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to that complication of absurdities, which was to extend its success beyond the Abyss and the ocean, the Opera. In this, with a mixture of lyrical and pastoral, of magical and phantasmagorical scenes, with the hope of blending all the sister arts to the production of heretofore unknown results, the Italians sanctioned the usurpation of the fair intruder, and music reigned supreme.

It would not be difficult to find objections against the opera, or rather to repeat the arguments that sober minds have ever brought against it. That enervation, that decomposition of all noble feelings into air and sound; those painted heroes ever sighing, ever melting, ever warbling, ever dying; that total absence of order and unity, that constant breach of the probabilities of common sense, ill disguised under the show of tinselled scenes and gilded drapery, has caused many a wise head to shake in pity and contempt, at the blindness of a nation surrendering to the senses such an empire over the reason, and laying asleep all just thought and sentiment under the enchantment of melody. The opera has been considered as an element of corruption, both of taste and manners, a dangerous seducer; at the least, as an idle, irrational, sensual enjoyment.

Of course it would be difficult for an Italian to subscribe to such a sentence. The musical opera, he would tell you, is not merely a vain pastime for the vulgar-it is the highest source of delight in which a noble mind can indulge. It has by far the advantage over the drama. The emotion that this last can produce, is always the result of close attention, of total abstraction, of absolute passivity. You must divest yourself of your feelings to receive those of another. The drama is a tyrant that must absorb all your faculties; its success depends on a complete illusion. A slight reaction of reflection, a preoccupation, an instant of listlessness, of ennui, an ill-timed jest, a fortuitous interruption-and the spell is broken and the interest slackens. Not so the opera. Music is no intruder. It asks for no admittance into the sanctuary of the mind; it hovers round its threshold, like the minstrel at the entrance of the nuptial apartment. It does not suspend the course of your feelings; it arouses them into a gentle agitation; it fans them, it soothes, it enhances the noblest of them; it gives them a harmonious, a delicate turn; it gives them a something elastic, ethereal, spiritual. Its effect is immediate. It does not urge, it does not importune you; it awaits you at the proper moment; it has some note to find its way to your heart; it has some strain that harmonizes with your thought, and that comes unlooked for, unsuspected, when you are turned away from the spectacle in disgust and ennui, when your ears are listening to the whisper of a fair one by your side, when your thoughts are wandering among the regrets of the past or the schemes of the future.

Such are the ideas the Italians entertain of music, which they call the architect of the celestial spheres, and the echo of the language of

paradise. They, who cannot conceive of a human heart dead to all impressions of harmony; who have carried their fanaticism for this charming art even to idolatry; have by the invention of the opera extended its power far beyond the efforts of all ancient and modern nations.

In Greece and in Rome, as well as in Italy, Music had always been accessory to theatrical performances. The choruses of tragedies and pastorals were always written in lyrical verses, to be sung and accompanied by instruments. The dulness of their dramatic pieces, and the national predilection for music, gradually gave the choruses and the other musical parts a greater extent, especially in the pastorals, until at the end of the sixteenth century, Ottavio Rinuccini gave, on the stage of Florence, what may be considered the first specimen of an Italian opera. Having no great confidence in his dramatic powers, but endowed with an exquisite taste for metrical cadences, he wrote the whole of his drama in lyrical measures; and associating himself with three celebrated musicians, he set the whole of his dramas to music. The first of his productions, la Dafne, a pastoral-mythological drama, was represented at Florence in the year 1594, and was welcomed as a most agreeable novelty.

This example was soon followed by other cities emulous of Florence, and the opera was soon the favorite of the court and the multitude. The Euridice and Arianna by the same poet had a still greater success. The first, a piece exhibiting many marks of poetical skill and genius, having been performed for the first time, in 1600, on the occasion of the nuptials of Mary dei Medici and Henry IV., the Italian opera soon made its way to France and England, where it has ever since been more or less successfully cultivated. Such as it was, the discovery was but in its infancy, and it underwent various vicissitudes during the whole of the seventeenth century. That century was an age of effort, of depravation and extravagance. That bad taste that occupied every branch of literature in the age of Marini,

did not spare the opera. As in the new arrangement poetry had insensibly given way to music, so even music yielded the sceptre to the portentous exhibitions of machinery. Flying chariots and horses, rattling thunders and storms, enchanted palaces, fireworks, deluges, conflagrations, every metamorphose, every prodigy that mechanic ingenuity could derive, made of the opera a complicate phantasmagory, or jugglery—a fairies' festival—a witches' Sabbath-where not unfrequently the stage was divided into three different stories, and exhibited at once what was going on on earth, in heaven, and in hell.

