Opera Books
A SECOND BOOK OF OPERAS
by Henry Edward Krehbiel
CHAPTER XVI
“MADAME SANS-GÊNE” AND OTHER
OPERAS BY GIORDANO
The
opera-goers of New York enjoyed a novel experience when Giordano's
“Madame Sans-Gene” had its first performance on any stage in their
presence at the Metropolitan Opera House on January 25, 1915. It was the
first time that a royal and imperial personage who may be said to live
freshly and vividly in the minds of the people of this generation as
well as in their imaginations appeared before them to sing his thoughts
and feelings in operatic fashion. At first blush it seemed as if a
singing Bonaparte was better calculated to stir their risibilities than
their interest or sympathies; and this may, indeed, have been the case;
but at any rate they had an opportunity to make the acquaintance of
Napoleon before he rose to imperial estate. But, in all seriousness, it
is easier to imagine the figure which William II of Germany would cut on
the operatic stage than the “grand, gloomy, and peculiar” Corsican. The
royal people with whom the operatic public is familiar as a rule are
sufficiently surrounded by the mists of antiquity and obscurity that the
contemplation of them arouse little thought of the incongruity which
their appearance as operatic heroes ought to create. Henry the Fowler
in “Lohengrin,” Mark in “Tristan und Isolde,” the unnumbered
Pharaoh in “Aida,” Herod in “Salome” and “Herodiade,” and the
few other kings, if there are any more with whom the present generation
of opera-goers have a personal acquaintance, so to speak, are more or
less merely poetical creations whom we seldom if ever think of in
connection with veritable history. Even Boris Godounoff is to us
more a picture out of a book, like the Macbeth whom he so
strongly resembles from a theatrical point of view, than the monarch who
had a large part in the making of the Russian people. The Roman
censorship prevented us long ago from making the acquaintance of the
Gustavus of Sweden whom Ankerstrom stabbed to death at a masked ball, by
transmogrifying him into the absurdly impossible figure of a Governor
of Boston; and the Claudius of Ambroise Thomas's opera is as
much a ghost as Hamlet's father, while Debussy's blind King is as
much an abstraction as is Mélisande herself.
Operatic dukes we know in plenty, though most of them have come out
of the pages of romance and are more or less acceptable according to the
vocal ability of their representatives. When Caruso sings “La donna e
mobile” we care little for the profligacy of Verdi's Duke of Mantua
and do not inquire whether or not such an individual ever lived.
Moussorgsky's Czar Boris ought to interest us more, however. The
great bell-tower in the Kremlin which he built, and the great bell — a
shattered monument of one of his futile ambitions — have been seen by
thousands of travellers who never took the trouble to learn that the
tyrant who had the bell cast laid a serfdom upon the Russian people
which endured down to our day. Boris, by the way, picturesque and
dramatic figure that he is as presented to us in history, never got upon
the operatic stage until Moussorgsky took him in hand. Two hundred years
ago a great German musician, Mattheson, as much scholar as composer if
not more, set him to music, but the opera was never performed. Peter the
Great, who came a century after Boris, lived a life more calculated to
invite the attention of opera writers, but even he escaped the clutches
of dramatic composers except Lortzing, who took advantage of the
romantic episode of Peter's service as ship carpenter in Holland to make
him the hero of one of the most sparkling of German comic operas.
Lortzing had a successor in the Irishman T. S. Cooke, but his opera
found its way into the limbo of forgotten things more than a generation
ago, while Lortzing's still lives on the stage of Germany. Peter
deserved to be celebrated in music, for it was in his reign that
polyphonic music, albeit of the Italian order, was introduced into the
Russian church and modern instrumental music effected an entrance into
his empire. But I doubt if Peter was sincerely musical; in his youth he
heard only music of the rudest kind. He was partial to the bagpipes and,
like Nero, played upon that instrument.
To come back to Bonaparte and music. “Madame Sans-Gene” is an
operatic version of the drama which Sardou developed out of a little
one-act play dealing with a partly fictitious, partly historical story
in which Napoleon, his marshal Lefebvre, and a laundress were the
principal figures. Whether or not the great Corsican could be justified
as a character in a lyric drama was a mooted question when Giordano
conceived the idea of making an opera out of the play. It is said that
Verdi remarked something to the effect that the question depended upon
what he would be called upon to sing, and how he would be expected to
sing it. The problem was really not a very large or difficult one, for
all great people are turned into marionettes when transformed into
operatic heroes.
