however great may be the musical value of the setting of the words, it has, so to speak, no abstract value, it is conditioned in every detail-it takes pride in the fact that its beauty is an incomplete beauty, that it is an attractive enigma to which another art holds the key. No doubt the songs of men like Strauss or Debussy, or, pre-eminently, those of Wolf, have taught us many lessons we needed to learn: they have shown us the infinite variety of legitimate tone-painting of psychological mood or even (in vague suggestion) of external object; they have given wings to singers' and accompanists' technique. The detailed subtlety of the verbal expression in such things as Wolf's "Lied des Windes" or "An eine Aeolsharfe," or Strauss' "Lied des Steindopfers" or "Bruder Liederlich," or Debussy's "Le faune" or "Chevaux de bois"-or very many more-is positively astounding: but it is something new. The great classical composers, the men on whose giant shoulders all these lesser folk stand, never troubled about words to this extent; can it be that, consciously or unconsciously, they took the view that great vocal music could not afford to admit literature to so large a share of the joint empire? Let us take a historical survey.

To start with, it is obvious that in no choral music of anything more than the squarely harmonic type can the words, if heard at all, be heard with more than approximate clearness. From the listener's standpoint, the masterpieces of Tallis and Byrd and Wilbye and Gibbons, of Palestrina and Lassus and Vittoria, might, as often as not, be merely vocalised: so also indeed might the great majority of later choral music on large lines. Unless only one word is sung at a time, there is no verbal clearness but the great sixteenth-century geniuses never troubled their heads about anything of the kind, except when (as in such works as Tallis' Service in the Dorian Mode) reluctantly forced to bend to the demand for theological intelligibility. Plainly harmonic passages of course occur, in passing, but it is obvious enough that they are due to purely musical considerations and not in the least to any other motive: where the words are clearly heard from start to finish, the music is always far less fine, and indeed can hardly help being so. The

few exceptions-almost entirely, among the great men, in the works of Wilbye-really prove their rule of verbal unconscientiousness: Wilbye is almost the only one who aims at effects of the modern order in carefully distinct emotional expression of isolated words.

There is of course, in all these composers, no incongruity between words and music: but it is very rarely that the reader of the score feels that the former add any particular assistance to the appreciation of the beauty of the latter-to him, as perforce to the listener, they are very often nearly or quite a negligible quantity. We must not, it is true, forget the impersonal nature of the ecclesiastical texts, or the necessary repetitions of the words of very short poems: but the tendency is plain enough, and it was no doubt one of the causes of the seventeenth century revolution. The declamation of Monteverde, of the brothers Lawes, of Purcell, was essentially literary: verbal expressiveness, to the utmost extent achievable in the contemporary musical medium, was paramount. We can see, in the works of the contrapuntal composers, examples of flowing flexibility of diction (often transcending the limits of bar-lines-a merely conventional guide to the eye, as we too often forget*) which sufficiently refute any charge of inartistic carelessness: but Monteverde and the rest always seem anxious to drag the words to the front, to proclaim, however stiffly and pedantically, that they have not been neglected. But the movement was merely an eddy in the stream of musical development: to some extent indeed Purcell himself was unaffected by it, and with the dawn of the eighteenth century we find ourselves, to all intents and purposes, back in the old channel.

The attitude which Bach assumed to this question is of great importance, and repays detailed study. When his words offer anything vivid, Bach grasps the point instantly: the recitatives in the cantatas (a vast gold mine that most of us are only now discovering bit by bit) are full of such strokes of miraculous genius. But, as a rule, the words offer nothing whatever of the kind: and Bach accepts the

*Composers who have known and acted on this truth sometimes suffer terrible things at the hands of interpreters who correct what they are pleased to style "false accentuation."

situation with such absolute equanimity that he has no sort of objection, over and over again, to transferring the same music to words of totally alien character. Whatever may have been the impelling cause, he extremely often borrows his material from earlier works of his own, modifying and technically improving to a greater or less degree. Many of the movements of the B-minor and the four smaller masses are thus borrowed from church cantatas, which, again, borrow from their own store and further, many portions of religious works the Osanna in the B-minor Mass, and several of the most familiar things in the Christmas Oratorio, for example-are derived from cantatas of the most frankly secular description. It is plain enough that Bach's main business was to write magnificent music, and that he cared remarkably little if later on, perhaps through mere pressure of time, he found it necessary to join it in second marriage to words poles asunder in sentiment from its first yoke fellows. Often, no doubt, the music fits both equally well: the famous slumber song in the Christmas Oratorio is equally beautiful in "The Choice of Hercules," when sung by Vice endeavoring to seduce the hero from the side of Virtue, just as Hercules' indignant repudiation is equally earnest in the form of the alto air "Prepare Thyself, Zion." But the curbing bass figures in the middle portion of this latter air, suggestive of the serpents mentioned in the text, become meaningless in the Christmas Oratorio version; just as the choral imitation of drums and trumpets with which the first number of the Oratorio starts is pointless when divorced from "Touet, ihr Pauken; ersdraket, Trompeten," in the Ode for the Queen of Poland's birthday. Similarly the Masses show many signs of torturing processes: the antiphony of the colossal Crucifixus in the B-minor Mass is more pointed when sung to the original cantata words, "Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen," and matters reach a climax in the pathetically disgraceful perversion of the superbly defiant great chorus in "Herr, deine Augen sehen nach dem Glauben" into the Kyrie of the Mass in G-minor. Any close student of Bach knows dozens of instances of this kind of thing, which is only explicable on the assumption that to the composer words were

