# The Spirit of French Music/Chapter 1

CHAPTER I
GRÉTRY
HIS LIFE, WORK, AND IDEAS
If it be true, as people are fond of saying, that Comic Opera is of all musical forms the form most distinctively French, then there has never been a more French composer than Grétry. Grétry is the king, the god of comic opera.
His greatest rival is Monsigny. And Monsigny undoubtedly has sweet and tender touches that are peculiar to himself. But Grétry has more life and strength.
Of all his works Richard Coeur de Lion is the only one that is still performed, so that the acquaintance of Grétry can only be made nowadays by reading. Even for that one must go to a library, unless one happens to be a Croesus possessing the wherewithal to acquire the magnificent edition of his works produced by the illustrious Gevaěrt under the auspices of the Belgian government. The piano editions published about fifty years ago by Michaělis are exhausted, and one hardly ever comes across them. I have been told that shortly before the war the enemy publisher Breitkopf bought the plates. There remains ​then this great Belgian edition which provides keen pleasure for the music lover. There is the orchestral partition, followed page by page by the piano score, a text of which the accuracy and value are guaranteed by the mere name of Gevaërt; there are full notices by Fétis and V. Wilder,—all these are to be found in this monument of learning and taste. I have spent many hours with them. I have read Grétry’s literary works, those three volumes of Essays and Memoirs, so delicate, charming and diversified; also the excellent work devoted to the master by Michel Brenet, which gives us, besides learned analyses of all his operas, a biography adorned with pleasant documents. My studies and the reading of these works have made me an enthusiastic admirer of the composer of Richard. My aim will be to outline, if only sketchily, some features of his genius and his art. They were adored by our fathers, and deserve to be so by ourselves. Time may have taken off the freshness of some of Grétry’s productions, but, if we consider their general effect, it has in no degree tarnished their first brilliancy. They will appear younger and more full of savour than ever when restored to the theatre
I
André Ernest Modeste Grétry was born at Liège on the 11th February, 1741. His grandparents, Jean Noé Grétry and Dieudonnée Campinado had married against the wishes of their families, who had punished them by leaving them to themselves; from this had resulted a certain loss of social standing which the happy couple endured with cheerfulness. They had set up as innkeepers at Blegny, a hamlet near Liège, ​and on Sundays Jean Noé used to set the peasants dancing to the sound of his fiddle. No sooner was his son François able to hold a bow, than he began to help his father; the little fellow was so talented that at twelve years old he gained by competition the place of first violin in the church of St. Martin at Liège. He was soon to become the most eminent violinist in the town. He too made a marriage of affection, but more lucky than his father, he forced the consent of his future wife’s parents, though they considered his position too humble or too uncertain. This was the father of the great Grétry. Here then we see at least one family in which the famous law of hereditary progress is faithfully observed. The village fiddler begets the leading violin, and the latter gives the world the composer of operas.
André’s early infancy was passed chiefly in the country with his grand-parents. I like to imagine that old Jean Noé was still playing dances, and to find in the memory of these village Sundays the source of inspiration at once so gracious and so lively, so sturdy and so elegant, so rustic and so dainty, with which the musician of Colinette and of Richard was to depict and animate the gaiety of peasants making holiday.
It was a great grief to the child to leave Blegny when his father put him in the choir of the collegiate church of St. Denis. There his existence was divided between the duties of choir boy, and music lessons, which he received with his comrades from a very rough master. He left St. Denis at the age of twelve, and next received private tuition from a musician named Leclerc, whose gentleness and kindness he praises in his Memoirs. The desire to compose was born ​in him, and he was considerably excited by the representations of an Italian troupe who were touring the large towns with the opéra bouffes of Pergolesi and Galuppi. This troupe spent a year at Liège, and Francois Grétry got the boy admitted to the orchestra. Coming into touch with Pergolesi’s work was a revelation to him. On hearing the Serva padrona, André (as he writes) nearly “died of pleasure,” and the idea that he too one day might compose operas threw him into ecstasies.
He had a very fine treble voice. Having resumed his place in the choir of the collegiate church, with his musical sense exalted and instructed by the Italians, he made an extraordinary impression as a soloist. The musicians of the orchestra in which his father was first violin, began to play pianissimo the better to hear him. A canon, a great music lover and a rich man, M. de Harlez was filled with enthusiasm and promised the young virtuoso whatsoever material help he might need to develop his talents. But the boy was eager to establish himself as a composer. He wrote, without any knowledge, a motet and a fugue: in his Memoirs he confesses that he had pilfered the ideas from various pieces, but had altered their form and given them new turns to render them unrecognisable. His father thereupon decided that he should study; he placed him at first under the direction of Renekin, organist at the church of St. Pierre, and afterwards under Moreau, organist at St. Paul’s. Renekin, delighted at his pupil’s happy nature, was inclined to guide him with a loose rein. Moreau, a stern master, would have liked to drive him into hard studies of musical science. He greeted coldly the faulty attempts of the little genius, whereas Renekin had revelled in ​them and had played them on his organ. Grétry paid more attention to Renekin than to Moreau. In that he was only following the natural tendency of a period of life which usually prefers facility to discipline when it has the choice. Unfortunately in his case this was not merely a youthful negligence, and in the years that followed he never learnt the necessity of severe studies in his art. At Rome where he spent eight years, we shall find that his school work remained superficial and incomplete; so much so that when he left that town his master Casali recommended him to a colleague at Geneva in these curious terms: “I am sending you one of my pupils, a perfect ass in music, and knowing nothing, but a pleasant young fellow of good character.” “Ass” is more than an exaggeration, and beyond all doubt the man who saw in a Grétry only his weakness in counterpoint reveals himself to us as a pedant. It is none the less true that Grétry had reduced his apprenticeship to too limited a field. Criticism is obliged to take note of this, because of the vast resources of invention and expression of which these gaps in the technical structure deprived a genius marvellously endowed by nature.