In the palmy days of bel canto no one would have raised the
question at all, for then the greatest characters in history moved about
the stage in stately robes and sang conventional arias in the
conventional manner. The change from old-fashioned opera to regenerated
lyric drama might have simplified the problem for Giordano, even if his
librettist had not already done so by reducing Napoleon to his lowest
terms from a dramatic as well as historical point of view. The heroes of
eighteenth-century opera were generally feeble-minded lovers and nothing
more; Giordano's Napoleon is only a jealous husband who helps out in the
denouement of a play which is concerned chiefly with other people.
In turning Sardou's dramatic personages into operatic puppets a
great deal of bloodletting was necessary and a great deal of the
characteristic charm of the comedy was lost, especially in the cases of
Madame Sans-Gêne herself and Napoleon's sister; but enough
was left to make a practicable opera. There were the pictures of all the
plebeians who became great folk later concerned in the historical
incidents which lifted them up. There were also the contrasted pictures
which resulted from the great transformation, and it was also the
ingratiating incident of the devotion of Lefebvre to the
stout-hearted, honest little woman of the people who had to try to be a
duchess. All this was fair operatic material, though music has a strange
capacity for refining stage characters as well as for making them
colorless. Giordano could not do himself justice as a composer without
refining the expression of Caterina Huebscher, and so his
Duchess of Dantzic talks a musical language at least which Sardou's
washerwoman could not talk and remain within the dramatic verities.
Therefore we have “Madame Sans-Gêne” with a difference, but not one that
gave any more offence than operatic treatment of other fine plays have
accustomed us to.
To dispose of the artistic merits of the opera as briefly as
possible, it may be said that in more ways than one Giordano has in this
work harked back to “Andrea Chenier,” the first of his operas which had
a hearing in America. The parallel extends to some of the political
elements of the book as well as its musical investiture with its echoes
of the popular airs of the period of the French Revolution. The style of
writing is also there, though applied, possibly, with more mature and
refined skill. I cannot say with as much ingenuousness and freshness of
invention, however. Its spirit in the first act, and largely in the
second, is that of the opera bouffe, but there are many pages of
“Madame Sans-Gêne” which I would gladly exchange for any one of the
melodies of Lecocq, let us say in “La Fille de Mme. Angot.” Like all
good French music which uses and imitates them, it is full of crisp
rhythms largely developed from the old dances which, originally
innocent, were degraded to base uses by the sans-culottes; and so
there is an abundance of life and energy in the score though little of
the distinction, elegance, and grace that have always been
characteristic of French music, whether high-born or low. The best
melody in the modern Italian vein flows in the second act when the
genuine affection and fidelity of Caterina find expression and
where a light touch is combined with considerable warmth of feeling and
a delightful daintiness of orchestral color. Much of this is out of
harmony with the fundamental character of Sardou's woman, but music
cannot deny its nature. Only a Moussorgsky could make a drunken monk
talk truthfully in music.
If Giordano's opera failed to make a profound impression on the New
York public, it was not because that public had not had opportunity to
learn the quality of his music. His “Andrea Chenier” had been produced
at the Academy of Music as long before as November 13, 1896. With it the
redoubtable Colonel Mapleson went down to his destruction in America. It
was one of the many strange incidents in the career of Mr. Oscar
Hammerstein as I have related them in my book entitled “Chapters of
Opera”1 that it should have been
brought back by him twelve years later for a single performance at the
Manhattan Opera House. In the season of 1916-1917 it was incorporated in
the repertory of the Boston-National Opera Company and carried to the
principal cities of the country. On December 16, 1906, Mr. Heinrich
Conried thought that the peculiar charms of Madame Cavalieri, combined
with the popularity of Signor Caruso, might give habitation to
Giordano's setting of an opera book made out of Sardou's “Fedora”; but
it endured for only four performances in the season of 1906-1907 and
three in the next, in which Conried's career came to an end. In reviving
“Andrea Chenier” Mr. Hammerstein may have had visions of future triumphs
for its composer, for a few weeks before (on February 5, 1908) he had
brought forward the same composer's “Siberia,” which gave some promise
of life, though it died with the season that saw its birth.
The critical mind seems disposed to look with kindness upon new
works in proportion as they fall back in the corridors of memory; and so
I am inclined to think that of the four operas by Giordano which I have
heard “Andrea Chenier” gives greatest promise of a long life. The
attempt to put music to “Fedora” seemed to me utterly futile. Only those
moments were musical in the accepted sense of the word when the action
of the drama ceased, as in the case of the intermezzo, or when the old
principles of operatic construction waked into life again as in the
confession of the hero-lover. Here, moreover, there comes into the score
an element of novelty, for the confession is extorted from Lorris
while a virtuoso is entertaining a drawing-roomful of people with a set
pianoforte solo. As for the rest of the opera, it seems sadly deficient
in melody beautiful either in itself or as an expression of passion.
