Praise the Lord with harp: sing unto him with the psaltery and an instrument of ten strings. Sing unto Him a new song: play skilfully with a loud noise.
Psalmsxxxiii. 2, 3.
England, where, as Mr. Gilbert was good enough to tell us in "Iolanthe," every child is born either a Liberal or a Conservative, leans both ways within the comfortable domain of oratorio. Chorus answers unto chorus and fugues pursue the even tenor (or bass, as the case may be) of their way, as they did in the brave days of old, when the Saxon sputtered in the Haymarket and threatened to pitch recalcitrant prima donnas out of windows. The festival of the three choirs preserves for the edification of a prosaic and stiffnecked generation the majestic sonorities of Handel and the subtle intimacies of the introspective Bach.
The prancing of Elgar into this peaceful world with his pocket full of leading motives, with a dramatization of the very throne of the Invisible, and a suggestion of the Mary Magdalen of Wagner, neither astonishes nor stirs the critics. Theharsh yell of the shofar disturbs them no more than the profound rumble of the contrabassoon. And since Mendelssohn left his "Elijah" ceaselessly clamoring for the costumes, the action, and the footlights of the stage, no Englishman is to be set staring by the projection of a sacred drama upon his field of vision.
After all, it was only in the day of Handel that the Bishop of London decided for us that oratorios should no more be acted. How do we know that, if things continue to go forward along the present lines, we shall not have a later bishop determining that the oratorio ought to be acted and thereby excluded from the hallowed precincts of famous cathedral towns? Then the censorious throng which has looked askance upon the New World performances of "Parsifal" would find that panorama of a young pilgrim's progress as innocuous as one of the "Four Serious Songs" of Brahms.
To those who watch with some solicitude the march of musical progress, it looks as if we were in the midst of a transition in the world of oratorio. A very peaceful transition, indeed, it is; for we are no longer to be excited by a comparison of Handel with other masters. We care not a pinch of snuff whether Coleridge-Taylor be a genius or not. We go once a year to hear "TheMessiah," and occasionally we remember with a sort of mild surprise that Handel also wrote "Israel in Egypt." When Mr. Elgar comes along with his revolutionary notions, compounded of Carissimi, Handel, Mendelssohn, and Wagner, we view them with a placidity which would be amusing were it not so stupid. The times have changed, indeed, since Gray wrote to Swift, on Feb. 23, 1723:—
"As for the reigning amusement of the town, it is entirely music; real fiddles, bass viols and hautboys; not poetical harps, lyres and reeds. There's nobody allowed to say 'I sing' but an eunuch or an Italian woman. Everybody is grown now as great a judge of music as they were in your time of poetry, and folks that could not distinguish one tune from another now daily dispute about the different styles of Handel, Bononcini and Attilio. People have forgot Homer and Virgil and Cæsar; or at least, they have lost their ranks. For in London and Westminster, in all polite conversations, Senesino is daily voted to be the greatest man that ever lived."
"As for the reigning amusement of the town, it is entirely music; real fiddles, bass viols and hautboys; not poetical harps, lyres and reeds. There's nobody allowed to say 'I sing' but an eunuch or an Italian woman. Everybody is grown now as great a judge of music as they were in your time of poetry, and folks that could not distinguish one tune from another now daily dispute about the different styles of Handel, Bononcini and Attilio. People have forgot Homer and Virgil and Cæsar; or at least, they have lost their ranks. For in London and Westminster, in all polite conversations, Senesino is daily voted to be the greatest man that ever lived."
True, this pother was all anent opera, which even to this day evokes a considerable gush of invalid comment about glorified tenors and sopranos. At least the men of the opera to-day are actually masculine, but there is an echo of the Handelian period in the adoration of tenors.But that, as the pleasant Mr. Kipling was wont to say in his pleasantest tales, is another story. It was but a flight of years till London town cackled as busily about Handel's oratorios as it had about his operas. A private letter from London, printed in Faulkner's Journal (Dublin) of March 12, 1743, said:—
"Our friend, Mr. Handel, is very well, and things have taken quite a different turn here from what they did some time past; for the publick will no longer be imposed on by Italian singers and wrong-headed undertakers of bad operas, but find out the merit of Mr. Handel's compositions and English performances. The new oratorio (called Samson) which he composed since he left Ireland, has been performed four times to more crowded audiences than ever were seen; more people being turned away for want of room each night than hath been at the Italian opera."
