CHRISTOPH WILLIBALD GLUCK WAS BORN in 1714, the son of a Bohemian forester. After acquiring some knowledge of music in the elementary schools, he went to Prague, where he remained from 1732 to 1736. After a short spell at Vienna as a chamber musician in the employ of Prince Ferdinand Philip Lobkowitz, he was sent by another noble patron to study with Giovanni Battista Sammartini (1701–75) at Milan.
No details of his early musical education are known for certain, although he must have become acquainted in Prague with the current Italian opera as represented by Hasse, and while at Vienna, he would have heard the older style of Caldara. At Vienna likewise he met Metastasio, whose poetry appealed to him as to every other opera composer; seventeen of Gluck’s operas were on Metastasian librettos. His studies with Sammartini opened to him the new world of modern symphonic music. His first ten operas were successfully performed at Milan and other Italian cities between 1741 and 1745. They are distinguished from those of contemporary Italian composers by a certain melodic freedom and individual energy of expression, but they show no traces of the revolutionary principles for which he later became famous.1
In the season of 1745–46, Gluck visited London, where he presented two operas with particular success and drew upon himself the oft-quoted remark of Handel to the effect that “he [Gluck] knows no more of counterpoint than Waltz, my cook.” Nevertheless, Gluck made friends with the older composer and was undoubtedly impressed by his music, though the influence exerted itself only considerably later and then indirectly, in the form of an ideal of grandeur that Gluck embodied in his own particular way in the reform operas. The two years following the visit to London were spent in touring Germany as conductor with a traveling opera company. Le nozze d’Ercole e d’Ebe, a serenata performed at a wedding in Pillnitz (near Dresden) in 1747, shows Gluck as an accomplished composer in a rather pretty, trifling Italian style.2 In this work, as indeed in all his operas, Gluck followed the eighteenth-century custom of borrowing numbers from his own previous works or even from those of other composers: several arias are from earlier Gluck operas, and the first movement of the overture is taken from a symphony of Sammartini, with only slight alterations. The aria “Così come si accese,” from the epilogue, is typical of the graceful, tuneful, Pergolesi-like melodies in which this work abounds (example 14.1).
Gluck’s first opera for Vienna, Semiramide riconosciuta, opened the newly renovated Burgtheater in May 1748. It was produced prior to the arrival in the imperial city of Count Giacomo Durazzo, with whom Gluck entered into a collaborative partnership in 1755. In 1750 Gluck was married in Vienna. The substantial dowery his wife brought him undoubtedly encouraged a certain independence that Gluck began to manifest about this time. Concrete evidence of the new attitude is found in the scores of Ezio (Prague, 1750) and La clemenza di Tito (Naples, 1752), both on librettos of Metastasio. In carefulness of orchestral writing, nobility of melody, and seriousness of expression, these works surpass not only the earlier operas but also most of the Italian ones of the next ten years. The characteristic vigor that had always been remarked in Gluck’s music, and the growing individuality of his methods, may have been what caused Metastasio about this time to describe him as a composer of “surprising fire, but … mad.”3 It was the cry of the conservative, instinctively recognizing the presence of a force inimical to the settled state of affairs. Yet it was to be ten years before Gluck composed Orfeo, and during that time he still produced some works in the old manner, as well as a sparkling one-act comic piece, Le cinesi (1754), on a libretto of Metastasio, for the entertainment of the imperial court. The success of this work was instrumental in securing for him the position of official court composer of theater and chamber music under the superintendency of Count Durazzo, whose influence and encouragement played a large part in determining the new artistic ideals that were then developing in Gluck’s mind. Their first collaborative work, the one-act Innocenza giustificata (1755), although apparently conforming to the Metastasian type of libretto, is in actuality a forerunner of the monumental simplicity of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, with the musical resources (including a chorus) largely subordinated to the dramatic aims. This work was revised by Gluck in 1768 under the title La Vestale; it is the same subject as that of Spontini’s opera of 1807.