Let us not however delude ourselves as to the significance and extent of such gaps in the case of Grétry. We have seen other great musicians possessing more genius than craftsmanship and being more or less seriously hampered thereby in the manifestation and realisation of that same genius. But with them this technical insufficiency was associated (strangely enough) with what one might call an insufficiency of natural musicality, or sense of music. Berlioz for instance. He abounds in eloquent and poetic ​inventions, in great ideas: but he writes badly; his music sounds hard: his “crust” is hollow, hard, tough. That is not the case with Grétry. He is fully and subtly a musician. All that he writes sounds agreeable, his technique is pure: his melody, which is sometimes of the utmost grace and beauty, and which in general recommends itself by a rare justness of accent and expression, is attached to the movements of a bass that is easy, neat and elegant. To what point then does our reproach, or one might far better say regret, apply? To the narrowness, the relative meagreness of his technique, to a certain lack of richness and variety in the harmonies of his lyre. Our pleasure is in no way lessened thereby in places where richer combinations were not needed. But when, not contenting ourselves with the pleasure of so many delicious pieces, and scenes, we step back a little to judge the general effect either of Grétry’s work or of one of his works, we cannot console ourselves for his not having possessed craftmanship to that degree that makes the greatest masters and produces works that are armed at all points against the blows of time. It seems to us that he was meant for such work, that he was born to achieve larger flights, constructions of greater breadth and more sustained. There is a perceptible contrast between the strength, the often masterly completeness of his ideas and the exiguity of the dramatic field in which they are produced and flourish so successfully. We have his efforts in the grand style (Céphale et Procrès, Andromaque, etc) in which superb elements of invention do not attain an effect worthy of themselves, because the style of the mass of the work is not kept up to the same level. We have his conceptions of dramatic music as he has set them out in his ​Memoirs, conceptions in which boldness and even largeness of scope are not what are missing, and in which one feels that some internal force is bubbling up, for abstract reasoning would not have sufficed to form them. Under the form of a dream of the future he describes a thousand enrichments that theatre music might receive from the hand of a great symphonist without changing its nature. Someone has remarked, not without justice, that this dream was indeed a prophecy, to be realised in the person of Mozart. But there is my point—I believe that Grétry, if he had gone through a greater and more complete school, would have been a French Mozart, and the true corollary to Rameau.
II
The young artist’s most ardent desire was to spend some years in Italy. The generosity of his Mæcænas, the canon, and the existence of a Liège college at Rome facilitated the accomplishment of that desire. The college used to give hospitality to eighteen young students and artists, natives of Liège, who had distinguished themselves in the eyes of their fellow-citizens. It was this college that Grétry entered after a journey on foot of which he has left us a pleasant account. His life at Rome, free from pecuniary anxieties and steeped in the torrent of music which flowed unceasingly in the eight theatres and countless churches of the town, must have been very happy. He was a well-conducted lad (as his master of counterpoint testified in the absence of any other recommendation) and moreover a lad of resource. Finding it necessary to do something to replenish his purse, he introduced himself to a nobleman who played the flute and who had made himself notor​ious among the musicians of Rome as being hard to satisfy. This music-lover was in the habit of ordering a flute concerto from every artist who visited him: he was never satisfied with it and always sent the music back to the composer with a few pounds. Our cunning Walloon expressed a desire to hear a prelude played on the instrument by one who was such a master of it. And having fixed in his memory all the flautist’s favourite passages and runs, he put them in the concerto. The nobleman declared his production admirable and took him into his pay, promising him a small annual salary on condition of receiving a flute concerto in every town where he stopped—for he was a great traveller.
The Memoirs of Grétry give us an amusing picture of musical life in Rome at this period, and of the passion of the public for the theatre and for church concerts. What one must not expect to find in the Memoirs is an account of the state of musical art, or a judicial mention of the artists who adorned it in its various branches at that time. Grétry is not writing a chapter of the history of music: he is merely telling us about the works and the masters that have specially attracted him by their affinity with his own personality, and by the direct help and stimulus that he felt he could draw from them for the development of his own nature. Of all the different kinds of music it was theatre music that captivated him at Rome: and in theatre-music it was opéra-bouffe, and among the masters of opéra-bouffe, Pergolesi. Pergolesi was the preponderating influence with Grétry. A study such as this, aiming at the accuracy, but not at the detail, of truth, can afford to neglect the share of the Galuppis, Vincis, Terradellas, in the formation of his art, and the rousing of his genius, and to confine itself to ​the share of Pergolesi alone. The public of his time were quite right in calling him the French Pergolesi. It may be mentioned that he had not waited for his visit to Rome before discovering Pergolesi—he knew of him through the Italian company at Liège—moreover the representation of the Serva padrona at Paris in 1752 had been a revelation to the French. But it was at Rome that Grétry steeped himself in the lessons to be learnt from him.
Admirable lessons certainly. Yet does it not seem extraordinary that these lessons, apart from those of nature, were the only ones that Grétry had ever received? As source and foundation of a musical culture the Serva padrona is a little inadequate. Why did not Grétry go back to the great Italian school that immediately preceded Pergolesi—to the great Scarlatti, the incomparable Stradella—the scope of whose genius is sufficiently attested by the fact that he not only invented the “bouffon” style which Pergolesi has employed divinely in the Serva padrona, but also exercised a real domination over Handel’s mind? But we must think of our artist as an impatient young man, eager to “arrive” and to make the most of the extraordinary facility of dramatic musical expression which he feels fermenting within him. Now for learning dramatic expression, as far as neatness and restraint are concerned, there is nothing better than Pergolesi. We shall find that Grétry loses no time in producing wonderful fruit from the seed thus sown.
The sense which attaches in French (and English) to the words buffoon, buffoonery, might cause a misconception as to the nature of Italian Opéra-bouffe. We have to deal with no extravagant art-form, but ​with a delicate one which wears the garland of gaiety and is also capable of the expression of fine shades. In Pergolesi, Cimarosa, Rossini, and one may add in Mozart, for his masterpieces contain magnificient pages of opéra-bouffe—in all these, then, the great attraction of opéra-bouffe is that it speaks a language at the same time incisive and playful, one which lends itself to accents of emotion and to bubbling laughter, which can pass without shock or break from the light to the tender, from farce to elegance, from a rhythm of strong comic animation to that of tender sighs. It is this variety, this mixture this enchanting lightness which explains Stendhal’s outburst “Opéra-bouffe is the masterpiece of the human mind.” He added that this cheerful music had the power of moving him to melancholy and to tender tears, whereas music of tragical tone left him resentful and cold; it was not that his sensibility to impressions was blunted; on the contrary it was excessive. His impression can be easily understood if connected with the Barber of Seville, the last in date of the masterpieces of opéra-bouffe, and the work of the happiest genius who has handled this form. It appears more natural still if taken in connection with the works of Pergolesi and Cimarosa, which have not the richness and dazzling play of fancy of The Barber, but which have (as I think) more tenderness and sentiment. I would call attention, for instance, to that air in the Servant Mistress, which seems to me to be the masterpiece of that masterpiece—where Pandolphe, brought face to face with the mad folly into which the girl’s coquetry is dragging him, considers her with a mixture of fright, passion and philosophy. What flexibility of tone Coloured in turn with pathos and cheerfulness but ​animated from beginning to end with a movement and rhythm that are unique, smooth, facile, lively and “tuney,” the music reflects every aspect of the subject by which it is inspired, the passion of an old man in love—the pathetic and touching aspect, the laughter-provoking and extravagant aspect. It is absolutely true to life.
