I.

EVERYTHING lives and lasts by the inner Necessity of its being, by its own nature's Need. It lay in the nature of the art of Tone, to evolve herself to a capability of the most definite and manifold expression; which capability, albeit the need thereof lay hid within her soul, she would never have attained, had she not been thrust into a position toward the art of Poetry in which she saw herself compelled to will to answer claims upon her utmost powers, even though those claims should ask from her a thing impossible.

Only in its Form, can a being utter itself: the art of Tone owed all her forms to Dance and Song. To the Word-poet, who merely wished to make use of Music for the heightening of his own vehicle of expression, in Drama, she appeared solely in that narrowed form of song-and-dance; in which she could not possibly betray to him the wealth of utterance whereof, in truth, she still was capable. Had the art of Tone remained once for all in a position toward the Word-poet such as the latter now occupies towards herself in Opera, then she could only have been employed by him in her meanest powers, nor would she ever have reached the capability of becoming that supremely mighty organ of expression that she is to-day. Music was therefore destined to credit herself with possibilities which, in very truth, were doomed to stay for her impossibilities; herself a sheer organ of expression, she must rush into the error of desiring to plainly outline the thing to be expressed; she must venture on the boastful attempt to issue orders and speak out aims there, where in truth she can only have to subordinate herself to an aim her essence cannot ever formulate (fassen) but to whose realising she gives, by this her subordination, its only true enablement.—

Along two lines has Music developed in that art-genre which she dominates, the Opera: along an earnest—with all the Tone-poets who felt lying on their shoulders the burthen of responsibility that fell to Music when she took upon herself alone the aim of Drama; along a frivolous— with all the Musicians who, as though driven by an instinctive feeling of the impossibility of achieving an unnatural task, have turned their backs upon it and, heedful only of the profit which Opera had won from an uncommonly widespread popularity, have given themselves over to an unmixed musical empiricism. It is necessary that we should commence by fixing our gaze upon the first, the earnest line.

The musical basis of Opera was—as we know—nothing other than the Aria; this Aria, again, was merely the Folk-song as rendered by the art-singer before the world of rank and quality, but with its Word-poem left out and replaced by the product of the art-poet to that end commissioned. The conversion of the Folk-tune into the Operatic-aria was primarily the work of that art-Singer; whose concern was no longer for the right delivery of the tune, but for the exhibition of his throat-dexterity. It was he, who parcelled out the resting-points he needed, the alternation of more lively with more placid phrasing, the passages where, free from any rhythmic or melodic curb, he might bring his skill to bearing as it pleased him best. The Composer merely furnished the singer, the Poet in his turn the composer, with the material for their virtuosity.

The natural relation of the artistic factors of Drama was thus, at bottom, as yet not quite upheaved: it was merely distorted, inasmuch' as the Performer, the most necessary condition for Drama's possibility, represented but one solitary talent—that of absolute song-dexterity—and nowise [25] all the conjoint faculties of artist Man. This one distortion of the character of the Performer, however, sufficed to bring about the ultimate perversion of the natural relation of those factors: to wit, the absolute preferment of the Musician before the Poet. Had that Singer been a true, sound and whole Dramatic-performer, then had the Composer come necessarily into his proper position toward the Poet; since the latter would then have firmly spoken out the dramatic aim, the measure for all else, and ruled its realising. But the poet who stood nighest that Singer was the Composer,—the composer who merely helped the singer to attain his aim; while this aim, cut loose from every vestige of dramatic, nay even poetic bearing, was nothing other, through and through, than to show-off his own specific song-dexterity.

