14
PARTISAN REVIEW
fine lady, instead of confessing them to himself, glorying in them, and
uttering them without motley as the universal inheritance.
-BERNARD SHAW
Shaw, and Beethoven, are both wrong, I believe, and Mozart
right. Feelings of joy, tenderness and nobility are not confined to
'noble' characters but are experienced by everybody, by the most
conventional, most stupid, most depraved. It is one of the glories of
opera that it can demonstrate this and to the shame of the spoken
drama that it cannot. Because we use language in everyday life, our
style and vocabulary become identified with our social character as
others see us, and in a play, even a verse play, there are narrow limits
to the range in speech possible for any character beyond which the
playwright cannot go without making the character incredible. But
precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be
out ot place but not out of character; it is just as credible that a
stupid person should sing beautifully
as
that a clever person should do
so.
•
If
music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular
is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we
not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost
to ourselves. Opera, therefore, cannot present character in the
novelist's sense of the word, namely, people who are potentially good
and
bad, active
and
passive, for music is immediate actuality and
neither potentiality nor passivity can live in its presence. This is
something a librettist must never forget. Mozart is a greater composer
than Rossini but the Figaro of the
Marriage
is less satisfying, to my
mind, than the Figaro of the Barber and the fault, is, I think, Da
Ponte's. His Figaro is too interesting a character to be completely
translatable into music, so that co-present with the Figaro who
is
singing one is conscious of a Figaro who is not singing but thinking
to himself. The barber of Seville, on the other hand, who is not a
person but a musical busybody, goes into song exactly, with nothing
over.
Again, I find
La Boheme
inferior to
Tasca,
not because its music
is inferior, but because the characters, Mimi in particular, are too
passive; there is an awkward gap between the resolution with which
they sing and the irresolution with which they act.