“Andrea Chenier” has more to commend it. To start with, there is a good
play back of it, though the verities of history were not permitted to
hamper the imagination of Signor Illica, the author of the book. The
hero of the opera is the patriotic poet who fell under the guillotine in
1794 at the age of thirty-two. The place which Saint-Beuve gave him in
French letters is that of the greatest writer of classic verse after
Racine and Boileau. The operatic story is all fiction, more so, indeed,
than that of “Madame Sans-Gêne.” As a matter of fact, the veritable
Chenier was thrown into prison on the accusation of having sheltered a
political criminal, and was beheaded together with twenty-three others
on a charge of having engaged in a conspiracy while in prison. In the
opera he does not die for political reasons, though they are alleged as
a pretext, but because he has crossed the love-path of a leader of the
revolution.
When Giordano composed “Siberia,” he followed the example of
Mascagni and Puccini (if he did not set the example for them) by seeking
local color and melodic material in the folk-songs of the country in
which his scene was laid. Puccini went to Japan for musical ideas and
devices to trick out his “Madama Butterfly” as Mascagni had done in
“Iris.” Giordano, illustrating a story of political oppression in
“Siberia,” called in the aid of Russian melodies. His exiles sing the
heavy-hearted measures of the bargemen of the Volga, “Ay ouchnem,” the
forceful charm of which few Russian composers have been able to resist.
He introduced also strains of Easter music from the Greek church, the
popular song known among the Germans as “Schone Minka” and the “Glory”
song (Slava) which Moussorgsky had forged into a choral
thunderbolt in his “Boris Godounoff.” It is a stranger coincidence that
the “Slava” melody should have cropped up in the operas of Giordano and
Moussorgsky than that the same revolutionary airs should pepper the
pages of “Madame Sans-Gêne” and “Andrea Chenier.” These operas are
allied in subject and period and the same style of composition is
followed in both. Chenier goes to his death in the opera to the
tune of the “Marseillaise” and the men march past the windows of
Caterina Huebscher's laundry singing the refrain of Roget de Lisle's
hymn. But Giordano does not make extensive use of the tune in “Madame
Sans-Gêne.” It appears literally at the place mentioned and surges up
with fine effect in a speech in which the Duchess of Dantzic
overwhelms the proud sisters of Napoleon; but that is practically all.
The case is different with two other revolutionary airs. The first crash
of the orchestra launches us into “La Carmagnole,” whose melody provides
the thematic orchestral substratum for nearly the entire first scene. It
is an innocent enough tune, differing little from hundreds of French
vaudeville melodies of its period, but Giordano injects vitriol into its
veins by his harmonies and orchestration. With all its innocence this
was the tune which came from the raucous throats of politically crazed
men and women while noble heads tumbled into the bloody sawdust, while
the spoils of the churches were carried into the National Convention in
1793, and to which “several members, quitting their curule chairs, took
the hands of girls flaunting in priests' vestures” and danced a wild
rout, as did other mad wretches when a dancer was worshipped as the
Goddess of Reason in the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
Caterina's account of the rude familiarity with which she is
treated by the soldiery (I must assume a knowledge of Sardou's play
which the opera follows) is set to a melody of a Russian folk-song cast
in the treatment of which Russian influences may also be felt; but with
the first shouts of the mob attacking the Tuileries in the distance the
characteristic rhythmical motif of the “Ça ira” is heard
muttering in the basses. Again a harmless tune which in its time was
perverted to a horrible use; a lively little contradance which graced
many a cotillion in its early days, but which was roared and howled by
the mob as it carried the beauteous head of the Lamballe through the
streets of Paris on a pike and thrust it almost into the face of Marie
Antoinette.
Of such material and a pretty little dance (“La Fricassee”) is the
music of the first act, punctuated by cannon shots, made. It is all
rhythmically stirring, it flows spiritedly, energetically along with the
current of the play, never retarding it for a moment, but, unhappily,
never sweetening it with a grain of pretty sentiment or adorning it with
a really graceful contour. There is some graciousness in the court
scene, some archness and humor in the scene in which the Duchess of
Dantzic submits to the adornment of her person, some dramatically
strong declamation in the speeches of Napoleon, some simulation
of passion in the love passages of Lefebvre and of Neipperg;
but as a rule the melodic flood never reaches high tide.
Footnotes :
- New York, Henry Holt & Co.
Last updated October 30, 2006