It is mainly by reason of the contradiction in these divers tendencies that the present confusion has come about in French dramatic music.

But we should also include as contributory causes:

1. The persistent "haunting" effect of Wagner's work, which is gradually regaining its former status and perhaps still represents the most solid foundation of musical drama. The symphonic school, however, at first at all events, merely offered a faithless reflection of this work, depriving it of most of its expressive signification.

2. The very strong reaction that looms ahead against impressionism. This was expected. It was inevitable that these vague blurred sounds should speedily be followed by a return to clear, definite, so-called melodic outlines, though really strangely different from what we have hitherto been accustomed to look upon as melody.

Here music evolved along somewhat similar lines as painting, where the reign of vague luminous vibrations culminated in the birth of cubism with its stupifying geometrical lines. Just as Claude Monet preceded Picasso, so the impressionism of Claude Debussy paved the way for the polytonic extravagances of Stravinsky in his latest mode, continued noisily by the famous "Six" who set up, as a sort of symbolic flag, the facetious triviality of Erick Satie. Besides, they are already finding themselves left behindas invariably happens-by teams of Italian "bruiteurs," who announce the most amazing combinations of screakings and growlings, cracklings, cluckings and croakings, effected by a complex system of levers, pulleys and cranks: the latest expression of that incapacity which cynically replaces music by noise.

Truth to tell, polytonic fantasies still belong mostly to the concert-world. All the same, they are already trying what they can do in pantomime, and have aims upon the theatre. We have to consider the unhealthy attraction. which invariably accompanies the search after what is strange and unusual, even though it be the very negation of beauty.

Two questions now arise:

Is not the success of symphonic music in France during the past fifty years calculated to raise doubts as to the preponderance of theatrical music in the future? In any case, how will the

clash of so many opposing tendencies, the sort of ebullition characteristic of the present moment, affect theatrical music?

We should have deliberately to shut our eyes to the constant trend of the Graeco-Latin genius towards dramatic forms if we imagine that musical drama will henceforth have to be thrust into the background. And again, the entire evolution of music reveals the capacity of the French mind for coördinating the most diverse aspirations, blending them into one harmonious condition with that sense of measure which characterises our race.

This sovereign faculty of our national genius is bound to manifest itself once more. Shaking themselves free from the various influences of snobbery and from the tyranny of doctrinal preconceived opinions, our musicians will see that art cannot be limited to a few mantel-piece adornments nor to certain laboratory formulas, that it cannot breathe freely in the rarefied atmosphere of a shrine. Seeking inspiration from the great breath of life alone, they will unite their scattered forces in an effort to restore, each according to his own temperament, the fine tradition of French dramatic music, which after all has never been really broken, in spite of a few temporary extravagances.

They will endeavour to continue the proud tradition of the masters of French musical drama during the second half of the nineteenth century: men whose works have successfully passed the test of time, because, apart from their absolute musical value, they are the clear, just and searching expression of human feeling as it shows itself in the form of drama. This tradition, inaugurated by Berlioz, a man of the utmost sincerity and of vivid, passionate imagination, has been mainly continued-to mention only the dead by Reyer, with his vivid and delicate sensibility; by Bizet, whose high-coloured though simple and direct art proclaimed the marvellous joy, the intoxicating beauty of life; by Gounod and Massenet, whose voluptuous inspiration expressed, by totally different methods, the most universal and profound of human feelings-love. It will not stop, thanks to the efforts of many noteworthy musicians-none of whom can be mentioned, as the names of them all would have to be given-who, regaining selfconfidence, will continue the work of their predecessors without wasting time on vain and barren demarcations of formulas.

They will restore the essential principles-momentarily shattered-of the musical theatre, utilising every advance in harmonic and instrumental technique, though exclusively releasing the force of expression and of evocation. They will never allow the symphony to submerge the drama; rather, following the ex

ample of Weber and Wagner, will they dissolve it, so to speak, in musical action so as to enable the words always to concentrate force, light and life within themselves.

Making use of declamation with inflexions as supple asthough more penetrating than those of the spoken sentence, they will still not forbid the use of melody, not of that which affects the aridity of sonata themes or fugue subjects, but of open melody, which does not prevent advantage being taken of the expressive force of that most moving of all instruments, the human voice; of that melody which made up the whole of Mozart's operas and which, even in the case of Wagner, gushes up spontaneously to the topmost summits of the purest lyricism.

Aware that the truth of to-day is vastly different from that of yesterday, and perhaps even more so from that of to-morrow, they will never be dismayed at innovations, however apparently audacious, but rather, in a spirit of enlightened eclecticism, will try to find out how these innovations may help forward the inevitable transition from the past to the future; not forgetting that, though the torch-bearers do not look behind, they should nevertheless not lose sight of the fact that those alone who preceded them in the race placed the sacred charge within their hands.

Finally, conscious of the social rôle of their art, knowing that dramatic music has an influence upon the masses which pure music never will have, they will become the eloquent interpreters of human feeling, ever drawing inspiration from that eternal spring of emotion which music, as a whole, really is.

(Translated by Fred Rothwell)

F

FRANCO ALFANO

By GUIDO M. GATTI

RANCO ALFANO had, as a very young man, one of those

strokes of good fortune which might have been the ruin of any artist less sane and less conscientious. At the age of twenty-seven he won success in the theatres, tasted the delights of notoriety, and-what is more important-found a publisher, the greatest among Italian publishers, who threw open the doors for him, and supported him liberally. Such good fortune brings in its train hazardous consequences. First of all, because so youthful an artist, seeing himself all at once esteemed and courted, may become insufferably vain, lose control of his artistic faculty, and give himself up to an exuberance of production lacking the strict supervision of self-criticism. In the second place because, having hit upon the type of composition which, at the given time, is most grateful to the public palate, he may be seduced into an infinity of repetition, or, at least, induced to hug the variable winds of public taste and follow them with strenuous solicitude in writing future works. The public is a psychological entity— whether logical or capricious is beside the matter that does not bestow its approval or its sympathy without assuring itself that the artist returns its favors with due consideration; that is to say, that he hearkens to its suggestions and heeds its inclinations. Otherwise it rebels, and its fondness changes to indifference or, perchance, to hostility.

This last has been, in a way, the fate of Alfano. His opera Risurrezione inspired in all quarters the rosiest visions of this artist's future; but the public, and together with them the majority of the critics and even the publisher, thought that he might possess himself of the heritage of those maturer opera-writers who had reaped an abundant harvest in the years preceding and were still following up, though at a slackened pace, their earlier successes. Taken as a whole, Alfano's opera might excite such expectations, for the musician indubitably did not succeed—excepting as we shall note further on-in liberating himself from influences foreign and domestic; the construction of the scenes, the melodic conception, the vague and uncareful phrasing, the very craving for the faraway and fascinating milieu of a Russia