EXAMPLE 14.1 Le nozze d’Ercole e d’Ebe
Another important influence on Gluck in the years immediately preceding the composition of Orfeo was his contact with the opéra comique, which made its appearance in Vienna as early as 1752.4 This distinctive national form of comic opera had grown up at Paris, at first using only popular melodies to which poets fitted their words but coming toward the middle of the century to make use of more and more original music, while at the same time improving in poetic quality and musical interest. The Viennese court being curious to hear these pieces, Durazzo arranged for some to be sent from Paris. Gluck was charged with the duty of conducting the performances; this entailed arranging the music and composing new numbers wherever it was thought the original melodies might not be suited to the Viennese taste. As the number of performances of opéras comiques in Vienna steadily increased, so too did the proportion of new music, until in La Rencontre imprévue (1764) not one of the original French airs was retained, the entire text having been newly set by Gluck.5 Thus, as it were by accident, the composer in his forties found himself enrolled in the school of French opéra comique composition, learning a syllabic style of text setting, a melodic restraint, a freedom of phrase structure, and a close adaptation of music to poetry, which contrasted with the typical Italian arias in an extreme degree. How thoroughly he assimilated the French musical idiom may be gathered not only from the scores but also from the testimony of the French poet and manager Favart, who speaks with highest praise of Gluck’s settings of his librettos: “They leave nothing to be desired in the expression, the taste, the harmony, even in the French prosody.”6
A final stage of preparation for Orfeo was the composition of music for Angiolini’s ballet Don Juan in 1761, a work that seems as though designed to illustrate the new principles outlined by Noverre in his book on the dance that had been published only a year previously.7 As in the opéras comiques, in which Gluck had learned to subordinate music to text, so here he adapted his art to the service of pantomime. There is in this music something of Rameau’s wonderful power of depicting gesture in sound, and as in the older opera, the score is divided into many short numbers, each complete in itself. But the music is more than mere accompaniment to patterns of motion; it enters into the action and becomes a partner of the drama figured forth by the dancers. Part of the closing scene between Don Juan and the Statue will serve to show this quality and also to suggest how Mozart must have remembered, perhaps unconsciously, the music of Gluck when composing his own Don Giovanni (example 14.2). Indeed, comparison between the two works is almost inevitable, though it is not in superficial thematic resemblances but rather in the whole spirit of the music that Mozart’s indebtedness to the older composer is evident.8
With the composition of Don Juan, Gluck stood at the parting of the ways. Having begun with the conventional Italian operatic formulas and having reached the point of instilling into this framework a new breath of dramatic life, he might have continued along the lines of Jommelli and Traetta, toward the type of opera that Mozart eventually brought to unsurpassable heights. That Gluck’s genius now took a different turn was not owing to any inner compulsion of Gluck the musician but rather to a quite unexpected development of Gluck the dramatist—a development for which at this moment external forces were largely responsible. These forces were immanent in the whole intellectual and artistic atmosphere of the later eighteenth century.9 Fundamental was the profound yearning for free, simple, unaffected expression of human feelings. The Baroque had been an age of order, authority, and formality, to which the early eighteenth century had reacted with the critical and skeptical philosophy of rationalism, summed up in the works of Voltaire. Into the vacuum created by this essentially negative criticism, there rushed the earlier manifestations of mannered sentimentality and capricious, superficial ornamentation, extending through all the details of life and mirrored in music of the galant style. But mere caprice was not enough. To the galant ideal succeeded that of naturalness, whose great prophet was Jean Jacques Rousseau with his Nouvelle Héloise (1760) and Emile (1762), the fountains of the Romantic movement in literature.
EXAMPLE 14.2 Don Juan, No. 30
Yet naturalness, however valid as an ideal, was too vague to furnish by itself a sure foundation for art; not only an ideal but a form as well was needed, and the form—the regulating, ordering principle without which great artistic creation is impossible—was sought now, as it had been at the time of the Renaissance, in the models of the classical age of ancient Greece. In 1764 a German archaeologist, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, published his Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of Ancient Art), embodying the fruits of nearly twenty years of study and meditation; from this publication may be said to date the epoch of European art known as the neo-classical period. Winckelmann’s work was not only a history but also a philosophy of art, which served in some degree to counteract the dangers of unrestrained individualism implicit in the doctrines of Rousseau. Beauty, according to this philosophy, can be attained only when individual characteristic details are subordinated to the general plan of the whole, thus creating an ideal, suprapersonal work marked by harmonious proportions and a certain repose in the total effect—in Winckelmann’s phrase, “noble simplicity and calm greatness.”10
It may be doubted whether Gluck ever read either Rousseau’s or Winckelmann’s books, though he probably had met Winckelmann at Rome in 1756. In any case, the question is not important, for the ideas both men expressed were so much in the air at this time that no thinking person could possibly have escaped them. With regard to the classic models, of course, the same difficulty was present as in the Renaissance, namely, the lack of actual specimens of ancient music. But theorists in the eighteenth century did not trouble to speculate, as the Florentine camerata had done, on the nature of Greek music; rather, they attacked the problem of opera at its root, advocating fundamental changes in the libretto and in the relations among composer, poet, and performing artists. The most influential writer in this field was the Italian Francesco Algarotti, a highly esteemed philosopher, a friend of Voltaire and Frederick the Great, and artistic adviser to the court of Parma, where Traetta was working. His Saggio sopra l’opera in musica (Treatise on the Opera), first issued in 1755, became the manifesto of operatic reform, influencing even in details both the practice and the theory of Gluck.11 The resemblance between Algarotti’s book and Gluck’s preface to Alceste (1769) leaves no room for doubt on this point.