III
There you have what charmed Grétry and permeated his spirit. I do not in the least mean to say that this attraction had the effect of making him produce Italian music in Paris. Nothing could be further from the truth. What he received from the Italians he transformed and poured into the mould of the true musical tradition of French comic opera. Now French comic opera had sufficient natural analogy with Italian opéra-bouffe to be subject to its influence; it had indeed already come under its influence before Grétry. In other respects it differed from opéra-bouffe as the temperaments and characters of the two nations differ and it could easily undergo this influence without losing its essential qualities. As Sainte Beuve remarks in his study on Piron, comic opera started from the humblest origins, namely, vaudeville and the theatre of fairs; but in the first half of the eighteenth century, this unimportant style became raised to the dignity of a real branch of music, a real art form. The names of Dauvergne, Duni (of Naples) Favart, Philidor and Monsigny mark the stages of this progress, which attains with Grétry a special degree of expansion. Grétry introduces into comic opera improvements of declamation and diction ​that are due to his study of the Italian masters, an increased abundance of colouring, melody, and musical breadth in which may be detected the soft brilliance of a Roman reflection.
Unfortunately in Grétry’s comic operas there is something besides Grétry’s music. At the same time that this form was receiving from him on the musical side a new influx of richness, on the literary side it was undergoing the influence and the intrusion of the most detestable sentimental fashion. We are dealing with the years that Rousseau dominates with his eloquent imbecilities—years when what passes for the most beautiful quality and the highest praise is “sensibility.” An epidemic of “sensibility” was raging in French society in those days. People gave themselves up to emotional crises and outpourings of heart. They heaved sighs at the mere name of virtue. They believed, and took pleasure in believing that in the matter of morals, sentiments, emotions, joys, and moral maxims, Nature had only just been discovered and realised for the first time. They went into ecstasies on Nature’s bounty. A game like this game of imagination sooner or later gets taken seriously and makes people rather silly. The poets who supplied Grétry were second-rate writers, and consequently more at the mercy of fashion than others; and too often they modelled their plots and their language on this mania.
But Grétry rose far superior to all this rubbish. There was nothing rubbishy about the music to which he set it. For his work he drew his inspiration not from the stuff itself but from the sound and true sentiments of which after all such productions are the caricature, and as it were the comedy. It is very true ​that “Nature” is good in everything, that she claims her part as counsellor and mistress in men’s lives; it is very true that simplicity of character and tastes is a condition of happiness, that we should love virtue, that goodness brings more happiness than wickedness, that mankind knows no joys more sure and enviable than those of affection and friendship—joys unknown to the wicked and the vain. But precisely because these truths are the most natural and most pleasant to realise, and further because it is only given to sincere and delicate hearts to be steeped in them and put them into practice—for these very reasons it is all the more ghastly to make an affectation and indiscreet display of them, to emphasise them and make them a subject of ostentation and vanity. Grétry felt these truths not theatrically or rhetorically or as a matter of “frills,” but as a decent man and a poet, and as such with nobleness and simplicity. He expressed in music their effect on him, fully, sweetly, and smoothly. No better illustration could be given than the famous quartet in his opera Lucile, “Where better should one be than in the bosom of one’s family?” The words are deplorable, enough to disgust one with family life. But the music is frank, broad, natural, reasonably hearty, full of downrightness and geniality. It depicts as they should be depicted the happiness of good folk who experience, glass in hand, the pleasure of affectionate intercourse with no reserve.
In some of Grétry’s successors we find this rubbishy nonsense of false sensibility communicating itself to the music. His music is admirably free from it. But we are left with the spoken part of several of his ​works, which ought to be recast (it would not be difficult) in a great many places, to give them life again.
IV
He left Rome after a stay of eight years. He had become known there by a few productions (the most important is a secular cantata, the Vintage Girls, which I have not been able to discover). Various circumstances drew him to Geneva, where he produced a comic opera Isabella and Gertrude, words by Favart. This had already been set to music by Blaise, but resettings were not objected to in those days. But it was Paris that our ambitious hero was determined to reach. He took advantage of being near Ferney to visit Voltaire, and did not hesitate to ask him for the book of a comic opera. Voltaire promised nothing But he did not lose sight of this young man, who besides having excellent manners showed great self confidence and firmness of mind. When, less than two years later news of the applause which greeted the Huron reached Ferney, he sent the musician who had suddenly become a celebrity two proposals for comic operas “one developed, and entitled The Baron of Otranto, which he had taken from one of his stories, A Prince’s Education; the other, entitled The Two Tuns, merely in outline.” He urged Grétry to preserve the author’s anonymity, begging him to offer these pieces to the Italian company as the work of a young provincial. This charge was so punctually fulfilled that the actors, dissatisfied with the books, but discerning in them traces of real literary aptitude, strongly recommended the author to come up from ​the provinces to Paris and there cultivate his gifts. Voltaire burst out laughing—and was furious. In one of his letters written shortly after this episode we read “Comic opera is nothing but a glorified fair. I know that this form of spectacle is nowadays the nation’s favourite, but I know too how sadly the nation has degenerated. The present century is practically composed of nothing but the refuse of the great age of Louis XIV. This shame is our lot in almost every phase.” This tribute to the age of Louis XIV as so generally superior in everything concerning the arts pleases us immensely. But the great man would have been more equitable if he had called our comic opera a “purified fair.”