"Our friend, Mr. Handel, is very well, and things have taken quite a different turn here from what they did some time past; for the publick will no longer be imposed on by Italian singers and wrong-headed undertakers of bad operas, but find out the merit of Mr. Handel's compositions and English performances. The new oratorio (called Samson) which he composed since he left Ireland, has been performed four times to more crowded audiences than ever were seen; more people being turned away for want of room each night than hath been at the Italian opera."
Nevertheless, even in those days there was little enough distinction between the styles of the opera and the oratorio, and not many years before Handel's day there had been none at all. Both opera and oratorio sprang from the same soil and were nurtured by the same fount, the drama of Greece. Cavaliere's "Anima e Corpo" was a delectable theatrical performance, prepared under the direction of a very good man, St. Philip Neri, with the laudable aim of drawingyoung persons away from the vulgar secular shows of Rome in the dawn of the seventeenth century. Like "Die Zauberflöte" this oratorio ended with a chorus, "to be sung, accompanied sedately and reverentially by the dance." How deep was the reverence and how reposeful the sedateness may be gathered from the fact that the ballet was "enlivened with capers orentrechats."
A religious drama it was, this early oratorio, and it battled its way into popularity by the mighty power of music. Its arch-enemy was the old mystery and miracle play, which made of every religious story something more lively than even an oratorio with a ballet enriched with capers. To combat the attractiveness of the popular religious play the oratorio had to cling to the stage, the costume, and the footlights, and it would have been little stranger to read in the time of Carissimi (1582-1672) than it was, in the century before his birth, the famous Coventry bill of expenses, which contains these items.
But Carissimi, and still more directly after him Stradella, advanced the oratorio toward a style in which acting was to become incongruous. Stradellahad the Handelian feeling for mass effects. He perceived the true use of the great chorus, and he piled up majestic climaxes with a skill marvellous for his time. He died four years before Handel was born, but he had already carved out that definiteness of structure which is so salient a feature of Handel's works. The drift away from the dramatic character had already begun. Indeed, Dr. Parry in his admirable "Evolution of the Art of Music" expresses doubt that even the works of Carissimi can have been intended for action. Still, we must not forget that whether oratorio should or should not be acted remained an unsettled question till the decision of the good Dr. Gibson, Bishop of London, in Handel's day.
However, a comprehensive view of the works of Handel and Bach shows that the oratorio had in their time been clearly differentiated in style and purpose from the opera. Bach's employment of the tenor narrator places his Passions on a ground far removed from the pictorial presentation of the stage. We know, too, that Bach wrote for church performance. Handel's oratorios designed for the concert platform were quite as far away as Bach's from the manner of the theatre, though they departed in a different direction.
Dear old Papa Haydn, who wept with emotion when he heard the Hallelujah chorus and exclaimed, "He is the master of us all," was even less dramatic than either Handel or Bach, for although they used no dramatic forms, they had their mighty outbursts of emotional expression; while their declamation, as well as their massive climaxes, often rises far above the trumpery effects of the opera of their period.
But Haydn was a most gentle spirit. He was too full of the fluid of humility and too much given to amiable reflection to approach dramatic effects. His music in both the "Creation" and "The Seasons" is descriptive, commentary, and speculative. It is delightful and it is exceedingly mild. It dwells comfortably in a peaceful atmosphere very remote from that of the nervous theatricalism of Carissimi or the impulsive eloquence of Stradella. It is just as far, too, from the poignant intensity of the psychic personification found in Bach's music. Bach's Christ is the living Son of God, but always in the heavens. It is a Christ of the inmost soul, not of the imaginative eye. It is a Christ of the heart, and has no pictorial form.
But Haydn sets a world before us, and lets us hear the rushing of the waters and the sighing of the winds. It was reserved for a thoroughlycultivated master to unify in his work the elements found in all these predecessors. Mendelssohn, without letting go of the Protestant chorale, which was so potent in the Bach Passion, or the massed chorus which Handel learned from Stradella how to use, or the orchestral description of Haydn, or the flexible recitative of Carissimi, succeeded in producing a new form of purely dramatic oratorio. His "Elijah" flashed forth as a religious opera. It might be put on the stage and acted. It stands almost perfectly adapted to such use, and would certainly prove far more influential in the theatre than "Anima e Corpo" did even in its own day. Mendelssohn was not a mighty genius, but he was a most clever adapter.