The fundamental impulse, the suggestion of a model, and the aesthetic theory were thus present, and at this moment appeared the poet Ranieri de Calzabigi (1714–95), from whose collaboration with Gluck Orfeo and Alceste resulted.12 Calzabigi was the real standard-bearer of the revolt against Metastasio, in spite of the fact that he had earlier brought out at Paris an edition of the latter’s works, which in the preface he characterized as “perfect tragedies.”13 He had led an adventurous life in Italy, Paris, and elsewhere; he was known as a literary amateur and aesthetician, and was an admirer of Shakespeare. Gluck handsomely acknowledged his indebtedness to Calzabigi: “If my music has had some success, I think it my duty to recognize that I am beholden for it to him…. However much talent a composer may have, he will never produce any but mediocre music, if the poet does not awaken in him that enthusiasm without which the productions of all the arts are but feeble and drooping.”14 Calzabigi himself went so far as to claim, without contradiction from Gluck, that it was he who had taught the composer exactly how to write his recitatives and had persuaded him to banish both coloratura passages and the secco accompaniment of recitative from his operas.15
Orfeo ed Euridice, the first joint work of Calzabigi and Gluck, was performed at Vienna on October 5, 1762, to celebrate the emperor’s name day.16 Thus the new reform began with the same subject as that of the first Florentine operas of 1600. Aside from two incongruous features—the festive overture and the artificial happy ending (both prompted by the joyous occasion for which the opera was written, where too much tragedy would have been out of place)—the work is a profound contrast to the contemporary Italian operas. On the title page of the libretto for the first production, as well as in the first engraved edition of the score, it is called an azione teatrale—a designation commonly used with eighteenth-century Italian works that, unlike the regular dramma per musica, made considerable use of the chorus. The plot is simplified to the verge of austerity, and it is presented in a series of tableaux rather than as a connected story. Eurydice has died before the action begins, and the curtain rises to show Orpheus and the chorus lamenting over her bier; the tombeau was a favorite type of scene in French opera, a fine example of which may be found at the opening of Act I of Rameau’s Castor et Pollux. The choral lament is intensified by Orpheus’s moving cries of “Euridice!”; there follow a short recitative and a ballo, that is, a solemn dance, after which the lament is resumed. At its conclusion, Orpheus sings his aria “Chiamo il mio ben cosi,” in F major, three strophes separated by short recitatives, a simple expression of grief made more poignant through echo repetitions of the closing phrases by a second orchestra behind the scenes. A final outburst of sorrow is interrupted by the appearance of the God of Love, who in pity directs Orpheus to seek his departed wife in the realms of the dead.
The opening of Act II shows the Furies guarding the gates of the underworld; their fierce denials Orpheus overcomes by the magic power of his singing. A gradual lessening of tension leads naturally into the next scene of the Elysian Fields, where a mood of bright, serene happiness is sustained throughout with remarkable consistency. This scene is introduced by the famous ballo terzo (the dance of the happy spirits), followed by the lovely arioso “Che puro ciel,” with its delicately pictorial accompaniment. Eurydice appears, conducted by a train of Blessed Spirits. Everything moves with a still, unearthly, dreamlike motion. With the third act, the mood is abruptly broken; we suddenly find ourselves watching a human-interest drama. The first part of this act is less interesting musically, though it brings the catastrophe of the action. Orpheus, no longer able to withstand the pleadings of Eurydice, looks back, and her death is followed by that ideal, classic outpouring of grief “Che faro senza Euridice?” which in its profoundly simple feeling is matched in opera only by the closing solo of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Here the action properly concludes, but since the occasion required a happy ending, the God of Love once more appears and restores Eurydice to life. General rejoicings, with ballets and chorus, furnish the closing scene, which thus, with the overture, frames this antique myth for presentation to a European court of the eighteenth century.
