Lully and Rameau took for their model the high-flown declamation of the
tragedy stage of their time. And French opera for the past twenty years
has chosen a more dangerous model still--the declamation of Wagner, with
its vocal leaps and its resounding and heavy accentuation. Nothing could
be more displeasing in French. All people of taste suffered from it,
though they did not admit it. At this time, Antoine, Gemier, and Guitry
were making theatrical declamation more natural, and this made the
exaggerated declamation of the French opera appear more ridiculous and
more archaic still. And so a reform in recitative was inevitable.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau had foreseen it in the very direction in which
Debussy[201] has accomplished it. He showed in his _Lettre sur la
musique francaise_ that there was no connection between the inflections
of French speech, "whose accents are so harmonious and simple," and "the
shrill and noisy intonations" of the recitative of French opera. And he
concluded by saying that the kind of recitative that would best suit us
should "wander between little intervals, and neither raise nor lower the
voice very much; and should have little sustained sound, no noise, and
no cries of any description--nothing, indeed, that resembled singing,
and little inequality in the duration or value of the notes, or in their
intervals.
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