A Second Book of Operas | Page 8

must perforce occupy attention in this study. Chiefest and
noblest of these are Rossini's "Moses" and Mehul's "Joseph." Finally,
there are a few with which I have only a passing or speaking
acquaintance; whose faces I can recognize, fragments of whose speech
I know, and whose repute is such that I can contrive to guess at their
hearts--such as Verdi's "Nabucodonosor" and Gounod's "Reine de
Saba."
Rossini's "Moses" was the last of the Italian operas (the last by a
significant composer, at least) which used to be composed to ease the
Lenten conscience in pleasure-loving Italy. Though written to be
played with the adjuncts of scenery and costumes, it has less of action
than might easily be infused into a performance of Mendelssohn's
"Elijah," and the epical element which finds its exposition in the
choruses is far greater than that in any opera of its time with which I am
acquainted. In both its aspects, as oratorio and as opera, it harks back to
a time when the two forms were essentially the same save in respect of
subject matter. It is a convenient working hypothesis to take the classic
tragedy of Hellas as the progenitor of the opera. It can also be taken as
the prototype of the Festival of the Ass, which was celebrated as long
ago as the twelfth century in France; of the miracle plays which were
performed in England at the same time; the Commedia spiritiuale of
thirteenth-century Italy and the Geistliche Schauspiele of
fourteenth-century Germany. These mummeries with their admixture of
church song, pointed the way as media of edification to the dramatic
representations of Biblical scenes which Saint Philip Neri used to
attract audiences to hear his sermons in the Church of St. Mary in
Vallicella, in Rome, and the sacred musical dramas came to be called
oratorios. While the camerata were seeking to revive the classic drama
in Florence, Carissimi was experimenting with sacred material in Rome,
and his epoch-making allegory, "La Rappresentazione dell' Anima e del
Corpo," was brought out, almost simultaneously with Peri's "Euridice,"
in 1600. Putting off the fetters of plainsong, music became beautiful for

its own sake, and as an agent of dramatic expression. His excursions
into Biblical story were followed for a century or more by the authors
of sacra azione, written to take the place of secular operas in Lent. The
stories of Jephtha and his daughter, Hezekiah, Belshazzar, Abraham
and Isaac, Jonah, Job, the Judgment of Solomon, and the Last
Judgment became the staple of opera composers in Italy and Germany
for more than a century. Alessandro Scarlatti, whose name looms large
in the history of opera, also composed oratorios; and Mr. E. J. Dent, his
biographer, has pointed out that "except that the operas are in three acts
and the oratorios in two, the only difference is in the absence of
professedly comic characters and of the formal statement in which the
author protests that the words fata, dio, dieta, etc., are only scherzi
poetici and imply nothing contrary to the Catholic faith." Zeno and
Metastasio wrote texts for sacred operas as well as profane, with Tobias,
Absalom, Joseph, David, Daniel, and Sisera as subjects.
Presently I shall attempt a discussion of the gigantic attempt made by
Rubinstein to enrich the stage with an art-form to which he gave a
distinctive name, but which was little else than, an inflated type of the
old sacra azione, employing the larger apparatus which modern
invention and enterprise have placed at the command of the playwright,
stage manager, and composer. I am compelled to see in his project
chiefly a jealous ambition to rival the great and triumphant
accomplishment of Richard Wagner, but it is possible that he had a
prescient eye on a coming time. The desire to combine pictures with
oratorio has survived the practice which prevailed down to the
beginning of the nineteenth century. Handel used scenes and costumes
when he produced his "Esther," as well as his "Acis and Galatea," in
London. Dittersdorf has left for us a description of the stage
decorations prepared for his oratorios when they were performed in the
palace of the Bishop of Groswardein. Of late years there have been a
number of theatrical representations of Mendelssohn's "Elijah." I have
witnessed as well as heard a performance of "Acis and Galatea" and
been entertained with the spectacle of Polyphemus crushing the head of
presumptuous Acis with a stave like another Fafner while singing "Fly,
thou massy ruin, fly" to the bludgeon which was playing understudy for
the fatal rock.

This diverting incident brings me to a consideration of one of the
difficulties which stand in the way of effective stage pictures combined
with action in the case of some of the most admired of the subjects for
oratorios or sacred