Music drama

“ True it is, of course, that in an opera the words may not be heard distinctly, and perhaps they need not be seized with certainty, since the emotion they set forth is more amply conveyed by the music. But the musician cannot express emotion musically, unless there is emotion for him to express, unless he has characters immeshed in a series of situations which evoke vivid and contrasting sentiments for him to translate into music. As the music-drama is a drama, it must obey the laws of the drama ”

“ In a more precise way the words and actions of a music drama supply the suggestion. Of course, we have been so long and so constantly under the influence of musical suggestions that music without a particular suggestion may have a more or less specific import to us. Slow minor music we are wont to call ‘sad,’ and rapid major music ‘gay.’ But this is because such music has nearly always, in our experience, been associated with the sort of mood it is supposed to express. ”

“ The music of the instruments is the voice of the fate, the conscience, and the will concerned in the drama. To those who wish to listen, it unfolds, unerringly, the thoughts, motives, and purpose of the personages, and lays bare the mysteries of the plot and counter-plot. As the passions and purposes of the drama grow complex, the musical texture, into which the themes which typify those passions and purposes enter, grows complex and heterogeneous. The most obvious factors in this development are changes of mode, harmony, rhythm, time, and orchestration. ”

“ Finally, the temporal and developmental character of the drama would seem to fit it for union with music. Yet the union of these two arts is confronted with the same difficulties that beset the connection between poetry and music. The movement of the acting drama is swift and straight, that of music is slow and circular; hence if the music is to have its way, the action of the drama must stand. ”

“ This is especially true of such complex and many-sided questions as this. When it is intended to judge seriously a work of musical drama the first thing necessary is to study the drama by itself. Drama in music is still drama. ”

“ Music, on the contrary, should do no more than contribute its full share towards making the drama clearly and quickly comprehensible at every moment. While listening to a good—that is, a rational—opera, people should, so to speak, not think of the music at all, but only feel it in an unconscious manner, while their fullest sympathy should be wholly occupied by the action represented. ”

“ This is the drama of the demigods, living in a different atmosphere from our own, however akin to ours may be their passions and purposes. For these we are no longer compelled to regard the medium of music as a forced and untruthful expression, for do they not dwell in the magic lands of the imagination? All sense of dramatic inconsistency instantly vanishes, and the conditions of artistic illusion are perfect. ”

“ Thus, beneath the roots of the drama, lay seeds of the historic novel, the romantic epic, which were to take its place to the reader, and for the scene, the oratorios, the opera, and ballet.
Music is the great art of the time. Its dominion is constantly widening, its powers are more profoundly recognized. In the forms it has already evolved, it is equal to representing any subject, can address the entire range of thoughts and emotions. ”

“ The form of drama with music which we loosely call “opera” is such a curious mixture of many elements—some of them closely related, others nearly irreconcilable—that it is almost impossible to arrive at any definite idea of its artistic value. A great picture or piece of sculpture, a great book or a great symphony represents a perfectly clear evolution of a well-defined art. ”

“ So delicious is our music that it may even render us indolent as to intellectual enjoyments. Far therefore from wishing to separate music from the drama, it should be our earnest endeavour to unite them; not in making heroes sing, which destroys all dramatic effect, but in introducing choruses, as the ancients did, or such other musical aid, as may naturally blend with the situations of the piece, as so often happens in real life. ”

“ In working out this plan he came upon the final and fundamental law of his theory, namely, that there must be in a music drama an organic union of all the arts necessary to the expression of the emotions of the scene to the spectator. Text, music, action, and scenery must all unite in a common purpose, and their union must be so complete that no one element can be taken away without injury to the whole. ”

“ There are people who fancy they have more music in their souls than was ever translated into harmony by Beethoven or Mozart. There are others who think they could paint pictures, write poetry—in short, do anything, if they only made the effort. To them what is accomplished by the practised actor seems easy and simple. But as it needs the skill of the musician to draw the full volume of eloquence from the written score, so it needs the skill of the dramatic artist to develop the subtle harmonies of the poetic play. ”

“ In drama it may happen that a series of modulations each bolder than the last and following each other close is perfectly appropriate. There are emotions that call for these bold changes of expression, these vivid transformations of colour in musical speech. ”

“ The music that is introduced to give relief to the mind, and also to heighten the tragic effect by means of contrast, is the music that is related to the scene which is the theatre of the outward action, or to the personages of the play who bear no part in the real tragedy which, as I have already intimated, plays on the stage of the lovers' hearts. ”

“ It is this attitude of the artistic mind of the future towards drama that will, I think, find utterance in a form of quasi-dramatic music in which we shall be rid of all or most of the mere scaffolding of narration or action that serves at present simply to give intellectual support to the music of opera. ”

“ A song-drama is a play which is both sung and acted, quite different from grand opera or musical comedy, and with a charm all its own. It corresponds in music to the Elizabethan or the Greek drama, for it is shown with scarcely any scenery, and on the simplest of stages, but its quality appeals to the very highest emotions. My hope is that we can get up a short song-drama for a Christmas performance, and that the orchestra should play the music for it. Those girls who can act, but not sing, will be given a separate opportunity to exercise their talents. ”

“ There{151} have been others who used the acted drama and the lyric, like Shakespeare; or words and music—”
“Let us see how your thesis works out with music,” says Mrs. Ogi.
Up to the end of the eighteenth century music has been either an adjunct of religious propaganda, or else a leisure-class plaything and decoration. The musicians are commanded to come and entertain their lords and masters, while the latter feast and dance and gossip. The musician as an artist, a lover of beauty for its own sake, exists at his own peril. ”

