REFLECTIONS ON MUSIC AND OPERA
15
The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g. Don
Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Briinnhilde, is that each of
them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they
would all be bores, even Don,Giovanni.
In recompense for this lack of psychological complexity, how–
ever, music can do what words cannot, present the immediate and
simultaneous relation of these states to each other. The crowning
glory of opera is the big ensemble.
•
The chorus can play two roles in opera and two only, that of the
mob and that of the faithful, sorrowing or rejoicing community. A
little of that goes a long way. Opera is not oratorio.
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Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend
'when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman
when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid
when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed
young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if
I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in
something very different. All good drama has two movements, first
the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.
In composing his plot, the librettist has to conform to this law
but, in comparison to the dramatist, he is more limited in the kinds
of mistakes he can use. The dramatist, for instance, procures some of
his finest effects from showing how people deceive themselves. Self–
deception is impossible in oper.a because music is immediate not
reflective; whatever is sung is the case. At most self-deception can be
suggested by having the orchestral accompaniment at variance with
the singer, e.g. the jolly tripping notes which accompany Germont's
approach to Violetta's death-bed in
La Traviata,
but unless employed
very sparingly such devices cause confusion rather than insight.
Again, while in the spoken drama the discovery of the mistake
can be a slow process and often, indeed, the more gradual it is the
greater the dramatic interest, in a libretto the drama of recognition
must be tropically abrupt, for music cannot exist in an atmosphere
of uncertainty; song cannot walk, it can only jump.
On the other hand, the librettist need never bother his head,