Since his day oratorio has wavered between the Italian dramatic form of the earliest period and a modernization of the Bach form. English composers have over and over again written for their festivals on the lines of Handel or Mendelssohn, seemingly without a clear discernment of the inner characteristics which differentiated the two. Continental composers have made all sorts of experiments. Gounod even tried in his "Redemption" to show how the melodic style of "Faust" could be superimposed on the ground plan of Bach. It is needlessto say that the scheme met with a cheering failure. Oil and water would not mix.
Edgar Tinel, whose "St. Franciscus" was produced in Brussels in 1888, was the first to make a deliberate attempt to return to the earliest dramatic form of the Italians. He certainly did not contemplate a stage performance, but he wrote in the fashion of the lyric drama of his time. He used the whole apparatus of the German opera except the leading motive. But Tinel failed in one important particular. He was unable to use the means of the opera without making it produce the speech of the theatre. His oratorio smells of the stage. It is a religious drama only because its story is in a measure religious. The music and much of the thought are, to say the least, secular. It may not be going too far to say that sometimes they are profane.
Now, what has Edward Elgar accomplished, and what does the character of his work indicate as the present tendency of oratorio? In his musical method he has striven to demonstrate that Bach and Wagner were of one blood. And, indeed, who that has heard the twining polyphony of five themes near the end of the "Meistersinger" prelude ever doubted that both of these masters sprang from the loins of Palestrina,the son of the house of Ockeghem? Elgar has preserved for the necessity of oratorio the narrator, though he has diversified his recitation by dividing it among the voices.
This preservation of the narrator is the one characteristic of the contemporaneous oratorio form which proclaims to the world that the mandate of the Bishop of London is still in force. Nothing else in the score would disclose this fact. Everything is constructed on dramatic lines; everything is conceived in the mood of Mendelssohn's "Elijah." The tremendous picture of the entrance of the soul of Gerontius into the shrine of the Invisible and the descriptive speech of Mary Magdalen on her tower, accompanied by the sounds of the orgy, demand most eloquently the accompaniment of pictorial scenes. And these are but two examples taken at random from scores prolific in similar instances.
The distribution of the narrative among several voices is the method of Handel, but in the treatment of the choruses Elgar has learned still more from that master. Here we have lessons accepted from both Bach and the Saxon, and in the dawn of the twentieth century we find a product of the skill of Stradella in handling huge masses of tone.
In the employment of one set of choruses representative of actors in the story and another of purely commentary nature, Elgar has followed Bach's method in "The Passion." He has honored aged custom in allotting the words of Jesus to a bass voice. The treatment of the post-ascension speeches of the Saviour as choral, or many-voiced, is as old as Heinrich Schütz.
Furthermore, Mr. Elgar has preserved the ecclesiastic character in his music by adhering to the use of the polyphonic devices which were created by church composers and which have sternly resisted the efforts of the ablest masters, even of Verdi, to lend themselves to the restless utterance of the music drama. Elgar's polyphony is by no means stencilled in form; his fugues are not fugues of the North German pattern. He handles single and double counterpoint with consummate ease and with the assured freedom of one who dares to depart from the beaten path without fear of disaster.
Added to this is the employment of a harmonic style which belongs entirely to the present day. Mr. Elgar's polyphony is built on a harmonic basis which almost completely ignores the ecclesiastic tonalities of the earlier church writers and utilizes the diatonic and chromaticscheme of the present, the method of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde." It is as far from Handel as it is from Mendelssohn. Its source is without question the inexhaustible fount of musical learning, the music of Sebastian Bach, but it is Bach studied by the lamp of Brahms and recited with the tongue of Wagner.
Brahms was himself a filter of Bach, and this might seem to indicate that the Sebastianism of Elgar was exceeding thin. But the English writer, while considering the work of the composer of the "German Requiem," has accepted suggestions from it only as to manner. For the original matter he has gone back to the real master of all masters. In his recitatives he again has shown a profound understanding of the psychologic nature of Bach's declamation. Upon it, as a foundation, he has reared a style of his own, very flexible, full of variety and as changeful in its harmonic undercurrents as a sunset sky.