It is a great thing for an artist to have the knack of securing the support of influential men of letters. This knack Grétry certainly had. Apart from the impression of superiority which his personality conveyed, nature had endowed him with a good supply of boldness and enterprise. Diderot, Suard, the Abbé Armond, Grimm (all of whom he knew how to flatter intellectually) and the Comte de Creutz the King of Sweden’s minister at Paris, did not wait for his success before shewing their admiration and warmly embracing his cause. His great difficulty was to find a poet and a book of words. Légier, an obscure man of letters, concocted for him a certain “Samnite Marriages” a work which was not accepted for the stage, and failed completely at a private performance at the Prince de Conti’s. The composer accused the performers of having wilfully murdered his work. This mishap would have been enough to estrange for a long time all the operatic poets from such an unlucky collaborator, but for the devotion of the Comte de Creutz, who was ​eager to get things put right for his friend at once, and whose persistence succeeded in getting a poem from Marmontel. This was the Huron, taken from the Ingénu of Voltaire. It is a mediocre work; Voltaire’s wit and imagination have evaporated under the heavy hand of the adapter. But the music triumphed and brought Grétry fame at a stroke. It was felt that a great musician had been born. The first performance of Huron is an important date in the history of French music. A new and fresh musical personality was revealed within the framework of a familiar art-form, the spirit and tradition of which were respected and at the same time given a new lease of life. This mixture, this happy proportioning of tradition and freshness has always been the condition of great successes in the arts.
V
Grétry records how the actor Cailleau of the Italian Comedy, an enthusiastic admirer of the Huron, which the composer had played to him on the harpsichord, foreseeing the opposition of his comrades, carried their votes by a pleasant surprise.
He invited them to dinner, and at dessert started humming in his fine bass voice, the air that afterwards became famous “In what canton is Huronia?”
“Whose is that?” his guests asked, much struck. The piece was accepted.
This air is already in the master’s best manner. We must bracket with it in the Huron that very elegant and frank madrigal, “The reeds no more are straight,” the charming ariette of Mlle, de St. Yves, “If I ever marry,” and lastly a descriptive piece, cur​ious and full of brightness, the account given by brave little Huron of the battle in which his valour decided the issue.
Lucile, played in the following years (1769) brought Grétry’s fame to its highest point. It has to be admitted, unfortunately, that the book (by Marmontel), which must be classified in part as lacrimose sentimentalism, contributed not less to the triumph of the work than did the fine healthy music. Lucile, daughter of the rich nobleman Timante, is about to marry for love a charming man of her own station. But her foster father, the peasant Blaise, is invited to the wedding and comes as a kill-joy. The child whom Timante had entrusted to his wife had died, and in order not to lose her pay as wet nurse, she had substituted her own child. Lucile is Blaise’s daughter, and the old fellow, smitten with remorse, comes and unburdens his conscience of this secret which has been weighing on him for eighteen years. You will guess that he does not, as he had feared, cause any domestic cataclysm: the marriage takes place just the same, and everyone is grateful to him for the opportunity he has given them to shew themselves superior to convention, to follow Nature and congratulate themselves upon doing so.
Blaise’s air, “Oh, wife, what have you done?” is indeed superb, and I have already mentioned the extraordinary success of the quartet “Where better should one be than in the bosom of his family?” It lingered long in memory. When Grétry in his old age appeared at the theatre, the audience used to sing it in his honour. The soldiers of Napoleon sang it during the retreat from Russia. And after the restoration, bands used to play it to welcome the royal family in public places. It can be found, I am told, in old collections of songs, those ​old maidish havens into which sink, when their original fire has somewhat died down, so many operatic and romantic airs that have in their day served for the expression of quite terrestrial sentiments.
I am not concerned to follow Grétry through the whole series of operas composed by him from his first appearances in Paris (1768) to his death which took place in 1813. The enumeration would be far too long, as it would comprise more than fifty pieces, rather more than one for each year; it would include many masterpieces such as Richard Coeur de Lion, Zemire and Azor, The Speaking Picture, False Magic, The Jealous Lover, and amongst works of less uniform and sustained merit, Silvain, Le Magnifique, The Maid of Salency, The Two Misers, The Judgment of Midas, Céphale and Procris, The Cairo Caravan, Colinette at Court, etc., a thousand pieces of admirable and happy growth. A detailed analysis of all these productions, illuminated with subtle and wise criticism, has been given by Michel Brenet, to whose book I would refer the reader. What concerns us more is to characterise in general outline the nature of Grétry’s art and genius.
VI
Grétry himself will help us in this investigation, for his was an enquiring mind, and his study of the philosophers inclines him to reason things out, sometimes to absurd conclusions. He has given us a theory of musical expression which would have a lively interest for us even if it merely explained his own method of invention and composition. But it offers at the same time a more extended interest. We find it throws real light on the meaning, foundations, and what one might call the genesis of music in general.
​According to Grétry, music is an imitative art. He lays this down with the utmost decision. His thesis will certainly be received as the height of paradox by numerous minds who have trained themselves to think that on the contrary, music is not an imitative art and that its place is beside those arts such as architecture or geometry which create or compose forms without natural models. Painting and statuary reproduce before the eyes visible objects. Poetry reproduces human sentiments, objects which are invisible but clearly defined. What objects does music reproduce? What are the models that sound-forms imitate? Our author proceeds to tell us.
Music is the imitation of the spoken word. It is, indeed, the imitation of sentiment, but of sentiment as manifested and incorporated in the spoken word. It imitates sentiment in the inflexions of language and of speech, in which it finds its natural expression. It imitates the natural movement and rhythm of utterance. It imitates them with a heightening effect, adding accent, force, intensity, and a great increase of pathos and feeling. Therein lies its true aim. But it follows them faithfully, models itself on them. Between sung and spoken speech there is the same kind of relation as between the enlargement of a diagram and the diagram itself, or better still, between a drawing picked out with colour and an uncoloured drawing. Song is a higher power of speech, but it is not substantially something other than speech. It is speech raised to its highest degree of expressive power, of penetrating force. One sees of course that Grétry has in view what song ought to be, what it is with musicians who follow truth and nature, not with bad musicians from whom the facility of ​singing without a message is no more withheld than is the power of stringing together meaningless words from bad writers. I do not suppose that he applies these observations to dance music. But the application there is obvious. Dance music imitates the movements and figures of the dance just as sung music does the movements and figures of speech.
