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answer the requirements of artistic reasonableness, and are, at the same time, beautiful. This cannot be said of Cavalleria Rusticana (Rustic Chivalry -Heaven save the mark!), La Bohème, La Tosca, The Girl of the Golden West, Thaïs (poison, infidelity, suicide, sorcery, and religion mixed up in an intolerable mélange), Contes d'Hoffman (a Don Juan telling his adventures in detail) — these are bad art, not because they are immoral, but because they are untrue, distorted, without sense of the value of the material they employ.

Operas which are both beautiful and reasonable do exist, and one or two of them are actually in our present-day repertoire. The questions we have to ask are these: Can a highly imaginative and significant drama, in which action and reflection hold a proper balance, in which some great and moving passion or some elemental human motives find true dramatic expression can such a drama exist as opera? Is it possible to preserve the body and the spirit of drama and at the same time to preserve the body and spirit of music? Does not one of these have to give way to the other? We want opera to be one thing, and not several. We want the same unity which exists in other artistic forms. We want to separate classic, romantic, and realistic. If opera changes from blank verse to rhymed verse, so to speak, we want the change to be dictated by an artistic necessity as it is in As You Like It. We want, above all, such a reasonable correspondence between seeing and hearing as shall make it possible for us to preserve each sense unimpaired by the other. A few such operas have been composed. A considerable number approach this ideal. From Gluck's Orfeo (produced in 1762) to Wagner's Tristan (1865) the pure conception of opera has always been kept alive. Gluck, Mozart, Weber, Wagner, and Verdi are the great names

that stand out above the general level.

Gluck's Orfeo is even more interesting since the dark shadow of Strauss's Electra has appeared to throw it into relief. Once in a decade or two Orfeo is revived to reveal anew how nobly Gluck interpreted the old Greek story. And it must be remembered that Gluck lived in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when music was quite inflexible in the matter of those dissonances which are considered by modern composers absolutely necessary to the expression of dramatic passion.

After Gluck came Mozart with his Don Giovanni, preserving the same balance between action and emotion, with an even greater unity of style and the same sincerity of utterance. Mozart possessed a supreme mastery over all his material, and a unique gift for creating pure and lucid melody. In his operas there is no admixture: his tragedy and his comedy are alike purely objective- and it is chiefly this quality which prevents our understanding them. We, in our day and age, cannot project ourselves into Mozart's milieu; the tragedy at the close of Don Giovanni moves us no whit because it is devoid of shrieking dissonances and thunders of orchestral sound. Our nervous systems are adjusted to instrumental cataclysms. (We are conscious only of a falling star; the serene and placid Heavens look down on us in vain.) Could we hear Don Giovanni in a small opera house sung in pure classic style, we should realize how beautiful it is; we should no longer crave the overexcitement and unrestrained passion of La Tosca; we should understand that the deepest passion is expressible without tearing itself to tatters, and that music may be unutterably tragic in simple major and minor mode. Don Giovanni is a type of operatic hero, he may be found in some modified form in half the operas ever written,

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but Mozart lifts him far above his petty intrigues and makes him a great figure standing for certain elements in human nature. (It is the failure of Gounod to accomplish this which puts Faust on the lower plane it occupies.) The stage setting of Don Giovanni, the conventional rooms with gilt chairs, and the like, the costumes, the acting, the music (orchestral and vocal), are all unified in one style. And this, coupled with the supreme mastery and the melodic gift of its composer, makes it one of the most perfect, if not the most perfect, of operas.

Beethoven's Fidelio (produced in 1805) celebrates the devotion and selfsacrifice of a woman - and that devotion and self-sacrifice actually have for their object her husband! It is a noble opera, but Beethoven's mind and temperament were not suited to the operatic problem, and Fidelio is not by any means a perfect work of art. The Beethoven we hear there is the Beethoven of the slow movements of the sonatas and symphonies; but we could well hear Fidelio often, for it stands alone in its utter sincerity and grandeur.

The romantic operas of Weber tend toward that characterization which is the essential equality of his great successor, Wagner, for Der Freischütz and Euryanthe are full of characteristic music. Weber begins and ends romantic opera. (Romantic subjects are common enough, but romantic treatment is exceedingly uncommon. Scott's Bride of Lammermoor, for example, in passing through the hands of librettist and composer becomes-in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor-considerably tinged with melodrama.) There is evidence enough in Der Freischütz and Euryanthe of Weber's sincerity and desire to make his operas artistic units. Each of them conveys a definite impression of beauty and avoids those specious appeals so common in opera.

