Musical Studies and Silhouettes

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ITALIAN MUSIC AND THE LAST TWO OPERAS OF VERDI. OTHELLO. HP HE compact between Italian art and truth lay broken, when Verdi, at the beginning of this century, came to heal the rupture in his Othello and Falstaff. For a hundred years, indeed, the music of Italy had uttered little else than lies; joyous...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ITALIAN MUSIC AND THE LAST TWO OPERAS OF VERDI. OTHELLO. HP HE compact between Italian art and truth lay broken, when Verdi, at the beginning of this century, came to heal the rupture in his Othello and Falstaff. For a hundred years, indeed, the music of Italy had uttered little else than lies; joyous lies, we must confess, ?of purest thoughtlessness; pardoned, because of their gay carelessness and irony; lies, always melodious, often amiable, rarely gross: burning, brilliant lies, ?and yet lies The great criminal in this affair, the more criminal because he was so great, was Rossini. It was Gretry who said of Pergolesi: He appeared, and truth became known; but Rossini had but to appear and truth was forgotten; forgotten for light and agreeable pretence, for vain pleasure and the facile delights of a sensation which was near voluptuousness'. Appagare ' orecchio, muovere il core, ricreare lo spirito; of these three duties imposed upon music by Marcello, Rossini (only too often neglected the two most noble. He seldom enchanted anything but the ear; and if, by chance, he wrote such masterpieces as The Barber of Seville and William Tell, appealing, not only to the ear, but to the mind and heart, yet the first of even these two operas draws its greatness from the outside, in movement and external life; while as for William Tell, it must ever rest as an exception, almost a miraculous contradiction, in the work of the great Italian virtuoso. This evil seed of Rossini's planting, spread ever to a larger growth after he had ceased to cultivate art; his followers inherited less of his genius than of his carelessness and errors, and Italy wandered always farther from the right path. Overflowing melodists, inexhaustible singers, her musicians sang as the...