The first and most famous of such grotesque productions was the Aurora and Cephalus, by a poet of high renown, Gabriello Chiabrera, who successively introduced as interlocutors the Ocean, the Sun, the Night, the Tritons, and the twelve signs of the Zodiac. After his example, falling from extravagance to extravagance, the four elements

were personified; the palaces of the Sun, of Neptune, of Plutus, appeared in all their pomp; and finally in the Cato in Utica, in a great spectacle given by the well-affected provinces to Cæsar, enters the Terrestrial Globe, majestically advancing on the stage to pay its homage to the conqueror.

Such were the spectacles exhibited at the court of the Farnese and Gonzaga, of the Dukes of Tuscany and Savoy, in those vast edifices whose ruins cannot be visited without astonishment; where the people, freely admitted, crowded the immense galleries, ten and fifteen thousands at a time; where by the contrivance of water-works the stage could be converted into a mimic sea, and exhibit the spectacle of a mock naval fight with the most complete illusion; where, in the interacts, the immense parterre could be changed into an arena for wild beasts and bull fights; and where the people was delighted by a succession of various games, for a longer lapse of time than our generation could possibly endure. Such has remained, notwithstanding the efforts of Quinaut and others, in the golden age of French literature, to a great extent even in our days, the French opera, where not less pains is still taken to dazzle the eye than to charm the ear. But the Italians, endowed, by the special gift of Heaven, with more refined taste than their neighbors, soon recovered from the follies of which they had set the first example; and, due allowance being made for the popular taste in the pantomime, where wonders and transformations continue to be exhibited down to our days, they soon restored music to her undisputed sway over the opera.

Apostolo Zeno, born and reared at Venice, where, on the decline of liberty and patriotism, the theatre in all its branches, and especially the opera, had been most eagerly cultivated—a man of taste, as well as of thorough education-well versed in the Greek and the Roman theatre, and a warm admirer of the productions of Corneille and Racine, which were then making their way into Italy-placed in charge of the direction of the theatres at Venice, and afterward at Vienna under the title of Poeta Cesareo, Poet Laureate-considerably contributed, during the first part of the 18th century, to the reform of the opera. But instead of bringing it back to the pastoral and mythological fables from which it had sprung, he took his subjects. principally from the Check and French tragedies; and writing a considerable number of Iphigenias and Andromaches in lyrical verses, he gave origin to what may be called tragic or heroic opera, the one that was perfected under the auspices of Metastasio. But, together with the subjects and plans which he took from the master-pieces of Greece and France, so far as his lyrical style of composition could admit of it, Zeno undiscerningly adopted the most striking peculiarities that are accounted as the capital defects of the primeval French dramathat complicated variety of intrigue; that fondness for what the French call coups de scène, strokes of stage effect; and above all that

mockery of modern manners and feelings attributed to ancient names, and characters, and that merciless length of cold and empty sermons, in sententious monologues and dialogues that chill the hearer to death. By such productions, however, Zeno had given the opera form and proportions. It was the clay that had received human shape and features under the hands of Prometheus. The man was yet to come who was to complete his work by rising to the sphere of the sun, to steal from its glowing orb the spark of animation and life. That man was Metastasio.

Metastasio has been for half a century ranked by the side of the greatest geniuses that have honored the Italian name. Indeed he had been placed so high that his downfall could not best be considered as inevitable. His character, which was in perfect consistency with the age in which he lived, could not remain unimpeached in our days, when the noblest feelings of the heart arc expected to be essentially connected with the highest attributes of the intellect. Dante, Tasso, Machiavelli, Michael Angelo, Galileo, ail the most conspicuous characters in Italian literature, issuing from noble families, united to their loftiness of genius that nobility of heart which can alone support genius against the difficulties that crowd on its path.