in the long run a hindrance rather than a help: he could think about them to a certain extent to start with, but all such minor concerns must take their chance if he wished to utilize the same music on a second occasion.

Take, again, the case of Handel. No one, it is true, claims that the libretto of an eighteenth century Italian opera is remarkable for literary beauty: but as Handel sets it, it is sometimes not even grammar. Like Bach, he borrowed largely from himself, transferring love-duets to the "Messiah," and so on, with perfect equanimity: it is true that we do not feel any incongruity, but that is merely because in neither of the two versions have the words any musical point at all. To Handel indeed the words are considerably more secondary still than to Bach; very seldom is there any particular reason apparent why the music should not be set to anything else just as well, and the expressiveness of Bach's recitatives finds not even a glimmering of a parallel in those of the other composer. The massively simple lines on which he worked effectually prevented him from taking heed of anything which would seem to mar the directness of the musical appeal.

Self-borrowing of this particular kind ended with the eighteenth century (we have one or two last examples in Mozart and in early Beethoven): but literature still remarried the Cinderella in the partnership. Practically never do we feel the presence of any literary sense, as such, in the works of Haydn and Mozart: Beethoven confessed that his ideas invariably came to him in instrumental guise, however they might be fitted to words subsequently. In Schubert, the first composer who took songwriting really seriously, we see the beginnings of the change: but it is easy to exaggerate the advance. The musician who, in one of his masses, could announce his belief "in resurrectionem peccatonum mortuorum" had obviously no deeply rooted conviction of the importance of words: he set, more or less indiscriminately, most of the poems that came his way, and it was a mere accident that among them happened to be the masterpieces of Goethe and Heine and Schiller. Miraculous as is his grasp over the central mood, it is always the emotion that he sets, not the poetry: what

does he care if, to secure some transcendent loveliness of musical phrase, he repeats any words any number of times? The spirit of the poem is caught to perfection, and the music is Schubert: why, perhaps, should we care either? Nevertheless, there the fact is: Schubert may be le musicien le plus poete que jamais, as Liszt finely called him, but the secrets of the poet in words are beyond his ken.

Schumann had no doubt a far keener literary sense than Schubert: he had far wider intellectual interests, and was himself a prose writer of great gifts. Nevertheless, just as the famous "pork chops" sentence in Newman's "Loss and Gain" is, though the one solitary outbreak in his entire works, sufficient to support a psychological theory, so, when we hear Schumann's poetical insight lauded, we can point to the last line of "Das ist ein Floten und Geigen." Heine writes:

Dazwischen schluchzen und stöhnen

Die guten Engelein

clinching, by one inspired adjective, the whole wonderful lyric. Schumann, apparently, quoting (as he too often did) from memory, has

Die lieblichen Engelein.

Surely literary insensibility could hardly go further; and in spite of such flashes of insight as the subtly commonplace end of "Ein Jüng ling liebt ein Mädchen" (perhaps the most finde-siècle page in all classical music) and many more equally wonderful appreciations of the inner details of the words, we cannot get a lapse like this out of our minds. After all, with him, as with Brahms, it is still the emotion, not the poetry, that is set: they are both more generally cultured than Schubert, more. alive to the literary aspect, but no more than he are they inclined to forget that they are musicians or to hesitate at sacrificing verbal points in the interests of their own art.

Space forbids to treat of the operatic side of the problem, from Gluck through Mozart, Beethoven, Weber and Wagner, down to our own day. Here alien and complicating elements enter, but still, in spite of all that Gluck and Wagner said, the fact remains that all the greatest stage music is associated with situations where the words are, as poetry, relatively unimportant: indeed, in every one of the su

preme Wagnerian pages in which the voice has any share, it merely comes in where it can to reinforce the predominant instrumental appeal. Without one single exception, the kings of the art seem to have agreed that in vocal music at its highest the verbal factor must be secondary: the general mood of the words must be expressed as closely as may be, but to dwell overmuch on what are the vital details to the poet is to sacrifice something vital in the music, some necessary element in its formal or its material beauty.

