The Beggar's Opera

“ We take pains to puff them up in their villany, and thieves are set out in so amiable a light in the Beggar's Opera, that it has taught them to value themselves on their profession rather than be ashamed of it. ”

“ The Beggar’s Opera was acted at Covent-Garden last night, for the purpose of introducing Miss Stephens in the character of Polly. The play itself is among the most popular of our dramas, and one which the public are always glad to have some new excuse for seeing acted again. Its merits are peculiarly its own. It not only delights, but instructs us, without our knowing how, and though it is at first view equally offensive to good taste and common decency. ”

“ Purcell seems, however, to have been the first to see the possibility of a national English opera;—his music to Dryden’s “King Arthur,” and to the “Indian Queen,” is considered very beautiful; “his recitative was as rhetorically perfect as Lulli’s, but infinitely more natural, and frequently impassioned to the last degree; his airs are not in the Italian form, but breathe rather the spirit of unfettered natural melody, and stand forth as models of refinement and freedom.” “The Beggar’s Opera,” set to music by Dr. Pepusch, and Dr. ”

“ To-day it is our pleasure to be drunk,
And this our queen shall be as drunk as we.
[Pg 14]
It was the fate of "Tom Thumb" to be transformed—so far as it was possible to transform it—into a burlesque of Italian opera as well as of conventional drama. "Set to music after the Italian manner," it was brought out in 1733 as "The Opera of Operas," and had considerable vogue in the new guise thus given to it. It had been preceded in 1727 by Gay's "Beggar's Opera"; but that famous work was a social and political satire rather than a travestie of the exotic lyrical drama. ”

“ The most familiar of such melodramas in Gay’s Beggar’s Opera. In these the dialogue is entirely spoken. In true opera the spoken dialogue was replaced by recitative. It may be noticed that the speaking of some parts of the dialogue is not sufficient to class an opera as a “melodrama” in this sense, as is proved by the spoken grave-digging scene, accompanied by music, in Fidelio, and the incantation scene in Der Freischütz. To this the English term “declamation” is usually applied; the Germans use Melodram. But see Opera. ”

“ The stage has not simply amused, but it has elevated mankind. The greatest genius of our world poured the treasures of his soul into the drama. I do not believe that any girl can be corrupted, or that any man can be injured, by becoming acquainted with Isabella or Miranda or Juliet or Imogen, or any of the great heroines of Shakespeare.
So I regard the opera as one of the great civilizers. No one can listen to the symphonies of Beethoven, or the music of Schubert, without receiving a benefit. And no one can hear the operas of Wagner without feeling that he has been ennobled and refined. ”

“ Thus it happens, that if the musician has more art than the poet, he effaces him; and the actor, seeing the spectator sacrifice the words to the music, sacrifices in his turn theatrical gesture and action to song and brilliancy of voice, which transforms a dramatic entertainment into a mere concert....
"Such are the defects which the absolute perfection of music, and its defective application to language, may introduce into the Opera. ”

“ Up to this time the Opera had been constituted as it alone could be; for what better use, at the theatre, could be made of a kind of music which could paint nothing than by employing it in the representation of things which could not exist? But as soon as music learnt to paint and to speak the charms of sentiment, it brought into contempt those of the Wand; the theatre was purged of its garden of mythology, interest was substituted for astonishment; the machines of poets and of carpenters were destroyed; and the lyric drama assumed a more noble and less gigantic character. ”

“ Hence the origin of airs, choruses, symphonies, and of that enchanting melody which often embellishes modern music at the expense of its poetic accompaniment.
"At the birth of the Opera, its inventors, to elude that which seemed unnatural, as an imitation of human life, in the union of music with speech, transferred their scenes from earth to heaven, and to hell. Not knowing how to make men speak, they made gods and devils, instead of heroes and shepherds, sing. Thus magic and marvels became speedily the stock in trade of the lyrical theatre. ”

“ How much of the merest putty, again, is left visible in the libretti of Puccini, Charpentier, and others—passages that are essential if the story is to be made clear to the spectator, but absolutely defying musical treatment. There is scarcely a single opera of which the music gives one the impression of pure necessity from first to last; every now and then our teeth are set on edge by some pieces of grit left by the bad cooks in an otherwise good dish. ”

“ However, there is the charm of aversion, and that piques the curious. Music in opera is prodigal, never generous. It is the too-much that appalls. It is as reticent as a female politician and a hundredfold more attractive. Flying fish, these singing-actors. They needs must swim and fly. Winged fish, birds with fins. It is an ambiguous art, the operatic, and it is devised to tickle the ears, dazzle the eyes, of the unmusical and myopic. It breeds personal gossip, never thought. For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of Mary Garden’s celebrated eyebrows! ”

“ The opera, where night after night the wealth of glorious voices is flung upon the air till its every vibration is melody, and the spirit drinks it in as it would the incense of rare flowers, is to her not so exquisite a luxury as the choice songs, warbled in a concert room, to which you may listen but few times in the year; such pleasure palls in repetition, on the common mind, for nature's favourites are among the poor, and gold, with all its magical power, can never attune the ear to music, nor the taste to an appreciation of that which is truly beautiful in nature or art. ”

“ What a grand thought is that which represents him at the theatre, mechanically performing his part, while all the time his soul is thinking of his beloved opera, so that often, unconsciously to himself, he bursts out into its weird and startling music! ”

“ The words of an opera ought to be good, and yet need not of necessity be heard. They should be poetical that they may inspire first the composer and afterwards the singer; and they should be ryhthmical and sonorous in order that the latter may be able to sing them with due effect. Above all they ought not to be ridiculous, lest the public should hear them and laugh at the music, just where it was intended that it should affect them to tears. Everything ought to be good at the opera down to the rosin of the fiddlers, and including the words of the libretto. ”