From this it results that if music can be called an imitative art, it is not so in the same sense as the other arts that are so denominated. It cannot, as do sculpture, painting and poetry, of itself represent to us the objects that it imitates. These must be present before we can recognise them in musical imitation. We must take note of the words, gestures, or (in dancing) the steps, in order to know exactly what the music that goes with them means. In a word—for music, imitation is not an end. It is a means, a condition, the condition which it must observe in order that its expression may bind itself to the thing’s own expression and reinforce it.
We have only spoken of vocal music and dance music. But there is another branch, pure instrumental music without dance or words, the sonata, chamber music in its various forms, the symphony. How are we to apply to these the theory of imitation?
What object can we say that instrumental music imitates? As far as instrumental music is concerned, are not those critics right to whom musical ideas appear as a sort of creation ex nihilo, absolute inventions, modelled on no given material?
The difficulty does not escape Grétry’s notice. And we see him in the course of his career resolving it in two successive fashions which give rise to reflection but can by no means satisfy us.
​The first solution was to shelve the difficulty, the solution of disdain. Grétry put aside the contradiction which instrumental music seemed to offer to his principles by treating it with contempt. He declared that he saw in it only an inferior and ill-determined form of musical invention, as it were a mere natural noise or wailing, a phantom music, almost a false music. To those who enjoy it he says that they are taking pleasure in the metaphysical (in a bad sense), and the vague emotion received from pure instrumental music appears to him to be the mark of dissolute sensibility.
It must be admitted that at the time he talked like that he knew next to nothing of instrumental music. Lacking the special technical education that it requires, he felt not the slightest inclination to try it himself. His attention was given entirely to theatrical work; he had not paid any to the masterpieces which had already appeared in Italy and France, not in the way of symphonies, which had not then appeared, but in pieces for the harpsichord and the organ. Later when the symphonies of Haydn began to find their way all over Europe, he bowed before those admirable works and generously changed his opinion; he exclaims that it is very wrong to profess not to know what message a fine sonata or a fine symphony has for us. But he invents a kind of conciliation between this late-formed opinion and his opinion of early days. He says that instrumental music when it is beautiful is as it were an unconscious vocal music. It is made for words, it is waiting for them, and it will be well to fit it with words. The symphonist (if he feels a real inspiration, a genuine glow) is inspired by an inherent or latent poem, which it becomes one’s duty ​to dig out and render explicit before the musical work can display all its brilliance, all its meaning. There we have a theory which may rightly be thought rash. The idea of setting words to the instrumental music of the masters is chimerical, and if tried would I think give worse than odd results. But there is in this proposal, singular as it is in itself, an element of reason, a basis of just observation. Grétry sees very clearly that the inspiration of symphonists worthy of the name of creators does not well up or form itself in a vacuum. It is the birth of a sentiment, an emotion, an image, a vision which occupies the musician’s mind, which sets in movement and warms his imagination and acts for him as the interior model which he struggles to reproduce in his musical ideas. This is of course a well known fact in psychology, almost self-evident, and confirmed by what the masters have confided to others of their method of work. The conclusion is clear; instrumental like all other music is imitative. Where it differs from vocal and dance music is that as the object imitated is not in any way explained or presented separately, we do not recognise it. It remains indistinct. The meaning of the music is clearly defined for its composer, but not for us who hear it. As a proof, if we bid five literary men, presumed to be of equal intelligence and sensibility, to depict the sentiments expressed in the symphony in C minor, or any other symphony of Beethoven, we shall get five versions,—not contradictory versions certainly, but quite distinct. Everybody recognises easily whether the state of mind reflected in a piece of music is cheerful or sad, agitated or calm, but that still leaves a wide margin for the indeterminate and vague. Instrumental music is ​vague imitation. In this quality of vagueness Grétry at first found a reason for despising this branch of music, but he came to realise that it was not a valid reason. And we, who know not only Haydn but Mozart and Beethoven as well, know that, as treated by them, instrumental music has produced master. pieces equalling in beauty the purest masterpieces of other arts. We have no doubt on that point. But then, how are we to get rid of the strange difficulty which that certainty raises for us, the downright aesthetic scandal or as a German would say, the shocking antinomy established by the existence of this fact—an artistic form at once capable of the highest beauty and essentially vague? Do not reason, taste, and the example of all the other arts teach us that there can be no beauty except in precision?
The scandal is dispersed, the antinomy resolved, if we remark that side by side with its expressive and pathetic element, instrumental music includes another quite different,—an element which performs a part exactly analogous to that of words in relation to vocal music or the dance in relation to dance music. I refer to the peculiarities of its construction which are subject to laws of a rigour only comparable (by analogy) to those governing the models of classic architecture. If in order to be beautiful, instrumental music demands (as it does) great vitality of inspiration, and powerful lyric force, on the other hand nothing can be less capricious than its developments. The latter run between lines whose curve, determined at the outset by the musician's fancy, cannot afterwards be changed. Once the initial ideas, the generative themes (always simple and short with the classical masters) have been laid down, no others can be introduced. From them ​everything must be taken, from them everything must proceed,—the courses, contours, and ornaments of the musical edifice. In other words, instrumental music is, as regards its form, the offspring of the Fugue. It is the fugue freed from its formal servitude, its scholastic heaviness, but preserving its essential features under this greatly extended variety and liberty. It is the marriage of the fugue with passion. The fact of its being thus subject to the action of strict and rational rules makes up for all the lack of definite ness that it may have from the point of view of expression. While the force of Lyric impulse, of dynamic life which is communicated to it by the heart and blood of the musician touches the heart of the hearer and stirs his blood, the marvellous regularity of its structure contents his intelligence. This more intellectual element, which seems to be a necessary adjunct to music, is represented in other cases by words or by dance figures. Instrumental music contains it in itself, and supplies it or supplements it by the severe laws of arrangement by which it confines itself.
From this one may conclude that compared with other branches of music there is something artificial in its nature, and that its appeal will always be, more or less, to the initiated. But this observation in no way lessens the value of its masterpieces.