“ In this manner, music and representation support each other delightfully: the impression made upon the audience by the representation, is a fine preparation for the music that succeeds; and the impression made by the music, is a fine preparation for the representation that succeeds. It appears to me clear, that, by some such contrivance, the modern drama may be improved, so as to enjoy the advantage of the ancient chorus without its slavish limitation {285}of place and time. And as to music in particular, I cannot figure any plan that would tend more to its improvement. ”

“ Legendary material in drama requires the aid of music. Music indeed has a most important part to play in poetic and rustic drama. L'Arlésienne is the finest example. We may say that music has not yet received the treatment in our drama which it deserves. The poets have dispensed with it, partly through sheer ignorance, and partly through fear and jealousy. Music and poetry are two wings of the lyric drama. He who neglects either, can fly only with great difficulty. ”

“ Music and the drama have been inseparably connected from the most remote date. Even in the cart of Thespis some corner must have been found for the musician. The custom of chanting in churches has been traced to the practice of the ancient and pagan stage. Music pervaded the whole of the classical drama, was the adjunct of the poetry: the play being a kind of recitation, the declamation composed and written in notes, and the gesticulations even being accompanied. The old miracle plays were assisted by performers on the horn, the pipe, the tabret, and the flute—a full orchestra in fact. ”

“ This expressiveness is gained by the employment of themes to which a definite meaning has been attached, no matter how arbitrarily, by their association with a picture, an action, a personality, or a thought. This association is made perfectly comprehensible to every listener who bears in mind that the text is the explanation of this music, and its only explanation. The music never exists for its own sake, but is a vital part of the speech of the drama. ”

“ But the difficulty of uniting song to declamation in modern languages explains how it is that the intervention of music has given to the lyric poem a character quite different from that of tragedy or comedy, and made it a third species of drama, having its particular rules. The differences alluded to cannot be determined without a perfect knowledge of music, of the means of identifying it with words, and of its natural relations to the human heart—details which belong less to the artist than to the philosopher. ”

“ And what is true of the Symphony, is true of all other kinds of Music. If it could really be demonstrated that Music, addressed to the intellect by means of the logical development of a well-considered thesis, was antagonistic to the progress of the Lyric Drama, the demonstration would amount to a positive proof that Music and the Drama were incompatible existences ”

“ The truth of this is nevertheless indisputable, and the remark is perhaps more applicable to music as represented in the "lyrical drama" than in any other form. What pleases one generation is often distasteful to the next, and a period of twenty or even ten years has sometimes been sufficient to witness a thorough evolution in the methods and general style of dramatic music. ”

“ X The Opera and Its Reformers
The evolution of the drama is intimately associated with that of music and both are inseparably entwined with the unfolding of the spiritual life of the human race. Man is essentially dramatic by nature, and both history and tradition show it to have been among his earliest instincts to express his inner emotions by action and song. ”

“ Joy it was that set thee here!
[They dance in picturesque groups around the tree. The orchestral music accompanies the dance, and gradually passes into a more elevated style, as there appear in the background from above GENIUS and the Goddesses of the Seven Arts. The country people retire to the sides of the stage, GENIUS comes down to the centre, with PAINTING, SCULPTURE, and ARCHITECTURE on his right, POETRY, DRAMA, MUSIC, and DANCING on his left.] ”

“ A musical thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it, namely the melody that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be, here in this world. All inmost things, we may say, are melodious; naturally utter themselves in Song. The meaning of Song goes deep. Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us? ”

“ There could be no question as to the utter incongruity of any dramatic picture of ordinary events, or ordinary personages, finding expression in musical utterance. Genuine and profound art must always be consistent with itself, and what we recognize as general truth. Even characters set in the comparatively near hack-ground of history are too closely related to our own familiar surroundings of thought and mood to be regarded as artistically natural in the use of music as the organ of the every-day life of emotion and sentiment. ”

“ But at moments I do appreciate music as pure musical form, as sounds combined according to the laws of a mysterious necessity, as pure art with a tremendous significance of its own and no relation whatever to the significance of life; and in those moments I lose myself in that infinitely sublime state of mind to which pure visual form transports me. How inferior is my normal state of mind at a concert. Tired or perplexed, I let slip my sense of form, my aesthetic emotion collapses, and I begin weaving into the harmonies, that I cannot grasp, the ideas of life. ”

“ LOVE makes us musical. In Storms and Sunshine, Suffering and Joy, Action, Union, Life, LOVE is the music at the heart of all. LOVE makes us musical," said all the Creatures.
And from the multitude before the throne, who, through fires of Tribulation and Storms of conflict, had learned the new song, and from depths of Darkness and the silence of Isolation had been brought together in the Light of Life to sing it, floated down a soft "Amen, for GOD is LOVE."
The Acorn. ”

“ It is the theatre that last feels its approach. Poetry, painting, sculpture, music, all have met it halfway; only the stage lags in the rear. Plot, action, trickeries, cheap illusions, must be swept away into the limbo of things used up. Atmosphere, the atmosphere of unuttered emotions, arrested attitudes, ideas of the spiritual subconscious, are to usurp the mechanical formulas of to-day. The ideal is music—music, the archetype of the arts. ”