This original relation of the artistic factors of Opera to one another we have to stamp sharply on our minds, in order to clearly recognise, in the sequel, how this distorted relation became only all the more entangled through every attempt to set it straight.—

Into the Dramatic Cantata, to satisfy the luxurious craving of these eminent sirs for change in their amusements, there was dovetailed next the Ballet. Dance and Dance-tune, borrowed just as waywardly from the Folk-dance and its tune as was the operatic Aria from the Folk-song, joined forces with the Singer, in all the sterile immiscibility of un-natural things; while it naturally became the Poet's task, midst such a heaping-up of inwardly incongruous matter, to bind the samples of the diverse art-dexterities, now laid before him, into some kind of patchwork harmony. Thus, with the Poet's aid, an ever more obviously imperative dramatic cohesion was thrust on That which, in its actual self, was crying for no cohesion whatever; so that the aim of Drama—forced on by outward Want—was merely lodged (angegeben), by no means housed (aufgenommen). Song-tune and Dance-tune stood side by side in fullest, chillest loneliness, for exhibition of the agility of singer or of dancer; and only in that [26] which was to make shift to bind them, to wit the musically-recited dialogue, did the Poet ply his lowly calling, did the Drama peep out here and there.

Neither was Recitative itself, by any means, some new invention proceeding from a genuine urgence of Opera towards the Drama. Long before this mode of intoning was introduced into Opera, the Christian Church had used it in her services, for the recitation of biblical passages. The banal singsong of these recitals, with its more listlessly melodic than rhetorically expressive incidence of tone, had been early fixed by ritualistic prescript into an arid semblance, without the reality, of speech; and this it was that, merely moulded and varied by musical caprice, passed over into the Opera. So that, what with Aria, Dance-tune and Recitative, the whole apparatus of musical drama— unchanged in essence down to our very latest opera—was settled once for all. Further, the dramatic groundplans laid beneath this apparatus soon won a kindred stereotyped persistence. Mostly taken from an entirely misconstrued Greek mythology, they formed a theatric scaffolding from which all capability of rousing warmth of human interest was altogether absent, but which, on the other hand, possessed the merit of lending itself to the good pleasure of every composer in his turn; in effect, the majority of these texts were composed over and over again by the most diverse of musicians.—

The so famous revolution of Gluck, which has come to the ears of many ignoramuses as a complete reversal of the views previously current as to Opera's essence, in truth consisted merely in this: that the musical composer revolted against the wilfulness of the singer. The Composer, who, next to the Singer, had drawn the special notice of the public to himself—since it was he who provided the singer with fresh supplies of stuff for his dexterity—felt his province encroached upon by the operations of the latter, in exact measure as he himself was busied to shape that stuff according to his own inventive fancy, and thus secure that his work also, and perchance at last only his [27] work, might catch the ear of the audience. For the reaching of his ambitious goal there stood two ways open to the Composer: either, by use of all the musical aids already at his disposal, or yet to be discovered, to unfold the purely sensuous contents of the Aria to their highest, rankest pitch; or—and this is the more earnest path, with which we are concerned at present—to put shackles on Caprice's execution of that Aria, by himself endeavouring to give the tune, before its executions an expression answering to the underlying Word-text. As, by the nature of these texts, they were to figure as the feeling discourse of the dramatis personae, so had it already occurred, quite of itself to feeling singers and composers to furnish forth their virtuosity with an impress of the needful warmth; and Gluck was surely not the first who indited feeling airs, nor his singers the first who delivered them with fit expression. But that he spoke out with consciousness and firm conviction the fitness and necessity of an expression answering to the text-substratum, in Aria and Recitative, this it is that makes him the departure-point of an at any rate thorough change in the quondam situation of the artistic factors of Opera toward one another. Henceforth the sceptre of Opera passes definitely over to the Composer: the Singer becomes the organ of the Composer's aim, and this aim is consciously declared to be the matching of the dramatic contents of the text-substratum with a true and suitable expression. Thus, at bottom, a halt was only cried to the unbecoming and heartless vanity of the singing Virtuoso; but with all the rest of Opera's unnatural organism things remained on their old footing. Aria, Recitative and Dance-piece, fenced-off each from each, stand side by side as unaccommodated in the operas of Gluck as they did before him, and as, with scarcely an exception, they still stand to-day.

