The Dramatisation Of Song

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Title:     The Dramatisation Of Song
Author: Arthur Symons [More Titles by Symons]

All art is a compromise, in which the choice of what is to be foregone must be left somewhat to the discretion of nature. When the sculptor foregoes colour, when the painter foregoes relief, when the poet foregoes the music which soars beyond words and the musician that precise meaning which lies in words alone, he follows a kind of necessity in things, and the compromise seems to be ready-made for him. But there will always be those who are discontented with no matter what fixed limits, who dream, like Wagner, of a possible, or, like Mallarmé, of an impossible, fusion of the arts. These would invent for themselves a compromise which has not yet come into the world, a gain without loss, a re-adjustment in which the scales shall bear so much additional weight without trembling. But nature is not always obedient to this too autocratic command. Take the art of the voice. In its essence, the art of the voice is the same in the nightingale and in Melba. The same note is produced in the same way; the expression given to that note, the syllable which that note renders, are quite different things. Song does not in itself require words in order to realise even the utmost of its capacities. The voice is an instrument like the violin, and no more in need of words for its expression than the violin. Perhaps the ideal of singing would be attained when a marvellous voice, which had absorbed into itself all that temperament and training had to give it, sang inarticulate music, like a violin which could play itself. There is nothing which such an instrument could not express, nothing which exists as pure music; and, in this way, we should have the art of the voice, with the least possible compromise.

The compromise is already far on its way when words begin to come into the song. Here are two arts helping one another; something is gained, but how much is lost? Undoubtedly the words lose, and does not the voice lose something also, in its directness of appeal? Add acting to voice and words, and you get the ultimate compromise, opera, in which other arts as well have their share and in which Wagner would have us see the supreme form of art. Again something is lost; we lose more and more, perhaps for a greater gain. Tristan sings lying on his back, in order to represent a sick man; the actual notes which he sings are written partly in order to indicate the voice of a sick man. For the sake of what we gain in dramatic and even theatrical expressiveness, we have lost a two-fold means of producing vocal beauty. Let us rejoice in the gain, by all means; but not without some consciousness of the loss, not with too ready a belief that the final solution of the problem has been found.

An attempt at some solution is, at this moment, being made in Paris by a singer who is not content to be Carmen or Charlotte Corday, but who wants to invent a method of her own for singing and acting at the same time, not as a character in an opera, but as a private interpreter between poetry and the world.

Imagine a woman who suggests at the same time Sarah Bernhardt and Mrs. Brown-Potter, without being really like either; she is small, exuberantly blonde, her head is surrounded by masses of loosely twisted blonde hair; she has large grey eyes, that can be grave, or mocking, or passionate, or cruel, or watchful; a large nose, an intent, eloquent mouth. She wears a trailing dress that follows the lines of the figure vaguely, supple to every movement. When she sings, she has an old, high-backed chair in which she can sit, or on which she can lean. When I heard her, there was a mirror on the other side of the room, opposite to her; she saw no one else in the room, once she had surrendered herself to the possession of the song, but she was always conscious of that image of herself which came back to her out of the mirror: it was herself watching herself, in a kind of delight at the beauty which she was evoking out of words, notes, and expressive movement. Her voice is strong and rich, imperfectly trained, but the voice of a born singer; her acting is even more the acting of a born actress; but it is the temperament of the woman that flames into her voice and gestures, and sets her whole being violently and delicately before you. She makes a drama of each song, and she re-creates that drama over again, in her rendering of the intentions of the words and of the music. It is as much with her eyes and her hands, as with her voice, that she evokes the melody of a picture; it is a picture that sings, and that sings in all its lines. There is something in her aspect, what shall I call it? tenacious; it is a woman who is an artist because she is a woman, who takes in energy at all her senses and gives out energy at all her senses. She sang some tragic songs of Schumann, some mysterious songs of Maeterlinck, some delicate love-songs of Charles van Lerberghe. As one looked and listened it was impossible to think more of the words than of the music or of the music than of the words. One took them simultaneously, as one feels at once the softness and the perfume of a flower. I understood why Mallarmé had seemed to see in her the realisation of one of his dreams. Here was a new art, made up of a new mixing of the arts, in one subtly intoxicating elixir. To Mallarmé it was the more exquisite because there was in it none of the broad general appeal of opera, of the gross recognised proportions of things.

This dramatisation of song, done by any one less subtly, less completely, and less sincerely an artist, would lead us, I am afraid, into something more disastrous than even the official concert, with its rigid persons in evening dress holding sheets of music in their tremulous hands, and singing the notes set down for them to the best of their vocal ability. Madame Georgette Leblanc is an exceptional artist, and she has made an art after her own likeness, which exists because it is the expression of herself, of a strong nature always in vibration. What she feels as a woman she can render as an artist; she is at once instinctive and deliberate, deliberate because it is her natural instinct, the natural instinct of a woman who is essentially a woman, to be so. I imagine her always singing in front of a mirror, always recognising her own shadow there, and the more absolutely abandoned to what the song is saying through her because of that uninterrupted communion with herself.

[The end]
Arthur Symons's essay: Dramatisation Of Song

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