REFLECTIONS ON MUSIC AND OPERA
17
size, that the stage be a space in which only the grand entrance and
the grand gesture are appropriate.
•
If
the librettist is a practicing poet, the most difficult problem,
the place where he is most likely to go astray, is the composition of
the verse. Poetry is in its essence an act of reflection, of refusing to
be
content with the interjections of immediate emotion in order to
understand the nature of what is felt. Since music is in essence
immediate, it follows that the words of a song cannot be poetry.
Here one should draw a distinction between lyric and song proper. A
lyric is a poem intended to be chanted. In a chant the music is
subordinate to the words which limit the range and tempo of the
notes. In song, the notes must be free to be whatever they choose
and the words must be able to do what they are told.
Much as I admire Hofmannsthal's libretto for
Rosenkavalier,
it
is, I think, too near real poetry. The Marschallin's monologue in Act
I, for instance, is so full of interesting detail that the voice line is
hampered in trying to follow everything. The verses of
Ah non
credea
in
La Somnambula
on the other hand, though of little in–
terest to read, do exactly what they should, suggest to Bellini one of
the most beautiful melodies ever written and then leave him com–
pletely free to write it. The verses which the librettist writes are not
addressed to the public but are really a private letter to the composer.
They have their moment of glory, the moment in which they sug–
gest to him a certain melody: once that is over, they are as expend–
able as infantry to a Chinese general: they must efface themselves
and cease to care what happens to them.
•
There have been several composers, Campion, Hugo Wolf, Ben–
jamin Britten, for example, whose musical imagination has been
stimulated by poetry of a high order. The question remains, however,
whether the listener hears the sung words as words in a poem, or, as I
am inclined to believe, only as sung syllables. A Cambridge psychol–
ogist, P. E. Vernon, once performed the experiment of having a
Campion song sung with nonsense verses of equivalent syllabic value
substituted for the original; only six per cent of his test audience
noticed that something was wrong.
It
is precisely because I believe