In the situation of the Poet toward the Composer not one jot was altered; rather had the Composer grown more dictatorial, since, with his declared consciousness of a higher mission—made good against the virtuoso Singer—he set [28] to work with more deliberate zeal at the arrangement of the opera's framework. To the Poet it never occurred to meddle with these arrangements; he could not so much as dream of Music, to which the Opera had owed its origin, in any other form than those narrow, close-ruled forms he found set down before him—as binding even upon the Musician himself. To tamper with these forms by advancing claims of dramatic necessity, to such an extent that they should cease to be intrinsic shackles on the free development of dramatic truth, would have seemed to him unthinkable; since it was precisely in these forms alone—inviolable even by the musician—that he could conceive of Music's essence. Wherefore, once engaged in the penning of an opera-text, he must needs pay even more painful heed than the musician himself to the observance of those forms; at utmost leave it to that musician, in his own familiar field, to carry out enlargements and developments, in which he could lend a helping hand but never take the initiative. Thus the Poet, who looked up to the Composer with a certain holy awe, rather confirmed the latter's dictatorship in Opera, than set up rival claims thereto; for he was witness to the earnest zeal the musician brought to his task.

It was Gluck's successors, who first bethought them to draw profit from this their situation for the actual widening of the forms to hand. These followers, among whom we must class the composers of Italian and French descent who wrote for the Paris opera-stage at quite the close of the past and beginning of the present century, gave to their vocal pieces not only a more and more thorough warmth and straightforwardness of expression, but a more and more extended formal basis. The traditional divisions of the Aria, though still substantially preserved, were given a wider play of motive; modulations and connecting phrases (Übergänge und Verbindungsglieder) were themselves drawn into the sphere of expression; the Recitative joined on to the Aria more smoothly and less waywardly, and, as a necessary mode of expression, it stepped into [29] that Aria itself. Another notable expansion was given to the Aria, in that—obediently to the dramatic need— more than one person now shared in its delivery, and thus the essential Monody of earlier opera was beneficially lost. Pieces such as Duets and Terzets were indeed known long before; but the fact of two or three people singing in one piece had not made the slightest essential difference in the character of the Aria: this had remained exactly the same in melodic plan and insistence on the tonality once started (Behauptung des einmal angeschlagenen thematischen Tones)—which bore no reference to any individual expression, but solely to a general, specifically-musical mood—and not a jot of it was really altered, no matter whether delivered as a monologue or duet, excepting at the utmost quite materialistic details, namely in that its musical phrases were either sung alternately by different voices, or in concert through the sheer harmonic device of combining two, three, or more voices at once. To apply that specifically-musical factor in such a way that it should be susceptible of a lively change of individual expression, was the object and the work of these composers, as shown in their handling of the so-called dramatic-musical Ensemble. The essential musical substance of this Ensemble was still, indeed, composed of Aria, Recitative and Dance-tune: only, when once a vocal expression in accord with the text-substratum had been recognised as a becoming claim to make on Aria and Recitative, the truthfulness of such expression must logically be extended to everything else in the text that betrayed a particle of dramatic coherence. From the honest endeavour to observe this logical consistency arose that broadening of the older musical forms, in Opera, which we meet in the serious operas of Cherubini, Méhul and Spontini. We may say that in these works there is fulfilled all that Gluck desired, or could desire; nay, in them is once for all attained the acme of all natural, i.e. in the best sense consequential, evolution on the original lines of Opera.

The most recent of these three masters, Spontini, was moreover so fully convinced that he had actually reached the highest point attainable in the genre of Opera; he had so firm a faith in the impossibility of ever seeing his exertions capped, that, in all the later art-productions wherewith he followed up the works of his great Paris period, he never made even the slightest attempt, as to form and import, to overstep the standpoint taken in those works. He obstinately refused to look upon the later, so-called "romantic" development of Opera as anything but its manifest decadence; so that he gave to people, with whom he afterwards discussed this matter, the impression of a man who was positively eaten up with himself and his works; whereas he was really only uttering a conviction based, in truth, upon a thoroughly sound view of the essence of Opera.. Surveying the demeanour of our Modern Opera, Spontini could say, with perfect justice: "Have you in any way developed the essential Form of the musical constituents of Opera, beyond what you find with me? Or have you, perchance, been able to bring forth any intelligible or healthy thing by actually quitting that form? Is not all the, unpalatable in your works the mere result of your stepping outside that form, and all the palatable a simple outcome of your adherence to it? Where will you find this Form more majestic, broader, or more capacious, than in my three grand Paris operas? And who will tell me that he has filled this Form with more glowing, more feeling, or more energic Contents, than I?"—

