My object
here is to illustrate the way composers work, and to prove that the
creating of an opera is perhaps the most difficult and marvellous
achievement of the human intellect.
Professor Langhans notes, in his history of music, that in the Middle
Ages, as late as Luther's time, it took two men to compose the
simplest piece of music: one who conceived the melody, and the other
who added the harmonic accompaniment. The theoretical writer,
Glareanus, deliberately expressed his opinion, in 1547, that it might
be _possible_ to unite these two functions in one person, but that one
would rarely find the inventor of a melody able to work it out
artistically. We have made much progress in music within these three
hundred years, and to-day every composer is not only expected to
invent his own harmonies and accompaniments to his melodies, but,
since Wagner set the example, composers are beginning to consider it
incumbent on them to write their own librettos; and, what is more
remarkable, if we examine biographies of musicians carefully we find
that, even _before_ Wagner, not a few composers assisted in the
preparation of their operatic texts; and this remark applies even to
some of the Italian composers, who were proverbially careless
regarding their librettos.
Pages:
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78