NOTES

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 34, 30 August 1923, Page 30

NOTES

Grand Opera

It has been announced that next year we are to have a visit from a real Italian Grand Opera company in which there are to •be luminaries of magnitudes hitherto unknown in our musical firmament, in conjunction if not singly. Melba, now of course no longer in her prime, will be an attraction to the curious if not to the lovers of song, and with her are coming singers go leor from La Scala and the San Carlo, not to say Covent Garden and L’Opera. For not a few people it will be a delight only too rare to hear once again the great masterpieces of Verdi and Puccini, even if we are .not accorded, or deemed worthy of, Wagner. Tosca, La Boheme, Madame Butterfly, II Trovatore, with their haunting music and their lovely songs, always leave an impression that acts as an elevating influence on one’s taste. And wreaths of melody from “Vissi d’arte,”or from “Un Eel Di” remain in one’s dreams through all the long months that in these distant climes intervene between one such performance and the next.

The Origins of Grand Opera

Historians of music generally tell us that the birth of Opera took place in Florence at the close of the sixteenth century; but there had been a short-lived operatic movement in England some fifty years earlier. Fewpeople who see "A Midsummer Night's Dream" realise that the play of "Pyramus and Thisbe" is a parody of English opera. It was a parody of the musical plays acted by the children of the Chapels Royal. Recite lines from "Tristan and Isolde" without their music, and they will be hardly less ridiculous than those of "Pyramus and Thisbe." What is too silly to be spoken may become sound sense, when it is sung; alliteration and repetition, set to music, may have a real emotional value. Few songs from the Elizabethan chorister plays have survived; but they are genuinely beautiful and expressive. What makes them important in the history of opera is that they were not mere incidental music, but part of the drama, just as indispensable to it as Isolde's "Liebestod." Why they did not lead to further developments at a period when both drama and music were at the height of their achievement in England is not known; the most probable reason is to be found in the jealousy of the v professional actors' towards the amateurs. . ; The early history of opera in England is largely a history of amateur effort. After the disappearance of the chorister plays the next stet) in the direction of opera was made by the Court masques. The masque was from its earliest origins an amateur entertainment. It called in the professional aid of architects and decorators, as well as of musicians and actors, but only in a subordinate capacity v The central interest of the masques lay always in the noble amateurs who danced the principal dances. There were other masques, too, which were

performed entirely by amateurs; and the first musicians who wrote music for masques were not the famous writers of anthems and madrigals, but experimenters, who sometimes took a hand in the acting or the scenepainting as well. It was the comic element, the antimasque, that was professional; and as the reign of Charles I. progresses we can watch the masque becoming more and more professional, more and more a succession of comic episodes, until it degenerates into a sort of revue. Our Patron People who think that Catholic journalists ought imitate St. Francis de Sales only in his meekness take a very one-sided view of the matter. St Francis knew that his Master could wield the lash in a manner which milk-and-water writers would (when it suited them) call personal and vituperative. The . straight-from-the-shoulder words, "You brood of vipers," "you whited sepulchres," "full of dead men's bones and rottenness," were, . like all the words the Saviour spake, for our example in time of need. And when occasion required, the Saint could hit hard and straight, as even Chesterton and other people whom their enemies reproach for being personal because they are direct, and vituperative because they are honest. *We are encouraged by the Pope to imitate the polished style, the absence of triviality, the patience, the sanity, the humility, the charity, the zeal of our new Patron. No man has been oftenerattacked for being personal and vituperative than Chesterton, except it be his friend Belloc. It is a habit of Protestant writers to fall back on calling plain speech, such as we find in the Gospel, personal and vituperative. What attacks were made on Louis Veuillot by milk-and-water Catholics of his age who used to write and say that his paper was doing great harm to the Church. Not, therefore, in his meekness alone, but in his manliness, in his consistency, his saneness, and his charity let us follow the Saint. W. H. Mallock To a friend who asked us recently if W. 11. Mallock died a Catholic we commend the following note from America-. William Hurrell Mallock has died within the Catholic Church. Those who remember the intellectual storm created by his book, Is Life Worth Living? will not be surprised to hear that he finally took, like Mr. Chesterton, the long-expected and logical step. Shortly before his death he was conditionally baptised at Downside Abbey. His sister preceded him into the Church almost half a century ago. Rejoicing at his entrance into the Fold the Toronto Catholic Register quotes Mallock's contrast between Protestantism, which comes to us with testimonials whose genuineness it cannot prove, and Catholicism, which he thus describes: "The Catholic Church comes to us in exactly the opposite way. She, too, brings with her the very same testimonials (the Scriptures), but she knows the uncertainty that obscures all remote evidences, and so at first does not lay much stress upon them. First she asks us to make some acquaintance with herself, to look into her eyes, to hear the words of her lips, to watch her ways and works, and to feel her inner spirit, and then she says to us: 'Can you trust me? If you can, trust me all in all. For the very thing I declare to you that I have never lied. Can you trust me thus*far? Then listen and I will tell you my story. You have heard it told one way I know and that way often goes against me. When you know me as lam you will give me the benefit of every doubt.' It is thus the Catholic Church presents the Bible to us. Believe the Bible for my sake, she —not me for the Bible's. And the book as thus offered us changes its whole character. We have not the formal testimony of a stranger; we have instead the memoranda of a friend.

<X*> . _ We call created things God's footprints, since they are made by Him and guide us to Himself.—St. Gregory the Great. -'*."-'. • ,