It would be hard to give Spontini's question any answer that should bewilder him; still harder, to prove to him that he is mad for taking us for madmen. Out of Spontini speaks the honest, confident voice of the absolute-musician, who there proclaims: "If the Musician per se, as ordainer of the Opera, desires to bring to pass the Drama, he cannot go a step farther than I have gone, without betraying his total incapacity for the task." But in this there unwittingly lies the corollary: "If you desire [31] more, you must address yourselves, not to the Musician, but—to the Poet."

Now how did this Poet bear himself towards Spontini and his colleagues? With all the maturing of Opera's musical Form, with all the development of its innate powers of Expression, the position of the Poet had not altered in the slightest. He still remained the platform-dresser (004) for the altogether independent experiments of the Composer. When the latter, by attained success, felt growing his power of freer motion within those forms of his, he simply bade the poet serve him his material with less fear and trembling; he, as it were, shouted to him: "See what I can do! Don't incommode yourself; trust me to dissolve even your daringest dramatic combinations, gristle, bone and all, into my music!"—So the Poet was merely hurried along with the Musician; he would have been ashamed to bring his master wooden hobby-horses, now that master was able to mount a real live horse, for he knew the rider had bravely learnt to ply the reins— those musical reins which were to school the horse's prancings in the well-strewn opera-circus, and without which neither Poet nor Musician would have dared to mount, for fear the steed should clear the ring and gallop home to its own wild wind-blown pastures.

Thus, in the wake of the Composer, the Poet certainly won an access of importance; but only in exact degree as the musician mounted upwards in advance, and bade him merely follow. The strictly musical possibilities, as pointed out by the composer, the poet had to keep in eye as the only measure for all his orderings and shapings, nay even for his choice of Stuff; and thus, for all the fame that he began to reap also, he remained ever but [32] the skilful servant who was so handy at waiting on the "dramatic" composer. Seeing that the composer had gained no other view of the relative position of the poet than the one he found laid down already by the very nature of Opera, he could only regard himself as the de facto responsible agent, and thus in all good conscience stay rooted to the standpoint of Spontini as the fittest; for thereon he might flatter himself that he was doing all that hay within the powers of a musician who fain would see the Opera, as a Musical Drama, maintain its claim to rank as an artistic form.

That in the Drama itself however, there lay possibilities which could not be so much as approached within that art-form—if it were not to fall to pieces,—this, perhaps, is now quite clear to us, but could by no chance occur to the poet or composer of that epoch. Of all dramatic possibilities, they could only light on such as were realisable in that altogether settled and, of its very essence, hampered Opera-music form. The broad expansion, the lingering on a motive, which the Musician required in order to speak intelligibly in his form,—the purely musical accessories he needed as a preliminary to setting his bell a-swinging, so that it might sound out roundly, and especially might sound in a fashion to give fitting expression to a definite character,—made it from the first the Poet's duty to confine himself to dramatic sketches of one settled pattern, devoid of colour and affording ample elbow-room to the musician for his experiments. Mere stereotyped rhetoric phrases were the prime requirement from the poet, for on this soil alone could the musician gain room for the expansion that he needed, but which was yet in truth entirely undramatic. To have allowed his heroes to speak in brief and definite terms, surcharged with meaning, would have only drawn upon the poet the charge of turning out wares impracticable for the composer. Since, then, the poet felt himself constrained to put trite and meaningless phrases in the mouth of his heroes, even the best will in the world could not have enabled him either to infuse a [33] real character into persons who talked like that, or to stamp the sum-total of their actions with the seal of full dramatic truth. His drama was forever a mere make-believe of Drama; to pursue a real dramatic aim to its legitimate conclusions could not so much as occur to him. Wherefore, strictly speaking, he only translated Drama into the language of Opera, and, as a matter of fact, mostly adapted long-familiar dramas already played to death upon the acting stage, as was notably the case in Paris with the tragedies of the Théâtre Français. The dramatic aim, thus bare within and hollow, passed manifestly over into the mere intentions of the Composer; from him was That awaited which the Poet gave up from the first. To him alone—to the Composer—must it therefore fall, to clothe this inner void and nullity of the whole, so soon as ever he perceived it; and thus he found himself saddled with the unnatural task of, from his standpoint—from the standpoint of the man whose only duty it should have been to help to realise by the expression at his command an already fully-fledged dramatic aim—imagining and calling into life that aim itself. The Musician thus had virtually to pen the drama, to make his music not merely its expression but its content; and yet this content, by the very nature of affairs, was to be none other than the Drama's self!