Metastasio was possessed of a mind of the very first order. His benevolent disposition, and the gentleness of his temper, endeared him to his intimate friends. He was pure, candid, incorruptible. Born and bred up in squalor and misery, fortune hastened to repair the defects of his nativity. From his earliest youth to the end of his long career he never saw one of her frowns. He knew no struggle, no trial. The energies of his character never were put in requisition, and it relaxed into a weak though harmless effeminacy. The age he lived in was corrupted, but quiet. It was too degraded even for great crime. Vice had been stripped of all its horrors, and clothed in the decencies of fashion and gallantry. Metastasio, the greatest mind of his age, was not above his age. He aspired not to the glory of its censor or reformer; he made himself its organ. He was disinterested and liberal-he declined titles and dignities, when his name was above all distinctions; he renounced a splendid inheritance, when his talents had placed him above his wants. But he had no dignity of character. Heaven knows, flattery is an ancient art; but Metastasio carried it so far, and practised it with so much ingenuity, that he invested it with an air of originality. Monarchs and princes, high and humble, friends and foes, all had their share in the offerings of his incense. Adulation had become in him a second nature. He had a lively fancy, with an exquisite sensibility; but indulged in it only so far as it would be a source of enjoyment. He was a happy man; he was perhaps the happiest of mortals; the only question in his case is, up to what degree it is permitted to man to be happy. Love, friendship, and patriotism, he felt every affection warmly so long as they brought him

sweet emotions-when they bespoke sorrows or dangers, he could shut his heart against them at his pleasure. He says of himself that the anguish of his imaginary heroes often called tears in his eyesthe evils of real life never came to disturb his repose.

His early life has much the appearance of one of the pleasant dreams of which we read in romance. Gian Vincenzo Gravina-a distinguished lawyer and a renowned scholar, a man of high rank and considerable fortune, and willing to use both for the promotion of talent-walking one evening, in 1712, through the streets of Rome, was attracted by a large group of persons crowding the entrance of a barber's shop. The appearance of his dress and countenance having gained him easy admittance, he found himself in presence of one of those popular minstrels, who under the name of improvvisatori afford the lower classes in Italy one of their most intellectual pastimes. It was a boy of fourteen, of middle size, of slender but elegant form, with auburn hair flowing down his shoulders, with blue eyes and a fair complexion-one of those soft, languid, effeminate faces which constituted the type of beauty in that unmanly age. It was a fascinating sight for the old jurisconsult. Those delicate features kindled by the enthusiasm of inspiration-that melodious voice obeying the impulse of every successive emotion-the flushing and fading, the ebbing and flowing, of that youthful complexion, revealed to his physiognomistic judgment the existence of genius. As soon as the exhibition was over, and ere his admiration had subsided, he approached the barber, in whom, by his smile of complacency, he recognized the father of the young bard, and with brief bargaining induced him, overloaded as he was with other children, to give him up his first-born as an adopted son. Such, according to the most probable tradition, was the origin of Metastasio. The education which Pietro Tropassi had received, meagre and poor, such as the efforts of his humble parent could afford, was now recommenced under better auspices by his patron. Gravina set all his cares and affections on the child of his choice; procured him the best masters; changed his vulgar name to the more sonorous Grecian surname of Metastasio; and when his last day arrived he bequeathed to the young poet, then twenty years of age, his books, his fortune, and his blessing. Unused to riches, Metastasio in less than two years had squandered in youthful follies the heritage of his benefactor. Urged by want, and with a mind strengthened by a more mature age and a thorough education, he went to Naples, and resumed that poetical career in which he had in his youth evinced such powerful talents. His first operas were crowned with an astonishing success. One of the princesses of the opera, a renowned beauty, and a fascinous singer, La Romanina, with a kindness of heart that is frequently found among the woman of her profession, enraptured with the beauty, not less than with the genius of her poet, offered to share her fortune with Metastasio, who had then nothing to share; and receiving him

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