Meanwhile, in the early part of the nineteenth century, opéra comique was flourishing in France. Auber, Hérold, Boieldieu, and other composers were producing works in which the impossible happenings of grand opera were made possible by humor and lightness of touch. The words of these composers are full of delightful melody and are more reasonable and true than are many better-known grand operas.

Then comes the Wagnerian period, with its preponderance of drama over music. In Tristan und Isolde Wagner, by his own confession, turned away from preconceived theories and composed as his inner spirit moved him. Tristan is, therefore, the work of an artist rather than of a theorist, and although it is based on the leit-motif and on certain other important structural ideas which belong to the Wagnerian scheme, it rises far above their limitations and glows with the real light of genius. In Tristan the action is suited to the psychology. It is a great work of art and the most beautiful of all recantations. In it we realize how finely means may be adjusted to ends, how clearly music and text may be united, how reasonable is the use of the leitmotif when it characterizes beings aflame with passion; how the song, under the influence of great dramatic situations, can be expanded; how vividly the orchestra can interpret and even further the actions; how even the chorus can be fitted into the dramatic scheme - everywhere in Tristan there is unity. This is not true of most of Wagner's other operas. Die Meistersinger comes nearest to Tristan in this respect. May we not say that of all the music-dramas of Wagner, Tristan and Die Meistersinger lay completely in his consciousness unmixed with philosophical ideas and theories? In them the leit-motif deals chiefly with emotions or with characteristics of persons rather

than with inanimate objects, or ideas; in them is no grandiose scenic display, no perversity of theory, but only beautiful music wedded to a fitting text.

Wagner's reforms were bound to bring about a reaction, which came in due season and resulted in shorter and more direct works, such as those of the modern Italians. No operas since Wagner, save Verdi's Otello and Falstaff, approach the greatness of his musicdramas, and the tendency of many of these later works has been too much toward what we mildly call 'decadence.' But there is a great difference between the truthfulness and artistic validity of Carmen and that of La Bohème and La Tosca. The former is packed full of genuine passion, however primitive, brutal, and devastating it may be; and its technical skill is undoubted.

The most interesting phase of modern opera is found in the works of the Russians. It was inevitable that they should overturn our delicately adjusted artistic mechanism. Dostoïevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is as though as though there never had been a Meredith or a Henry James, and Moussorgsky's Boris Godounov is as though there had never been a Mozart or a Wagner. It has something of that amorphous quality which seems to be a part of Russian life, but, on the other hand, it has immense vitality. How refreshing to see a crowd of peasants look like peasants, and to hear them sing their own peasant songs; and what stability they give to the whole work! Boris Godounov gravitates, as it were, around these folk-songs, which give to it a certain reality and truthfulness.

These various works have long since been accepted by the musical world as the great masterpieces in operatic form.

Many of them are practically out of the present repertoire of our opera houses. Were we to assert ourselves - were the general public given an opportunity to choose between good and bad - we should hear them often. And who shall say what results might not come from a small and properly managed opera house, with performances of fine works at reasonable prices?

Opera is controlled by a few rich men who think it a part of the life of a great city that there should be an opera house with a fine orchestra, fine scenery, and the greatest singers obtainable. It does not exist for the good of the whole city, but rather for those of plethoric purses. It does not make any attempt to become a sociological force; it does not even dimly see what possibilities it possesses in that direction. Opera houses and opera companies are sedulously protected against any sociological scrutiny. They are persistently reported to be hot-beds of intrigue; they trade on society and on the love of highly paid singing; they surround themselves with an exotic atmosphere in which the normal person finds difficulty in breathing, and which often turns the opera singer into a strange specimen of the genus man or woman; they go to ruin about once in so often, and are extricated by the unnecessarily rich; they are too little related to the community that supports them save in the mediums of money and social convention.

These artificial and false conditions are bound to bring evils in their train, but these conditions and these evils are chiefly the result of our own complacency. Were opera in any sense domestic; were opera singers to some extent, at least, human beings like ourselves, moving in a reasonable world; did we go to hear opera as we go to a symphony concert, or to an art museum, to satisfy our love of beauty,

and quicken our imagination by contact with beautiful objects; were the conditions of performance such as to enable us to hear the words, then would opera become a fine human institution, then would it take its place among the noble dreams of humanity.

In my endeavor to make some distinctions between good and bad opera I have drawn a somewhat arbitrary line. I do not wish to give the impression that I think all opera on one side of the line is bad and on the other good. I have tried to strike a just balance by applying certain admitted principles of artistic contruction and expression. From these principles, which are the basis of life and, therefore, of art, opera has unjustly claimed immunity.