It is here that the predicate "dramatic" most palpably begins to work a strange confusion in men's notions of the nature of Music. Music, which, as an art of expression, can in its utmost wealth of such expression be nothing more than true, has conformably therewith to concern itself alone with what it should express: in Opera this is unmistakably the Feeling of the characters conversing on the stage, and a music which fulfils this task with the most convincing effect is all that it ever can be. A music, however, which would fain be more than this, which should not connect itself with any object to be expressed, but desire to fill its place, i.e. to be alike that object: such a music is no longer any kind of music, but a fantastic, hybrid emanation from Poetry and Music, which in truth can only materialise itself as [34] caricature. With all its perverse efforts, Music, the in any way effective music, has actually remained naught other than Expression. But from those efforts to make it in itself a Content—and that, forsooth, the Content of a Drama—has issued That which we have to recognise as the consequential downfall of Opera, and therewith as an open demonstration of the radical un-nature of that genre of art.

If the foundation and intrinsic Content of Spontinian opera were void and hollow, and its musical investiture of Form both threadbare and pedantic, yet with all its narrowness it was a plain, sincere avowal of the limits that must bound this genre, without one is to drive its un-nature into raving madness. Modern opera, on the contrary, is the open proclamation of the actual advent of that madness. In order to approach its essence closer, let us now turn to that other line of Opera's evolution which we have denoted above as the frivolous, and by whose intercrossing with the serious line just dealt-with there has been brought to light that indescribable medley which we hear spoken of, and not seldom even by seemingly reasonable beings, as "modern Dramatic Opera."

II.

LONG before the time of Gluck—as we have already mentioned—it had occurred quite of itself to nobly-gifted, nobly-feeling singers and composers to equip the phrasing, (Vortrag) of the operatic Aria with a more sincere (innig) expression; amid all their song-dexterity, and despite their virtuose bravura, to work upon their hearers by conveying genuine feeling and true passion wherever the text permitted, and even where it brought nothing to meet such expression half-way. This step was due entirely to the individual disposition of the musical factors of Opera; and therein the true essence of Music was so far victorious over formalism, as she proclaimed herself that art whose very nature it is to be the immediate language of the heart.

If, in the evolution of Opera, we may call the line (Richtung) on which this noblest attribute of Music was raised on principle by Gluck and his followers into the ordainer of the drama, that of reflective Opera: on the other hand, we must call that other line, on which this attribute—especially on the Italian opera-stage—was unconsciously evinced by naturally-gifted musicians, the naïve line. It is characteristic of the first, that, coming to Paris as a foreign product, it matured under the eyes of a public which, in itself entirely unmusical, gives a far more cordial welcome to well-balanced, dazzling turns of speech than to any feeling Content of that speech; whereas the second, the naïve line, remained preeminently the property of the sons of Italy, the home of modern music.

Admitted that it was again a German, who displayed the utmost splendour of this line: yet was he called alone to this high office because his artist nature was as clear, as spotless, as unruffled as a shining sheet of water, to which the rare, the brightest flower of Italian music bent down its [36] head; to see therein, to know, to love the mirrored likeness of itself. This mirror, however, was but the surface of a deep, unending sea of yearning, which from the measureless fill of its being reached upwards to that surface, as for the utterance of its meaning; from the gentle greeting of that fair vision, bending down to it as though in thirst for knowledge of itself, to win a form, a fashioning, a beauty.