If Grétry had lived a little later, and had seen the great modern expansion of the symphony, he would no doubt have enriched his principles with complements and correctives approximating to those which I have ventured to add, which would have made them true of music in general, as they are of vocal music. In their application to the latter they seem to me to ​be admirably subtle, and it is interesting to see how he availed himself of them in practice, and the resources of invention which he found in them.
Music is the imitation of speech. But it could not be so if speech had not already in itself an element of music. In reality music is already latent in speech. "Speech is a sound in which song is locked up." All that is needed is to have a sufficiently fine ear to recognise the song that it contains. Speech, according to the inflexions of the sentiment that it expresses has its intervals, it rests on various points of the chromatic scale, it follows a rhythm. What is required is to give musical precision to all this, to fix and harden these intervals which exist but are not definite, to determine these points, to hold the voice on the most characteristic of them for the required length of time, to bring into prominence this rhythm. Naturally there can only be question of words that express sentiments of a nature to be set to music, sentiment already stamped with a certain lyricism, conveyed on a certain tone. Grétry found this at the Théatre Français, where he attended constantly. He used to note by a series of lines rising, falling or horizontal, the diction of the actors, and by an enlargement of his diagram, with the help of necessary thumb marks, he developed his notes into melody. These were his preliminary studies, his cartoons as it were.
Assuredly this minuteness would have been no use to him if he had not had the spirit of musical invention. But as he did possess that spirit, he found in this method of investigation a wonderful guide. It saved him effort and kept him in close touch with truth and nature. These studies of Grétry on the inflexions of speech are to his melodic inspiration what the light ​wire framework is to the climbing plant. Or one might compare them to the body of a piece of fireworks; it needed his genius to set fire to them, but this fire was magnificently controlled, and not a spark was wasted. Moreover the value of this combination of method and active genius finds its proof in the result—Grétry was the most fertile of French melodists.
VII
It is this melodic abundance which, in the absence of performances on the stage, lends great charm to the continuous reading of Grétry's best works. It is the welling up of a fresh spring, constantly renewed, and widely spread. Music has had more powerful creators, capable it may be granted of striking stronger blows. But there has never been one who conveyed so strongly the impression of unfailing inspiration. I have spoken of his music having breadth—for we are not to suppose that because Grétry was a composer of comic opera (the first of our composers of comic opera) his inspiration moves in a confined sphere. I will not base the claim for breadth on his efforts in musical tragedy, to which he brought, in spite of much elegance and feeling, insufficient strength. But comic opera as he handles it, if it is often the Italian opéra-bouffe adapted to French tastes, is often also Middle Comedy, that is to say, the form which lends itself to the greatest variety of sentiments and tones, the form of which Molière is thinking in his famous comparison of Tragedy and Comedy (Critique de l'Ecole des Femmes)—"When you depict heroes," he makes Dorante say, you have a free hand: they are fancy portraits in which one looks for no points of resemblance, and you have only ​to follow the lines of imagination, letting yourself go and often leaving truth behind in the pursuit of the wonderful. But when you depict men, you must paint from nature; the portraits have to be likenesses and your labour is in vain if your models are unrecognisable."
Grétry has admirably depicted brazen greed in the Two Misers, love-lorn and jealous old age in the Jealous Lover, paternal tenderness and grief in Zémire and Azor, friendship and chivalrous fidelity in Richard, domestic happiness in Lucile, the impulses, cheerfulness and passing moments of despair of young lovers, here and there throughout his works; and in a score of places too we find him an admirable subject-painter, in his scenes of village festivals, in accounts of battles. journeys, storm and shipwreck. I have mentioned Molière I do not say that Grétry was a Molière. But he is at least a Regnard, a very prolific Regnard with great ease of production.
Like all great artists, like all choice spirits, he collected and welded together in his personality the most precious elements of the influences to which he had been subject: influences which would in several respects have been mutually destructive in the case of a second-rate mind. His music has something of Paris, and the Ile de France, something of Rome (I do not mean the Rome of Michel Angelo, but of Pergolesi and the eighteenth century), something also of Liège and the Walloon country. From this last source it draws a simplicity, a sort of solidity of construction, which without preventing it from having much life and spirit, does prevent it from having too much. Consider in the Richard (I prefer to take my examples from a score which is accessible to all) these ​three airs "Tis not the dance I love," "I fear to speak to my love at night," "A bandage o'er the eyes." It is the genius of old French song, with the shade of amorous archness that was in vogue at that period, and a stream of melody that is quite Italian. This fusion of qualities is found again in some of the more masculine airs. Blondel's drinking song, "Sultan Saladin," with the calm strength of its rhythm, the expansive frankness of its refrain, its perfection of line, is certainly one of the happiest and daintiest morsels in the whole of music. It is enough to compare with these pieces those of a loftier tone: "O Richard, O my king." "Though the whole universe should me forget," to have proof of the variety to which I drew attention as the reason for placing Grétry in so high a rank. I refrain from bringing up all the witnesses with which scores unknown to the public and not easily accessible would provide me. My aim is to give a general impression, to stimulate curiosity.
Grétry's facility of melodic invention cost him a great deal of thought and trouble. In any art it is always thus that that fine impression of facility and naturalness is obtained. He tells us that before hitting on the air, so touching and destined to become so celebrated, “A burning fever," he lay on his sofa racking his brains from eleven o'clock at night to four in the morning; a new domestic he had just then, whom he ordered to light the fire, thought he had lost his reason. Talking on this subject he would say that a composer "could always be sure of making twelve bars of harmony every morning'" but to discover a melody, to put one's hand on the exact spot, the living, hidden spring from which is to issue forth the true accent of nature,—that too may need much labour, but it is ​labour of another sort, and one has no certainty that it will have any result. I quote the gist of his remark, a singularly valuable one, and one by which our contemporaries might profit greatly. "Twelve bars of harmony" is as a technical expression no doubt sufficiently vague, but there is no doubt about the meaning. Grétry has in his mind the result attained by work of development and combination. Are we to believe that he treats work of this kind with contempt? If so, he would certainly be wrong, for musical composition cannot do without it, and he himself suffers from the difficulties that are apt to arise through not having the mastery of this kind of work it is his own weak point. On the other hand it is one of the peculiarities of musical technique that it offers a thousand resources for developments produced as it were in a vacuum, that contain no idea worth the trouble of developing and for combinations of sounds and formulæ that can be multiplied and refined indefinitely, without any need, I should say without any real impulse, of inspiration and of life. It is very human that Grétry should look for compensation for his own deficiencies in gleefully drawing attention to this possibility, which some musicians of his time abused. But what would he have said had he lived in our day! What would he have said had he known such and such contemporary musicians, honourably ambitious but never scoring a bull's eye, who overwhelm us, crush us in masterly fashion through an hour of symphony or five acts of opera, not (as the worthy public supposes) by "abuse of learning" but because their expenditure of "learning" lacks any reason for existence, being prompted neither by inventive power, nor intensity of feeling, nor the pressure of any living force within ​them. We may even say that it is because of this absence of what is essential that "Learning"—quite the wrong word, by the way—is prodigiously to the fore. Where there are both inspiration and mastery, "learning" exists certainly (and in a higher degree), but one does not notice it.