“ In the first quarter of the 18th century the popularity of ballads was not as great, but it rose again under George II. with the introduction of Ballad-operas, of which the 'Beggars' Opera' (1727) was the first. These operas formed the first reaction of the popular taste against the Italian music. They were spoken dramas with songs interspersed; and the songs were set to old ballad tunes, or imitations of them. [See English Opera, vol. i. p. 489b.] ”

“ He never leaves you cold; and when he does not move you, he astonishes you; in a word, before hearing him, I did not know what the power of singing really was. The enthusiasm he excites is without limits. In fact, his faults are not faults for Italians, who in their opera seria do not employ what the French call the tragic style, and who scarcely understand us, when we tell them that a waltz or quadrille movement is out of place in the mouth of a Cæsar, an Assur, or an Otello. ”

“ For the sake of enjoying the pleasures of music and of the drama in combination, we must adopt certain conventions, and must assume that song is the natural language of the men and women that we propose to show in our operas; as we assume in tragedy that they all talk in verse, in comedy that they are all witty and yet are perpetually giving one another opportunities for repartee; in the ballet that they all dance and are unable to speak at all. ”

“ I remember nothing more until the scene was ended: the test and last scene of the opera it had been: and as the curtain fell, it was stopped by a faint, dismal hiss that grew slowly louder and more venomous, was mingled with laughs and jeers from the gallery, and the play was damned. I stood with my white gauze and bony body and rouge behind a pasteboard flower-vase, and looked out at the laughing mob of faces. This was the world ”

“ Why don’t you go back to washing? An artist! Corpo di Bacco! Why don’t you go back to scrubbing floors? You, who stand there dressed up like Marguerite! Where is your fur, where are your claws, where are your shiny yellow eyes, cat that you are!” All of this, disheartening and saddening as it is, only proves that social amenities at the opera are very much as they are with us all in real life.
THE SPELL OF MUSIC Why is it, we wonder, that the people in the first tier boxes at the opera always seem like human beings. ”

“ From the inimitably gay and dramatic laughing chorus and waltz of the first scene to the divine melody in which the heroine expresses her unshaken faith in Heaven, immediately before her lover's triumph closes the piece, the whole opera is a series of exquisite conceptions, hardly one of which does not contain some theme or passage calculated to catch the dullest and slowest ear and fix itself on the least retentive memory ”

“ They have even been known to complain during or after the performance that they could not hear the words, as if it were through the mere logical meaning of the words that the composer proposed to excite the emotion of the audience. The only pity is that it is necessary in an opera to have words at all, but it is evident that a singer could not enter into the spirit of a dramatic situation if he had a mere string of meaningless syllables or any sort of inappropriate nonsense to utter. ”

“ The stage whisper and aside, too, we accept with benevolent indulgence; but it is worth noting that in the attempted verisimilitude of the modern "legitimate" drama, the aside has well nigh vanished. As we go down the scale through light comedy and broad farce these conventions multiply rapidly.
With the introduction of music come further absurdities. Melodious voicing of our thoughts is in itself essentially unnatural, to say the least. Grand opera, great art form as it may be, is hopelessly artificial. ”

“ No one will dispute but that understanding Italian would render our entertainment at an opera more rational and more complete; but without that advantage, let it be remembered by the lovers of Music, that an opera is the completest concert to which they can go; with this advantage over those in still life, that to the most perfect singing, and effects of a powerful and well-disciplined band, are frequently added excellent acting, splendid scenes and decorations, with such dancing as a playhouse, from its inferior prices, is seldom able to furnish. ”

“ This anarchy of the arts, where music, dancing, and decoration endeavour to surpass each other by the most profuse display of dazzling charms, constitutes the very essence of the Opera. What sort of opera music would it be, where the words should receive a mere rhythmical accompaniment of the simplest modulations? The fantastic magic of the Opera consists altogether in the luxurious competition of the different means, and in the perplexity of an overflowing superfluity. ”

“ But, on the contrary, should we be so cruel to deny any such good purpose to be at the bottom; nay, should we derive this desire of an opera at present from the most depraved levity of mind, an utter insensibility of public good or evil, yet we may still draw advantages from our opera, though I must own I could be scarce sanguine enough to derive them from design. ”

“ In opera, willy-nilly, poetry must be the obedient daughter of music. Why do Italian operas please everywhere, even in Paris, as I have been a witness, despite the wretchedness of their librettos? Because in them music rules and compels us to forget everything else. All the more must an opera please in which the plot is well carried out, and the words are written simply for the sake of the music and not here and there to please some miserable rhyme, which, God knows, adds nothing to a theatrical representation but more often harms it. ”

“ By the clapping of their hands they might be taken for deaf people delighted at catching some shrill piercing sound. For my part, I am convinced that they applaud the outcries of an actress at the Opera as they would the feats of a tumbler or a rope-dancer at a fair. The sensation produced by this screaming is both revolting and painful; one actually suffers whilst it lasts, but is so glad to see it all over without accident as willingly to testify joy. ”

“ Young man, can you be so ignorant? As Italian, I complain that this opera gives me no rest; that I must be kept on the stretch from beginning to end; that I forget the singers in the orchestra; that I feel more fear and horror than delight; in short, I complain that the devil, instead of Don Giovanni, has not taken the composer, who forces me to labor, where I expected only pleasure. But I can also complain as a German. Do you think I know not what you wish? Per Bacco! the misfortune is, you only half wish! An opera should be a whole; connected from beginning to end ”