Whosoever insists on seeing in Mozart an experimenting musician who turns, forsooth, from one attempt to solve the operatic problem to the next, can only counterpoise this error by placing alongside of it another, and, for instance, ascribing naïvety to Mendelssohn when, mistrustful of his own powers, he took his cautious, hesitating steps along that endless stretch of road which lay between himself and Opera. (005) The naïve, truly inspired artist casts himself with reckless enthusiasm into his artwork; and only when this is finished, when it shows itself in all its actuality, does he win from practical experience that genuine force of Reflection which preserves him in general from illusions (die ihn allgemeinhin vor Täuschungen bewahrt), yet in the specific case of his feeling driven again to art-work by his inspiration, loses once more its power over him completely. There is nothing more characteristic of Mozart, in his career of opera-composer, than the unconcernedness wherewith he went to work: it was so far from occurring to him to weigh the pros and cons of the æsthetic problem involved in Opera, that he the rather engaged with utmost unconstraint in setting any and every operatic textbook offered him, almost heedless whether it were a thankful or a thankless task for him as pure musician. If we piece together all his æsthetic hints and sayings, culled from here and there, we shall find that the sum of his Reflection mounts no higher than his famous definition of his "nose." He was so utterly and entirely a musician, and nothing but musician, that through him we may also gain the clearest and most convincing view of the true and proper [37] position of the Musician toward the Poet Indisputably his weightiest and most decisive stroke for Music he dealt precisely in Opera,—in Opera, over whose conformation it never for a moment struck him to usurp the poet's right, and where he attempted nothing but what he could achieve by purely musical means. In return, however, through the very faithfulness and singleness of his adoption of the poet's aim—wherever and howsoever present—he stretched these purely musical means of his to such a compass that in none of his absolute-musical compositions, and particularly his instrumental works, do we see the art of Music so broadly and so richly furthered as in his operas. The noble, straightforward simplicity of his purely musical instinct, i.e. his intuitive penetration (unwillkürlichen Innehabens) into the arcana of his art, made it wellnigh impossible to him there to bring forth magical effects, as Composer, where the Poem was flat and meaningless. How little did this richest-gifted of all musicians understand our modern music-makers' trick of building gaudy towers of music upon a hollow, valueless foundation, and playing the rapt and the inspired where all the poetaster's botch is void and flimsy, the better to show that the Musician is the jack in office and can go any length he pleases, even to making something out of nothing—the same as the good God! O how doubly dear and above all honour is Mozart to me, that it was not possible to him to invent music for Tito like that of Don Giovanni, for Cosi fan tutte like that of Figaro! How shamefully would it have desecrated Music!

Music Mozart always made, but beautiful music he could never write excepting when inspired. Though this Inspiration must ever come from within, from his own possessions, yet it could only leap forth bright and radiant when kindled from without, when to the spirit of divinest Love within him was shewn the object worthy love, the object that in ardent heedlessness of self it could embrace. And thus would it have been precisely the most absolute of all Musicians, Mozart himself who would have long-since solved the [38] operatic problem past all doubt, who would have helped to pen the truest, fairest and completest Drama, if only he had met the Poet whom he only would have had to help. But he never met that Poet: at times it was a pedantically wearisome, at times a frivolously sprightly maker of opera-texts, that reached him Arias, Duets, and Ensemble-pieces to compose; and these he took and so turned them into music, according to the warmth they each were able to awake in him, that in every instance they received the most answering expression of which their last particle of sense was capable.

