The Nineteenth Century - Page 2

misunderstanding his integrity, openly
questioned his sanity. But to those who were not looking for
pretty new sound patterns, but were longing for the expression of
their moods in music, he achieved revelation, because, being
single in his aim to express his own moods, he anticipated with
revolutionary courage and frankness all the moods of the rising
generations of the nineteenth century.

The result was inevitable. In the nineteenth century it was no
longer necessary to be a born pattern designer in sound to be a
composer. One had but to be a dramatist or a poet completely
susceptible to the dramatic and descriptive powers of sound.
A race of literary and theatrical musicians appeared; and
Meyerbeer, the first of them, made an extraordinary impression.
The frankly delirious description of his Robert the Devil in
Balzac's short story entitled Gambra, and Goethe's astonishingly
mistaken notion that he could have composed music for Faust, show
how completely the enchantments of the new dramatic music upset
the judgment of artists of eminent discernment. Meyerbeer was,
people said (old gentlemen still say so in Paris), the successor
of Beethoven: he was, if a less perfect musician than Mozart, a
profounder genius. Above all, he was original and daring. Wagner
himself raved about the duet in the fourth act of Les Huguenots
as wildly as anyone.

Yet all this effect of originality and profundity was produced by
a quite limited talent for turning striking phrases, exploiting
certain curious and rather catching rhythms and modulations, and
devising suggestive or eccentric instrumentation. On its
decorative side, it was the same phenomenon in music as the
Baroque school in architecture: an energetic struggle to enliven
organic decay by mechanical oddities and novelties. Meyerbeer was
no symphonist. He could not apply the thematic system to his
striking phrases, and so had to cobble them into metric patterns
in the old style; and as he was no "absolute musician" either, he
hardly got his metric patterns beyond mere quadrille tunes, which
were either wholly undistinguished, or else made remarkable by
certain brusqueries which, in the true rococo manner, owed their
singularity to their senselessness. He could produce neither a
thorough music drama nor a charming opera. But with all this,
and worse, Meyerbeer had some genuine dramatic energy, and even
passion; and sometimes rose to the occasion in a manner which,
whilst the imagination of his contemporaries remained on fire
with the novelties of dramatic music, led them to overrate him
with an extravagance which provoked Wagner to conduct a long
critical campaign against his leadership. Thirty years ago this
campaign was mentably