It is no wonder that this unsatisfactory conclusion is challenged by the men of our own day who are, through no choice of their own, living in a world that is continually growing more and more "full of a number of things" (as Stevenson says), among which music is only one. We have to face the fact that in all the greatest vocal music of the past either the words have mattered virtually not at all or only so much as to demand, for the listener's appreciation, some general knowledge of their drift: the music would be equally supreme if sung in Kamchatkan, provided we knew vaguely what it was all about. But (beginning with Wagner in his less inspired moments), modern vocal composers have now inevitably abandoned this attitude: we are now (and

quite rightly in our generation) committed to the task of combining such musical inspiration as we can command with fidelity to the demands of our non-musical self for high literature, expressed not merely in general mood, but with the poet's own love for all the details that make up the whole. We are learning that vocal music can deal with poems of infinitely more varied themes than those to which it was once restricted: and simultaneously, though without anything like the same justification, instrumental music, apart from any accompanying words, is allying itself more and more with verbal images, with the arts of the painter and the novelist. In this matter of clashing interests, how are we to preserve the pure primal fire which is the life of all the classic tonal art -the fire of "abstract music"? Let us pray that we may not be forced to stretch out our hands to a dim and distant vision, and cry, like the gladiator of old, Ave, Dea, movituri te salutamus.

ber 7 until end of December, 1797. Suddenly, beginning with January 1, 1798, the announcements of the very same company are headed "Charleston Theatre."

The explanation is simple enough if one happened to notice in the City Gazette of February 12 a card by "The Proprietor of the City Theatre," in which he announces his removal to the Charleston Theatre in Broad street for the remainder of the season. This shifting process was repeated several times, but logically performances given by the City The atre Company at the Charleston Theatre cannot be credited to the managers of the latter. Otherwise the utmost confusion would be the result, as less than a fortnight after the close of the season just mentioned (March 29) the Charleston Theatre was reopened by a totally different company, called "The Charleston Comedians." The reason of Mr. Sollee, or his representatives, for relinquishing the City Theatre was admittedly its shaky condition. They hastened to employ the best architects to strengthen the building, and after seven architects had publicly pronounced the building safe, the City Theatre was again thrown open to the lovers of drama and opera from October 28, 1799, until end of March, 1800. However, the managers themselves appear to have felt uneasy and they again preferred to lease the Charleston Theatre for the remainder of the season. Therewith ends the career of both theatres during the eighteenth century, and as a kind of odd epilogue the fact may be mentioned that the manager of the ill-fated Charleston Theatre in the summer of 1800 opened on Sullivan's Island "a spacious and well ventilated saloon.. to be distinguished as the South Carolina Lyceum," where for twenty nights plays, readings, concerts and assemblies were dispensed "for utility, amuse.ment and instruction."

When the war broke out, Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, had enjoyed for many years a familiarity with the English operas of the age, and the re-establishment of the theatre in these cities after the war might be likened to the renewal of a friendship interrupted by unfavorable circumstances. No

such traditions were alive in Boston when in the last decade of the century Bostonians, in addition to the many and well managed

did so with a vengeance, and it would have been better for the development of opera in Boston had the interest for the novel entertainment assumed a less explosive nature.

It will be remembered that all attempts to establish opera at Boston were frustrated, particularly after the very stringent blue law of 1750 went into effect. However, this law could not prevent the importation of opera librettos and the customary "favorite songs" from popular operas for reading purposes and enjoyment in the home circle. Nor did the framers of the law foresee that a loophole was left for the reading of operas in public. Such primitive opera performances in concert garb, especially of the classic "Beggar's Opera," are on record for the year 1769 and later; but from these hybrid entertainments to operatic opera was a long step.

In

The first serious effort to. break down the Chinese wall against plays was made in 1790, when Hallam and Henry submitted a formal petition for permission to open a theatre at Boston. Upon its refusal the friends of the drama adopted more energetic measures. the fall of 1791 two meetings were held at Faneuil Hall to urge the repeal of the law of 1750, and how stormy they were may be illustrated by the fact that even Samuel Adams could not gain the ears of the assembly when he attempted to speak in favor of the hated act. However, when on January 17, 1792, Mr. Tudor brought the grievances of the meeting before the legislature, the house voted the petition down, while complimenting the advocates of the grievance on their "blaze of eloquence."

This vote by no means settled the problem, as a number of influential citizens, in open defiance of the law, proceeded to erect a building in Board Alley, which would be a theatre in everything but in name. It was called the "New Exhibition Room," was opened on August 16, 1792, and under the management of Mr. Harper soon a fairly interesting repertoire of dramas, operas and pantomimes was presented under the veil of "Lectures, Moral and Entertaining." But this disguise was too thin for His Excellency Governor Hancock, and the Attorney General arrested Mr. Harper in December in the midst of a benefit performThis raid is supposed to have stopped

ance.