Thus did Mozart only prove the exhaustless power of Music to answer with undreamt fulness each demand of the Poet upon her faculty of Expression; for all his un-reflective method, the glorious musician revealed this power, even in the truthfulness of dramatic expression, the endless multiplicity of its motivation, in far richer measure than Gluck and all his followers. But so little was a fundamental principle laid down in his creations, that the pinions of his genius left the formal skeleton of Opera quite unstirred: he had merely poured his music's lava-stream into the moulds of Opera. Themselves, however, they were too frail to hold this stream within them; and forth it flowed to where, in ever freer and less cramping channels, it might spread itself according to its natural bent, until in the Symphonies of Beethoven we find it swollen to a mighty sea. Whereas in Instrumental music the innate capabilities of Music developed into boundless power, those Operatic-forms, like burnt-out bricks and mortar, stayed chill and naked in their pristine shape, a carcase waiting for the coming guest to pitch his fleeting tent within.

Only for the history of Music in general, is Mozart of so strikingly weighty moment; in no wise for the history of Opera in particular, as a specific genre of art. Opera, whose unnatural being was bound to life by no laws of genuine Necessity, was free to fall a ready booty to the first musical adventurer who came its way.

The unedifying spectacle presented by the art-doings of so-called followers of Mozart, we here may reasonably pass by. A tolerably long string of composers figured to themselves that Mozart's Opera was a something whose form might be imitated; wherewith they naturally overlooked the fact that this form was Nothing in itself, and Mozart's musical spirit Everything. But to reconstruct the creations of Spirit by a pedantic setting of two and two together, has not as yet succeeded in the hands of any one.

One thing alone remained to utter in those forms. Albeit Mozart, in unclouded naïvety, had evolved their purely musical-artistic content to its highest pitch, yet the real secret of the whole opera-embroglio, in keeping with its source of origin, was still to be laid bare to nakedest publicity in those same forms. The world was yet to be plainly told, and without reserve, what longing and what claim on Art it was, that Opera owed its origin and existence to: that this longing was by no means for the genuine Drama, but had gone forth towards a pleasure merely seasoned with the sauces of the stage; in no sense moving or inwardly arousing, but merely intoxicating and outwardly diverting. In Italy, where this—as yet unconscious—longing had given birth to Opera, it was at last to be fulfilled with open eyes.

This brings us back to a closer dealing with the essence of the Aria.

So long as Arias shall be composed, the root-character of that art-form will always betray itself as an absolute-musical one. The Folk-song issued from an immediate double-growth, a consentaneous action of the arts of Poetry and Tone. This art—as opposed to that almost only one we can now conceive, the deliberate art of Culture—we ought perhaps to scarcely style as Art; but rather to call it an instinctive manifestment of the Spirit of the Folk through the organ of artistic faculty. Here the Word-poem and the Tone-poem are one. It never happens to the Folk, to sing its songs without a 'text'; without the Words (Wortvers) the Folk would brook no Tune (Tonweise). [40] If the Tune varies in the course of time, and with the divers offshoots of the Folk-stem, so vary too the Words. No severing of these twain can the Folk imagine; for it they make as firmly knit a whole as man and wife.

The man of Luxury heard this Folk-song merely from afar; in his lordly palace he listened to the reapers passing by; what staves surged up into his sumptuous chambers were but the staves of Tone, whereas the staves of Poetry died out before they reached him. Now, if this Tone-stave may be likened to the delicate fragrance of the flower, and the Word-stave to its very chalice, with all its tender stamens: the man of luxury, solely bent on tasting with his nerves of smell, and not alike with those of sight, squeezed out this fragrance from the flower and distilled therefrom an extract, which he decanted into phials to bear about him at his lief, to sprinkle on his splendid chattels and himself whene'er he listed. To gladden his eyes with the flower itself, he must necessarily have sought it closer, have stepped down from his palace to the woodland glades, have forced his way through branches, trunks and bracken; whereto the eminent and leisured sir had not one spark of longing. With this sweet-smelling residue he drenched the weary desert of his life, the aching void of his emotions; and the artificial growth that sprang from this unnatural fertilising was nothing other, than the Operatic Aria. Into whatsoever wayward intermarriages it might be forced, it stayed still ever-fruitless, forever but itself, but what it was and could not else be: a sheer musical Substratum.