And finally we come to that point in our argument where reasoning must stop altogether. For opera is to many people a sort of fascination entirely outside reason. They refuse to admit it as a subject of discussion; they enjoy the spectacle on the stage and the spectacle of which they are a part; the sight of three thousand people well dressed like themselves comforts them; the fine singing, costumes, and stage-setting, the gorgeous orchestra throbbing with passion entirely unbridled - all these they enjoy in that mental lassitude which is dear to them. They are, perhaps, slightly uncomfortable at a symphony concert; here there are no obligations. Opera is, in short, to such people a slightly illicit æsthetic adventure.

PREPAREDNESS AND DEMOCRATIC DISCIPLINE

BY GEORGE W. ALGER

I

"THE great word of the present day,' said Emerson in 1838, 'is Culture.' It was the same word with a different meaning with which the war began. Some of the defenses of Germany by which her statesmen and professors sought then to justify her in the eyes of the world raised not merely issues of right and wrong as to the war itself, but issues as to fundamentals in civilization.

The Germans asserted a high claim for world-power for the Teutonic race, based upon a superior Kultur, a civilization which Germany has evolved and which they declared demands through

its success, through its practical results, a far wider sphere of power and influence in world-civilization than it has yet received.

Some of these claims of Kultur we have forgotten, as they were not often repeated after the first few months of the war.

The Germans said, in effect: We alone of the great nations of modern times have succeeded in evolving a great organization of government, a perfection of administration, unequaled in the whole history of the world. We have done it against tremendous odds and in an incredibly short time. France is a decadent and corrupt bureaucracy, masquerading as a democ

racy. England is a patchwork of disorganized law, feudal survivals, and precedents patched with clumsy adaptations of transplanted modern German ideas a civilization gone to seed. What right does her civilization give her to the choice place in the sun? What is there about the organization of English government which justifies its continuance except on the basis of sea-power and force? Rome lived and spread her eagles through the ancient world by the superior genius of Roman law, by the civilizing power of that law which lived even after the barbarian laid his hands upon the city of the Cæsars. The Teutons, declared the German professors, are the successors of the Cæsars. The right to world-dominion belongs and rightly belongs to this race, the race alone capable of evolving a superior world-civilization.

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So we in America were compelled to think hurriedly, and for too short a period, of world-civilization. The train of our reflection if we reflected was not entirely pleasant. We remembered that ours is not the youngest, but the oldest of modern democracies. We remembered that many, if not most, of the general principles of democracy were born, or first practiced, on our soil; that these ideas were, a hundred years and less ago, the great contribution of America to the transformation of Europe. The revolutionary principles which Metternich and the concert of Europe a hundred years ago strove to stamp out had thriven on the new and favored soil. We had no feudalism to overcome. Our press was not fettered; our religion was free. No bonds of caste and heredity gripped us to the past. We had no white peasants attached to the soil. We had a new rich continent of unlimited wealth. We preached to the world the promise of democracy. All the handicaps from which we were free bound Germany,

and many more beside. Yet, at the beginning of this great war, she was claiming in sincerity and good faith the right to a world-domain as justified by the results of a superior world-civilization.

This is no place to consider the accuracy of the Teuton's prefatory estimate of his civilization. No other country has made a similar contention. No other nation has sufficient confidence and pride in its accomplishments in the organization of national life to make such a boast, even if, indeed, it would be willing to concede that such a standard alone is a sufficient test for civilization. Last of all would democratic America make such a claim.

Yet the issue is one which we cannot blink, and which has not changed simply because we have ceased to think about it. The fundamental postulate of this war is the failure of democracy as a system of human government; that we need in place of it, in place of its wasteful, shiftless, haphazard character and methods, a civilization of intense and practical efficiency based upon autocracy and to the existence of which autocratic discipline is essential. This issue should make us, even in the midst of the smoke and thunder of war, self-critical. On the accuracy of this fundamental postulate the future history of democracy will largely be determined - our own as well as the democratic spirit in other lands.

When we marvel at Germany in this war, at her wonderful capacity for carnage, at the terrible efficiency and completeness of her mechanism for destruction; when we see the disorganization of England, the long wait for the development of sufficient ammunition, the attitude of the trade-unions, the strikes of the workers, the fumbling with the drink problem in a national crisis, the lack of adequate enlistments — the claims of the German professors come back to us; for in the final analysis this

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