Liège, who had distinguished themselves in the eyes of their fellow-citizens. It was this college that Grétry entered after a journey on foot of which he has left us a pleasant account. His life at Rome, free from pecuniary anxieties and steeped in the torrent of music which flowed unceasingly in the eight theatres and countless churches of the town, must have been very happy. He was a well-conducted lad (as his master of counterpoint testified in the absence of any other recommendation) and moreover a lad of resource. Finding it necessary to do something to replenish his purse, he introduced himself to a nobleman who played the flute and who had made himself notor- ious among the musicians of Rome as being hard to satisfy. This music-lover was in the habit of ordering a flute concerto from every artist who visited him: he was never satisfied with it and always sent the music back to the composer with a few pounds. Our cunning Walloon expressed a desire to hear a prelude played on the instrument by one who was such a master of it. And having fixed in his memory all the flautist’s favourite passages and runs, he put them in the concerto. The nobleman declared his production admirable and took him into his pay, promising him a small annual salary on condition of receiving a flute concerto in every town where he stopped—for he was a great traveller.

The Memoirs of Grétry give us an amusing picture of musical life in Rome at this period, and of the passion of the public for the theatre and for church concerts. What one must not expect to find in the Memoirs is an account of the state of musical art, or a judicial mention of the artists who adorned it in its various branches at that time. Grétry is not writing a chapter of the history of music: he is merely telling us about the works and the masters that have specially attracted him by their affinity with his own personality, and by the direct help and stimulus that he felt he could draw from them for the development of his own nature. Of all the different kinds of music it was theatre music that captivated him at Rome: and in theatre-music it was opéra-bouffe, and among the masters of opéra-bouffe, Pergolesi. Pergolesi was the preponderating influence with Grétry. A study such as this, aiming at the accuracy, but not at the detail, of truth, can afford to neglect the share of the Galuppis, Vincis, Terradellas, in the formation of his art, and the rousing of his genius, and to confine itself to the share of Pergolesi alone. The public of his time were quite right in calling him the French Pergolesi. It may be mentioned that he had not waited for his visit to Rome before discovering Pergolesi—he knew of him through the Italian company at Liège—moreover the representation of the Serva padrona at Paris in 1752 had been a revelation to the French. But it was at Rome that Grétry steeped himself in the lessons to be learnt from him.

Admirable lessons certainly. Yet does it not seem extraordinary that these lessons, apart from those of nature, were the only ones that Grétry had ever received? As source and foundation of a musical culture the Serva padrona is a little inadequate. Why did not Grétry go back to the great Italian school that immediately preceded Pergolesi—to the great Scarlatti, the incomparable Stradella—the scope of whose genius is sufficiently attested by the fact that he not only invented the “bouffon” style which Pergolesi has employed divinely in the Serva padrona, but also exercised a real domination over Handel’s mind? But we must think of our artist as an impatient young man, eager to “arrive” and to make the most of the extraordinary facility of dramatic musical expression which he feels fermenting within him. Now for learning dramatic expression, as far as neatness and restraint are concerned, there is nothing better than Pergolesi. We shall find that Grétry loses no time in producing wonderful fruit from the seed thus sown.

The sense which attaches in French (and English) to the words buffoon, buffoonery, might cause a misconception as to the nature of Italian Opéra-bouffe. We have to deal with no extravagant art-form, but with a delicate one which wears the garland of gaiety and is also capable of the expression of fine shades. In Pergolesi, Cimarosa, Rossini, and one may add in Mozart, for his masterpieces contain magnificient pages of opéra-bouffe—in all these, then, the great attraction of opéra-bouffe is that it speaks a language at the same time incisive and playful, one which lends itself to accents of emotion and to bubbling laughter, which can pass without shock or break from the light to the tender, from farce to elegance, from a rhythm of strong comic animation to that of tender sighs. It is this variety, this mixture this enchanting lightness which explains Stendhal’s outburst “Opéra-bouffe is the masterpiece of the human mind.” He added that this cheerful music had the power of moving him to melancholy and to tender tears, whereas music of tragical tone left him resentful and cold; it was not that his sensibility to impressions was blunted; on the contrary it was excessive. His impression can be easily understood if connected with the Barber of Seville, the last in date of the masterpieces of opéra-bouffe, and the work of the happiest genius who has handled this form. It appears more natural still if taken in connection with the works of Pergolesi and Cimarosa, which have not the richness and dazzling play of fancy of The Barber, but which have (as I think) more tenderness and sentiment. I would call attention, for instance, to that air in the Servant Mistress, which seems to me to be the masterpiece of that masterpiece—where Pandolphe, brought face to face with the mad folly into which the girl’s coquetry is dragging him, considers her with a mixture of fright, passion and philosophy. What flexibility of tone Coloured in turn with pathos and cheerfulness but animated from beginning to end with a movement and rhythm that are unique, smooth, facile, lively and “tuney,” the music reflects every aspect of the subject by which it is inspired, the passion of an old man in love—the pathetic and touching aspect, the laughter-provoking and extravagant aspect. It is absolutely true to life.