The whole cloud-body of the Aria evaporated into Melody; and this was sung, was fiddled, and at last was whistled, without its ever recollecting that it ought by rights to have a word-stave, or at the least a word-sense under it. Yet the more this extract, to give it some manner of stuff for physically clinging to, must yield itself to every kind of experiment—among which the most pompous was the serious pretext of the Drama,—the more folk felt that it was suffering by mixture with the threadbare [41] foreign matter, nay, was actually losing its own pungency and pleasantness.

Now the man from whom this perfume, unnatural as it was, acquired again a corpus, which, concocted though it was, at least imitated as cleverly as possible that natural body which had once breathed forth its very soul in fragrance; the uncommonly handy modeller of artificial flowers, which he shaped from silk and satin and drenched their arid cups with that distilled substratum, till they began to smell like veritable blooms;—this great artist was Joachimo Rossini.

In the glorious, healthy, single-hearted artist-nature of Mozart that melodic scent had found so fostering a soil, that it eke put forth again the bloom of noble Art which holds our inmost souls as captives still Yet even with Mozart it only found this food when the akin, the sound, the purely-human offered itself as Poetry, for wedding with his wholly musical nature; and it was wellnigh a stroke of Luck, that this repeatedly occurred for him. Where Mozart was left unheeded by this fecund god, there, too, the artificial essence of that scent could only toilsomely uphold its false, unnecessary life by artificial measures. Melody, however costly were its nurture, fell sick of chill and lifeless Formalism, the only heritage the early sped could leave his heirs; for in his death he took away with him—his Life.

What Rossini saw around him, in the first flower of his teeming youth, was but the harvesting of Death. When he looked upon the serious, so-called Dramatic Opera of France, he saw with the keen insight of young Joy-in-life a garish corpse; which even Spontini, as he stalked along in gorgeous loneliness, could no longer stir to life, since—as though for some solemn sacrament of Self—he had already embalmed himself alive. Driven by his prickling sense of Life, Rossini tore the pompous cerecloths from this corpse, as one intent on spying out the secret of its former being. Beneath the jewelled and embroidered trappings he disclosed the true life-giver of even this majestic mummy: [42] and that was—Melody.—When he looked upon the native Opera of Italy and the work of Mozart's heirs, he saw nothing but Death again; death in empty forms whose only life shewed out to him as Melody,—Melody downright, when stripped of that pretence of Character which must seem to him a hollow sham if he turned to what of scamped, of forced and incomplete had sprung therefrom.

To live, however, was what Rossini meant; to do this, he saw well enough that he must live with those who had ears to hear him. The only living thing he had come upon in Opera, was absolute Melody; so he merely needed to pay heed to the kind of melody he must strike in order to be heard. He turned his back on the pedantic lumber of heavy scores, and listened where the people sang without a written note. What he there heard was what, out of all the operatic box of tricks, had stayed the most unbidden in the ear: the naked, ear-delighting, absolute-melodic Melody; i.e. melody that was just Melody and nothing else; that glides into the ear—one knows not why; that one picks up—one knows not why; that one exchanges to-day with that of yesterday, and forgets again to-morrow—also, one knows not why; that sounds sad when we are merry, and merry when we are out of sorts; and that still we hum to ourselves—we haven't a ghost of knowledge why.

This Melody Rossini struck; and behold!—the mystery of Opera was laid bare. What reflection and æsthetic speculation had built up, Rossini's opera-melodies pulled down and blew it into nothing, like a baseless dream. The "dramatic" Opera met the fate of Learning with her problems: those problems whose foundation had really been mistaken insight, and which the deepest pondering could only make but more mistaken and insoluble; until at last the sword of Alexander sets to work, and hews the leathern knot asunder, strewing its thousand thongs on every side. This Alexander-sword is just the naked Deed; and such a deed Rossini did, when he made the opera-public of the world a witness to the very definite truth, that people were [43] merely wanting to hear "delicious melodies" where mistaken artists had earlier fancied to make Musical Expression do duty for the aim and contents of a Drama.

The whole world hurrahed Rossini for his melodies: Rossini, who so admirably knew how to make the employment of these melodies a special art. All org