VIII
I have dealt with Grétry as he was in the prosperous and glorious period of his artist's life. It lasted rather more than twenty years, from 1768 to the first years of the Revolution. The numerous works which he produced during this time met with varying success, but several were brilliant triumphs, and by 1792 the indefatigable composer counted more victories than rebuffs in his total. He was therefore an exceptionally fortunate artist. In this part of his career there fell across his path, it is true, an event which might have wrecked him. I refer to the great quarrel between Glück and Piccini, which divided the world of musicians and music-lovers into two camps both ready to fight to the death. But he had the good fortune to emerge unscathed from this tempest which had seemed as if it would spare no position already won, no established reputation. He owed his safety partly to his own adaptability and tact, but far more to the merit of his works which were recommended not by any brilliant artificiality, but by the calm and steady light of truth. The realm of comic opera in which he held sway was not drawn into the battle, or at any rate did not incur heavy casualties.
The Revolution was destined to affect his interests far more seriously. Not that he put himself forward as ​an opponent or even as a passive resister; nor did he leave anything undone to gain the favour of its successive governments. On the contrary, considering the sympathy he inspires in other respects, one is rather disconcerted at the tenacious eagerness he shewed in trying to curry favour—indeed in one case he went rather far. But after all, this fine poet, a perfectly sincere man in private life, a good husband, a tender father, a man of talent, was also a peasant, as much set upon making money as he was keen to work; his task once done, and done well, he was not the man to hamper himself with too refined a delicacy when it was a question of drawing his fair profit.—Here is an illustration that comes to me by oral tradition: on days when one of his operas was being produced, the composer, wearing a cloak that half concealed his face, would stop in front of the theatre posters, making the gestures of a man who is absolutely delighted at what he reads. When bystanders had begun to collect, he would exclaim, "Aha! They're playing Grétry's Epreuve villageoise to night, I must be off to book my seat,"—and then he would go and repeat the scene at another posting station, as they were called in those days. It was innocent enough. It was in just the same innocent spirit that our hero did all that was necessary, and more, to make up for the compromising effect in the eyes of the revolutionaries of the favours with which the "Tyranny" had rewarded his talents. He who, being extremely appreciative of elegance and grace in society, had more than most men worshipped the Court, who had received delightful treatment at its hands, who had given dainty and expert models of flattery in his dedications to the Comte d'Artois, the Duchess of Polignac, and the Duke of Choiseul, ​perhaps did really persuade himself that it was to the sentiments of republicanism that he had imbibed from his infancy that he owed his love of liberty and horror of enslavement, and that "he had never been able to endure the proud smugness, based on false prejudices, of the nobles."
The fall of royalty had caused him to lose his posts, notably that of director of the Queen's band, and the allowances on which he lived; he would have needed to be more of a Spartan than can be expected of one who wields the lyre, not to have wished to obtain some equivalent from the new régime. But what was more serious was that from August, 1792 the performance of Grétry's previous works became practically impossible. Bands of revolutionaries made themselves masters of all places where public performances were given and greeted with shouting and tumult every scene and every line that recalled,—even in the most insignificant and harmless manner, without any special intention of justifying them,—the picture of political and social institutions that had been over turned. Thus "O Richard, O my king" could no longer be sung in public because of the word King, and it can be readily understood that hardly any of Grétry's works could find grace with a censorship of which his librettists had been quite unable to foresee the peculiar susceptibilities. The revolutionary theatrical censorship adopted literally the point of view (if you can call it a view) of a certain citizen in our own day, who hearing a political speaker allude to the nobility of the scene where he was speaking (a part of France full of illustrious and ancient memories) noisily interrupted him with the words, "There's no nobility now." The Committee of Public Safety ​issued, among other similar edicts, an order prescribing the substitution of the expression "serious father" for "noble father" in the theatrical vocabulary. Soon the turbulent elements in the crowd would only tolerate on the stage political pieces in which their passions were flattered. Colinette at Court, False Magic, or Silvain were no longer in season. To perform them before the agitators and ranters of the clubs would have been just like giving wild beasts roses to eat.
So, like other musicians, Grétry had to compose revolutionary music. I will not include under this heading a William Tell which appeared in 1791, an unequal work containing spirited passages stamped with the sincere enthusiasm inspired in the composer, as in so many others by a political movement about which it was still possible to have illusions. But I would pick out from the list of his productions between 1792 and 1794, Joseph Barra, "a true history in one act," a Hymn for the plantation of the tree of Liberty, some pieces for the opera, The Congress of Kings, done in collaboration with several other composers, and lastly The Feast of Reason or The Republican Maid. This last work is the only one which casts a shadow over Grétry's memory. It breathes a fanaticism which I believe to be insincere. We have in it a priest who tears his cassock and breviary and appears garbed as a sans culotte, women who go to sleep at the recitation of a Pater and an Ave Maria, and wake to the strains of the Hymn of Reason. This performance was given when the Terror was at its height,—I prefer to let my mind dwell on the castigation which the Memoirs of Grétry inflict on that régime.
IX
In any case he was not a success as a revolutionary musician. And when one considers what the music of the Revolution was like, he is to be congratulated on the fact. With the exceptions of the sublime Marseillaise and the two masterpieces of Méhul, the Song of Departure and Song of Return (the latter not so fine, but still very strong and stately), the history of French musical art offers nothing worse. Cherubini was a great musician, Gossec an elegant and lively composer with a happy cleverness, Lesueur an artist by nature, very interesting and bold. But their civic music, characterised by a clumsy and hollow emphasis which they mistake for Roman majesty, is unbearable. It is rather like Glück re-fashioned after his own taste by the theatre fireman. Grétry could not adopt that tone. He had lived too long under the reign of good taste.