To these derivations from the art of Bach and others Elgar has added much of the material of to-day's music. In the first place, he has permitted the diatonic major mode to occupy its own proud place as the chief medium for the expression of the optimistic emotions. Bach seldom tarried loner in major keys. He waslingering under the influence of the ecclesiastic modes. Elgar has emancipated his oratorio music from the domination of these modes, but he has not, like Handel and Mendelssohn—the one governed by the Omphalic distaff of Italian opera and the other writing in an age when the minor was always relative—neglected their significance entirely.
Secondly, he has utilized the whole splendor of the modern orchestra and has extended it in every direction which seemed to him necessary. He has employed gongs, both great and small; cymbals ancient and modern, bells with and without keyboard mechanism, tambourine and triangle. Of course, he has written elaborately for the organ; he would not be a loyal son of the royal house of Bach if he had not.
Thirdly, he has gone over, horse, foot, and baggage, to the Wagnerian camp and armed himself from head to foot with leading motives. In "The Apostles" there are ninety-two of them—just two more than Hans von Wolzogen found in the whole of "Der Ring des Nibelungen." The result is that there is almost no free composition in the score; it is all woven out of the motives. The web thus woven is sometimes thick, sometimes thin. Motives steal upon us singly or crowd before us four at a time,writhing in a counterpoint, sometimes forming most beautiful orchestral cloud shapes and again smearing garish shades and monstrous outlines across the musical firmament. Elgar never shrinks from outlandish combinations. He is as daring as Strauss. He makes fearful ugliness when he wishes to do so. But he does everything with a delineative purpose. He is the Wagnerite of oratorio.
To Wagner's ingenious scheme of interweaving and developing leading motives Elgar has joined the ground plan of polyphonic choral writing which was the secret of the influence of Bach and Handel, but Elgar has a palette with a thousand tone tints which they never knew. He has all the delicate inner tracery of modern harmonization to throw additional lights and shades upon his colors.
In a word, Elgar has brought together in his oratorios all the expressional power of modern musical romanticism, whether found in the descriptive tone pictures of the instrumentalists, the declamation of the dramatists, or the orchestration of the contemporaneous opera. What is the result? We have now oratorio quite as dramatic as Tinel's, but saved from mere theatricalism by the artistic discretion of the composer.
But the thing itself is anomalous. As we have noted, the narrator becomes an imperative necessity, because oratorio now demands scenic representation, and that is forbidden. How much more imposing would "The Apostles" be if we would frankly go back to the way of Cavaliere and put it on the stage! Why enact "Parsifal" and not this? Which is the truer tale, the more convincing art? This "Apostles" reads like that question-begging version of "Parsifal" as a narrative poem in which all the stage directions are turned into descriptive verse. Set those descriptions to music and have them recited by singers in evening dress and you have your "Parsifal" in correct oratorio form.
Are we afraid of it? Or is it simply that certain good people to whom the theatre is a place accursed must have their dramatic excitements in some other form? Let us, if you will, go to a dimly lighted concert hall and sit with our heads bent over our scores while ladies and gentlemen, gloved and in evening dress, narrate and chant to us a tremendous drama, helped out by all the resources of modern delineative music, and we try to see the action with our mind's eye. Thus shall we salve our consciences and perform the tragedy of the Passionwithin the four walls of our skulls. This may perchance insure to us that salvation which might be endangered were we fearlessly to countenance an actual presentation of the drama on the stage.
The oratorio of to-day tends steadily toward the completion of a cycle. It started from the primitive religious play of Cavaliere, and through the development of the method of choral composition reached a point at which all conception of action disappeared. From that point it has been slowly and surely moving around to the restoration of the dramatic element, till now it stands once more at the very threshold of the theatre. In its present form it is an absurdity. Even the singers find it almost impossible to sing the oratorios of the new sort without putting at least facial expression into their work, and every one of them looks solemnly conscious of the foolishness of evening dress. Mr. Elgar's interpretation makes Judas Iscariot altogether too realistic for a white waistcoat, and his Mary Magdalen in a Princess gown with kid-gloved arms is a portrait which would make Henner gasp and Ruskin stare.