A fortnight is
generally time enough. The musicians of the orchestra, and the
singers, who are generally strangers to each other and get no
encouragement from the audience (the latter are generally either
chatting or sleeping--in the fifth box they either sup or play cards),
assemble inattentive, insensible, and troubled with catarrh, not as
artists, but as people who are paid for the music they make. There is
nothing more icy than these Italian representations. No trace of
_nuances_, in spite of the exaggeration of accent and gesture dictated
by Italian taste, much less any effect _d'ensemble_. Each artist
thinks only of himself, without troubling his thoughts about his
neighbor. Why worry one's self for a public that does not even
listen?"
In German opera, on the other hand, the orchestral part and the
choruses and declamatory sections are just as important as the lyric
numbers, and many of the most exquisite passages in the operas of
Weber and Wagner are a kind of superior pantomime music during which
no voice at all is heard on the stage. Now I am convinced that much of
the talking in opera-boxes is simply due to ignorance of this fact.
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