A Second Book of Operas | Page 6

with Barbier and Carre, wrote an opera entitled "La
Reine de Saba." The plot had nothing to do with the Bible beyond the
name of Sheba's Queen and King Solomon. Mr. Farnie, who used to
make comic operetta books in London, adapted the French libretto for
performance in English and called the opera "Irene." What a title for a
grand opera! Why not "Blanche" or "Arabella"? No doubt such a
thought flitted through many a careless mind unconscious that an Irene
was a Byzantine Empress of the eighth century, who, by her devotion
to its tenets, won beatification after death from the Greek Church. The
opera failed on the Continent as well as in London, but if it had not
been given a comic operetta flavor by its title and association with the
name of the excellent Mr. Farnie, would the change in supposed time,
place and people have harmed it?
A few years ago I read (with amusement, of course) of the
metamorphosis to which Massenet's "Herodiade" was subjected so that
it might masquerade for a brief space on the London stage; but when I
saw the opera in New York "in the original package" (to speak
commercially), I could well believe that the music sounded the same in
London, though John the Baptist sang under an alias and the painted
scenes were supposed to delineate Ethiopia instead of Palestine.
There is a good deal of nonsensical affectation in the talk about the
intimate association in the minds of composers of music, text, incident,
and original purpose. "Un Ballo in Maschera," as we see it most often
nowadays, plays in Nomansland; but I fancy that its music would sound
pretty much the same if the theatre of action were transplanted back to
Sweden, whence it came originally, or left in Naples, whither it
emigrated, or in Boston, to which highly inappropriate place it was
banished to oblige the Neapolitan censor. So long as composers have
the habit of plucking feathers out of their dead birds to make wings for
their new, we are likely to remain in happy and contented ignorance of
mesalliances between music and score, until they are pointed out by too
curious critics or confessed by the author. What is present habit was

former custom to which no kind or degree of stigma attached. Bach did
it; Handel did it; nor was either of these worthies always scrupulous in
distinguishing between meum and tuum when it came to appropriating
existing thematic material. In their day the merit of individuality and
the right of property lay more in the manner in which ideas were
presented than in the ideas themselves.
In 1886 I spent a delightful day with Dr. Chrysander at his home in
Bergedorf, near Hamburg, and he told me the story of how on one
occasion, when Keiser was incapacitated by the vice to which he was
habitually prone, Handel, who sat in his orchestra, was asked by him to
write the necessary opera. Handel complied, and his success was too
great to leave Keiser's mind in peace. So he reset the book. Before
Keiser's setting was ready for production Handel had gone to Italy.
Hearing of Keiser's act, he secured a copy of the new setting from a
member of the orchestra and sent back to Hamburg a composition
based on Keiser's melodies "to show how such themes ought to be
treated." Dr. Chrysander, also, when he gave me a copy of Bertati's
"Don Giovanni" libretto, for which Gazzaniga composed the music,
told me that Mozart had been only a little less free than the poet in
appropriating ideas from the older work.
One of the best pieces in the final scene of "Fidelio" was taken from a
cantata on the death of the emperor of Austria, composed by Beethoven
before he left Bonn. The melody originally conceived for the last
movement of the Symphony in D minor was developed into the finale
of one of the last string quartets. In fact the instances in which
composers have put their pieces to widely divergent purposes are
innumerable and sometimes amusing, in view of the fantastic belief
that they are guided by plenary inspiration. The overture which Rossini
wrote for his "Barber of Seville" was lost soon after the first production
of the opera. The composer did not take the trouble to write another,
but appropriated one which had served its purpose in an earlier work.
Persons ignorant of that fact, but with lively imaginations, as I have
said in one of my books, ["A Book of Operas," p. 9] have rhapsodized
on its appositeness, and professed to hear in it the whispered plottings
of the lovers and the merry raillery of Rosina contrasted with the futile

ragings of her grouty guardian; but when Rossini composed this