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A Sketch of the Development of Opera performance

If Music be, among the arts, 'Heaven's youngest-teemed star', the

latest of the art-forms she herself has brought forth is

unquestionably Opera. There is a good deal of fascination, and some truth, in the theory

that different nations enjoy opera in different ways. According to

this, the Italians consider it solely in relation to their sensuous

emotions; the French, as producing a titillating sensation more or

less akin to the pleasures of the table; the Spaniards, mainly as a

vehicle for dancing; the Germans, as an intellectual pleasure; and the

English, as an expensive but not unprofitable way of demonstrating

financial prosperity. The Italian might be said to hear through what

is euphemistically called his heart, the Frenchman through his palate,

the Spaniard through his toes, the German through his brain, and the

Englishman through his purse. The Englishman who said of the opera,

'At the first act I was enchanted; the second I could just bear; and at the third I ran away',

is a fair illustration of an attitude common in the eighteenth

century; and in France things were not much better, even in days when

stage magnificence reached a point hardly surpassed in history. La

Bruyère's 'Je ne sais comment l'opéra avec une musique si parfaite, et

une dépense toute royale, a pu réussir à m'ennuyer', shows how little

he had realised the fatiguing effect of theatrical splendour too

persistently displayed. But though artistic conditions in opera

change quickly and continually,though reputations are made and lost in

a few years, and the real reformers of music themselves alter their style

and methods so radically that the earlier compositions of a Gluck, a Wagner,

or a Verdi present scarcely any point of resemblance to those later

masterpieces by which each of these is immortalised, yet the attitude

of audiences towards opera in general changes curiously little from century to century.

To most of the world (and we say it advisedly,) the opera is a sealed

book. We do not mean a bare representation with its accompanying

screechings, violinings and bass-drummings. Everybody has seen that--But

the race of beings who constitute that remarkable combination; their

feelings, positions, social habits; their relation to one another; what

they say and eat;[a] whether the tenor ever notices as they (the world)

do, the fine legs of the contralto in man's dress, and whether the basso

drinks pale ale or porter; all these things have been hitherto wrapped

in an inscrutable mystery. In regard to mere actors, not singers, this

feeling is confined to children; but the operators of an opera are

essentially esoteric. They are enclosed by a curtain more impenetrable

than the Chinese wall. You may walk all around them; nay, you may even

know an inferior artiste, but there is a line beyond which even the fast

men, with all their impetuosity, are restrained from invading.

Shakspeare observes, that "all the world's a stage;" the converse of

this proposition is no less worthy of being regarded as a great moral

truth,--that all the stage is a world. Every condition of life may be

found typified in one or other of the officials or attachés of an opera

house; from the king upon the throne, symbolized by the haughty and

magisterial impresario, to the _chiffonier_ in the gutter, represented

by the unfortunate chorister who is attired as a shabby nobleman on the

stage, but who goes home to a supper of leeks. Between these two

degrees, of dignity and unimportance, come those many shades of social

position corresponding to the happy situations of Secretary of State,

Secretary of the Treasury, and divers other dignitaries, set forth in

the stage director, the treasurer and the chorus-master.

The tenor, basso, prima donna and baritone may be considered as

belonging to what is called "society;"--that well-to-do and ornamental

portion of the community, who having no vocation save to frequent balls,

soirées, concerts and operas, and fall in love--serve as objects of

admiration to those persons less favoured by fortune, who make the

clothes and dress the hair of the former.

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