III

There you have what charmed Grétry and permeated his spirit. I do not in the least mean to say that this attraction had the effect of making him produce Italian music in Paris. Nothing could be further from the truth. What he received from the Italians he transformed and poured into the mould of the true musical tradition of French comic opera. Now French comic opera had sufficient natural analogy with Italian opéra-bouffe to be subject to its influence; it had indeed already come under its influence before Grétry. In other respects it differed from opéra-bouffe as the temperaments and characters of the two nations differ and it could easily undergo this influence without losing its essential qualities. As Sainte Beuve remarks in his study on Piron, comic opera started from the humblest origins, namely, vaudeville and the theatre of fairs; but in the first half of the eighteenth century, this unimportant style became raised to the dignity of a real branch of music, a real art form. The names of Dauvergne, Duni (of Naples) Favart, Philidor and Monsigny mark the stages of this progress, which attains with Grétry a special degree of expansion. Grétry introduces into comic opera improvements of declamation and diction that are due to his study of the Italian masters, an increased abundance of colouring, melody, and musical breadth in which may be detected the soft brilliance of a Roman reflection.

Unfortunately in Grétry’s comic operas there is something besides Grétry’s music. At the same time that this form was receiving from him on the musical side a new influx of richness, on the literary side it was undergoing the influence and the intrusion of the most detestable sentimental fashion. We are dealing with the years that Rousseau dominates with his eloquent imbecilities—years when what passes for the most beautiful quality and the highest praise is “sensibility.” An epidemic of “sensibility” was raging in French society in those days. People gave themselves up to emotional crises and outpourings of heart. They heaved sighs at the mere name of virtue. They believed, and took pleasure in believing that in the matter of morals, sentiments, emotions, joys, and moral maxims, Nature had only just been discovered and realised for the first time. They went into ecstasies on Nature’s bounty. A game like this game of imagination sooner or later gets taken seriously and makes people rather silly. The poets who supplied Grétry were second-rate writers, and consequently more at the mercy of fashion than others; and too often they modelled their plots and their language on this mania.

But Grétry rose far superior to all this rubbish. There was nothing rubbishy about the music to which he set it. For his work he drew his inspiration not from the stuff itself but from the sound and true sentiments of which after all such productions are the caricature, and as it were the comedy. It is very true that “Nature” is good in everything, that she claims her part as counsellor and mistress in men’s lives; it is very true that simplicity of character and tastes is a condition of happiness, that we should love virtue, that goodness brings more happiness than wickedness, that mankind knows no joys more sure and enviable than those of affection and friendship—joys unknown to the wicked and the vain. But precisely because these truths are the most natural and most pleasant to realise, and further because it is only given to sincere and delicate hearts to be steeped in them and put them into practice—for these very reasons it is all the more ghastly to make an affectation and indiscreet display of them, to emphasise them and make them a subject of ostentation and vanity. Grétry felt these truths not theatrically or rhetorically or as a matter of “frills,” but as a decent man and a poet, and as such with nobleness and simplicity. He expressed in music their effect on him, fully, sweetly, and smoothly. No better illustration could be given than the famous quartet in his opera Lucile, “Where better should one be than in the bosom of one’s family?” The words are deplorable, enough to disgust one with family life. But the music is frank, broad, natural, reasonably hearty, full of downrightness and geniality. It depicts as they should be depicted the happiness of good folk who experience, glass in hand, the pleasure of affectionate intercourse with no reserve.

In some of Grétry’s successors we find this rubbishy nonsense of false sensibility communicating itself to the music. His music is admirably free from it. But we are left with the spoken part of several of his works, which ought to be recast (it would not be difficult) in a great many places, to give them life again.

IV

He left Rome after a stay of eight years. He had become known there by a few productions (the most important is a secular cantata, the Vintage Girls, which I have not been able to discover). Various circumstances drew him to Geneva, where he produced a comic opera Isabella and Gertrude, words by Favart. This had already been set to music by Blaise, but resettings were not objected to in those days. But it was Paris that our ambitious hero was determined to reach. He took advantage of being near Ferney to visit , and did not hesitate to ask him for the book of a comic opera. Voltaire promised nothing But he did not lose sight of this young man, who besides having excellent manners showed great self confidence and firmness of mind. When, less than two years later news of the applause which greeted the Huron reached Ferney, he sent the musician who had suddenly become a celebrity two proposals for comic operas “one developed, and entitled The Baron of Otranto, which he had taken from one of his stories, A Prince’s Education; the other, entitled The Two Tuns, merely in outline.” He urged Grétry to preserve the author’s anonymity, begging him to offer these pieces to the Italian company as the work of a young provincial. This charge was so punctually fulfilled that the actors, dissatisfied with the books, but discerning in them traces of real literary aptitude, strongly recommended the author to come up from the provinces to Paris and there cultivate his gifts. Voltaire burst out laughing—and was furious. In one of his letters written shortly after this episode we read “Comic opera is nothing but a glorified fair. I know that this form of spectacle is nowadays the nation’s favourite, but I know too how sadly the nation has degenerated. The present century is practically composed of nothing but the refuse of the great age of Louis XIV. This shame is our lot in almost every phase.” This tribute to the age of Louis XIV as so generally superior in everything concerning the arts pleases us immensely. But the great man would have been more equitable if he had called our comic opera a “purified fair.”