Music in general

Melody – said to have been absent in much contemporary composition – made a comeback when a new generation of Italian operas appeared. Both Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, given its first London performance in 1891, and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, which appeared in 1893, were very successful. But not all critics were enamoured: F. Gilbert Webb declared Pagliacci, ‘with its characters of low animal type and brutal story’, to be ‘detrimental to the growth of appreciation of refined and intellectual artistic workmanship’. But this moral censure was not typical. H.F. Frost reacted very differently to the opera’s portrayal of low life: ‘Not one of the characters possesses any moral sense … The atmosphere is grim, unwholesome, and sordid to the last degree, but it is intensely and pitilessly human, and the author has arranged his material with consummate art, so that, aided by music surging with feverish vitality, the whole becomes irresistibly fascinating.’ Cavalleria and Pagliacci were welcomed by the Speaker critic as representatives of a new school of Italian opera where the music did not hold up the dramatic action and continuous melody replaced the endless declamation found in Wagner.

Another work whose success was attributed to melody was Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, a ‘masterpiece’ according to one critic. All critics saw the strong influence of Wagner, but for the Speaker critic the influence was tempered by the use of ‘rhythmical, metrical, easily-to-be-remembered tunes’. It showed that Wagnerian methods did not preclude originality. But for the public it was the opera’s tunefulness that appealed.

Although the operas referred to above had a generally positive reception, in other respects contemporary composition continued to criticised for its ugliness. A revival of early music drew forth unfavourable comparisons between modern music and its forebears. J.F. Runciman, reviewing some recent music, turned with relief to the old, as revived and performed by Arnold Dolmetsch: ‘our music has more in it of human passion, often more of mere hysteria; and while the old music is never hysterical it generally equals ours, and sometimes beats it, in point of pure beauty’. Shedlock recorded a similar feeling evoked by a successful revival of Gluck’s Orfeo at Covent Garden: ‘the very simplicity seems a merit, and almost a condemnation of modern art’. He opined that contemporary opera bore the consequences of living in a ‘feverish’ age, where ‘tales of dishonour and death’ were to the public taste.