Moreover these composers brought in a richer instrumentation, and, one must admit, a fuller scoring than his, which had always been rather scanty. These new methods also helped to estrange the public from him. However in 1797 a reaction took place in his favour. Lisbeth and Anacreon and Polycrates (a very interesting work, though one misses in it the bloom of his best years) were very successful.
During the last ten years of his life he almost gave up composing. He said that music now only interested on its theoretical and philosophic side, and he felt himself beset by all the questionings of the human mind. He gave himself up to meditation and began to write. He wrote with a certain child-like simplicity if one may judge by the title of a work that appeared in 1801: ​Concerning Truth: What we were, what we are, and what we ought to be. These pages have been bound up with his Memoirs and Essays on Music published in 1789. The whole makes three large volumes which can be read with great enjoyment. The Memoirs are charming The Essays in spite of an element of confusion in the most general ideas, are full of wonderful passages, especially on vocal music, the rightness of melody, prosody and declamation, matters which the master treats with a subtlety that has not been equalled since. As to Grétry the metaphysician, moralist and organiser of cities, he is a mild disciple of Jean Jacques, spreading himself in amiable ineptitudes.
We must pick out from his Memoirs a well-told anecdote which throws a very clear light on Rousseau's character. The latter had got introduced to Grétry at the first performance of False Magic, and with a great deal of gush had sworn eternal friendship. As they lived not far apart they came from the theatre together. The paviors had left in the middle of the street a heap of stones which Jean Jacques found some difficulty in crossing, and Grétry who was nearly thirty years his junior wanted to help him. The philosopher's serenity was clouded, he rejected the proffered aid, and left him without a word, never to see him again
The private life of Grétry was both happy and unhappy. Married to a loving, simple and faithful wife, he had by her three charming daughters: one of them, Lucile, was a little musical genius, but consumption carried off all three before their twentieth year. In the closing years of his life he installed himself at Montmorency, in Rousseau's celebrated Hermitage, and there numerous visitors, among them Queen Hortense and young Boïeldieu, came to pay homage to his ​fame. The writer Bouilly who had been engaged to his daughter Antoine, has drawn this pleasing though slightly turgid portrait of the old man: "All the most striking marks of wit and delicacy were stamped upon his venerable face. Through the dignity of a great artist accustomed to the homage of the most distinguished, there pierced a geniality that charmed and broke down barriers. An old-fashioned Liége accent, which he had retained from infancy, gave his words a sort of attraction that doubled their expressiveness. I felt that I was looking on Anacreon, or on an Orpheus who had taken a new form to enchant mortals with the ravishing sounds of his lyre."
Fétis, in his Universal Biography of Musicians, gives a different impression of his illustrious compatriot. He tells us that Grétry's society was by no means agreeable because he always brought the conversation round to his own work. It is indeed true that nothing is more trying than this trick, which is so usual with artists: one readily excuses it at a distance, but it is unbearable at close quarters. It is probable that both Fétis and Bouilly have done him justice, and that with age Grétry improved and was less absorbed in himself. That also is quite usual.
XI
If I could feel that this rapid sketch of Grétry's life, work, and ideas has entertained my readers, it would be a great satisfaction to me. But I aim at another result. I would like in the measure of my humble ability, to restore him to favour, and help to drag his best works out of the dust of libraries. It is true that for their performance there would be two great difficultties to overcome, but neither of them is insuperable.
​The first difficulty is a literary matter. Among the "books" which Grétry set to music, a large number are full of artless ineptitudes which would have to be removed. We have in Paris more than one man of letters endowed with sufficient tact and lightness of touch to carry out this enterprise with success. The words of the sung text ought to be religiously respected, but as they have a very general sense and are applicable to very various situations, it would be possible without inconsistency to touch up in many places the detail of the spoken dialogue and even the plots.
A second difficulty, this time a musical one, lies in the disproportion between the small orchestra of less than twenty five players for which Grétry wrote and the dimensions of our modern theatres. You may say it is very easy to double the number of musicians. It is not easy, for that cannot be done without reshaping the orchestration, a delicate task which requires the hand of a very clever master. Some eighty years ago Adolphe Adam, the celebrated composer of "If I were King" undertook it in the case of Richard Coeur de Lion and utterly spoilt that admirable score by introducing trombones, and accompanying with a tremolo the refrain of "A burning fever," and twenty other pretty tricks of that sort. The same Adam similarly ill-treated Monsigny's Deserter. To-day a just appreciation of style is found far more generally among our musicians than in Adam's time, and the required expert could assuredly be found.
But there is another solution which would get over the difficulty by giving the works of Grétry in a small hall. This was tried about ten years ago by the Théatre de Monsieur (Rue des Mathurins) of ephemeral ​memory. In those days I knew next to nothing of the great master, and I shall always remember the absolutely astonished surprise with which I heard there the Speaking Picture. Among many other beautiful things it contains a certain tale of storm and shipwreck that is bursting with genius, animation and life. The Théatre de Monsieur itself soon made shipwreck, being something far too French and distinctive to hold its own in a Paris from which French taste had almost disappeared, in music at any rate, and in which the public would look at nothing that was not massive, heavy, noisy, clouded and clumsy—Boche in fact. We may hope to see the last of this thickheaded and barbarous form of snobbery, and perhaps there will be a chance of life for a small theatre in which would be played, in the setting and under the material conditions most suited to them, the operatic masterpieces of the eighteenth century. What I have said on this subject is not inspired merely by historical interest, but by the hope of bringing back to life, by contact with these masterpieces, a form of French music,—and so natural a form,—that has died out.
In the meantime there is one place, and a privileged place, where Grétry ought to be restored at once to high honour, though his creations seem to have fallen into utter neglect there. I mean the school, the Conservatoire. There there is no need of settings or orchestra. A piano is enough. It is outrageous that at the Conservatoire there should be classes and competitions in Comic Opera, and yet they never sing a line of Grétry who was the genius of Comic Opera incarnate.