In no other work did Gluck realize so consciously and so fully the effect of classic, statuesque repose as in Orfeo. The music, like the libretto, is denuded of all unnecessary ornament; nothing in it calls attention to itself. The forms are clearly perceived but freely intermingled and always appropriate to the moods and situations; the extremes of recitativo semplice on the one hand and of coloratura aria on the other are abolished. Always the simplest means are used, and yet these produce an effect apparently out of all proportion to their simplicity. It can hardly be said that the music is in any degree suppressed in favor of poetry, even in the recitatives, which are certainly more musical and expressive than those of Lully or Rameau.17 Rather, the music is purified; it is as though Gluck, by voluntarily abandoning the outward charms of Italian operatic melody, stimulated the sources of inward beauty.
The full score was printed at Paris in 1764—one of the very few Italian operas to be published since 1639. Its popularity may be inferred both from this fact and from the number of parodies that appeared in the latter half of the eighteenth century.18 A decade later, in 1774, Orfeo was performed at Paris with a French libretto, some added ballets, and a change of the role of Orpheus from contralto to tenor, which also involved some changes in the key scheme.
The five years after Orfeo were occupied with the composition of two other Italian operas, Il trionfo di Clelia and Alceste, and a number of lesser works.19 Alceste, the second opera on which Gluck and Calzabigi collaborated, was first performed in Vienna on December 26, 1767. It is based on a Greek subject first dramatized by Euripides. Like Orfeo, the opera exists in both the original form and a revision made for Paris (in 1776). The differences between these two versions are more extensive than those of Orfeo, but, as in the earlier work, it is hardly possible to decide which is superior. Both have certain faults of dramatic construction, chiefly the artificial ending. King Admetus lies at the point of death; an oracle decrees his life may be spared if another will die in his stead. His wife, Alcestis, offers herself as the victim but is rescued and restored to Admetus—in Calzabigi’s poem by Apollo, and in the Paris version by Hercules. The latter accords with the Greek original, but in both librettos the interference has the character of a mere arbitrary act of magnanimity on the part of a conventional eighteenth-century deus ex machina instead of being motivated, as in Euripides, by a feeling of gratitude for hospitality. Still, as Einstein points out, the strength of this motif, however it may have been appreciated by the Athenians, could not have been made clear to a modern audience, for whom the spectacle of Alcestis’s sacrificial devotion was bound to overshadow all other interests. Thus the opera centers around the heroine, in comparison with whom the other figures count for little.
Gluck had called Orfeo an azione teatrale; Alceste he designated a tragedia per musica. The entire action is on a grander scale than in Orfeo. It is organized, in a manner similar to Traetta’s operas, into monumental scene-complexes with large choruses, which are the most prominent features of the score. The first act is the most unified and satisfactory, from the truly tragic overture that leads directly into the opening outburst of the chorus, the announcement by the herald of Admetus’s impending death, and the choruses of mourning, proceeding in an unbroken crescendo of interest through the pronouncement of the oracle, and climaxing with Alcestis’s heroic resolve and her famous aria “Divinités du Styx.” The second act (in the Paris version) opens with the needed contrast, the dances and choruses of rejoicing over Admetus’s recovery. The dramatic entrance of Alcestis, and the revelation to the king of the identity of his rescuer, lead to some remarkable recitative dialogue, ending with Alcestis’s cavatina “Ah! malgré moi,” the agitated second part of which is broken by a short choral interlude. The third act is dramatically an anticlimax, the action remaining for a long while just where it was at the end of Act II, but the music is notable for the choruses, the strangely calm and yet moving aria of Alcestis, “Ah, divinités implacables,” and a fine passionate aria of Admetus, “Alceste, au nom des Dieux.”20 After a banal final chorus, the opera closes with the customary suite of ballets.
When the score of Alceste was published at Vienna in 1769, it contained a dedicatory preface that is the clearest and fullest statement of Gluck’s and Calzabigi’s new ideals for opera. This preface has been reproduced so many times, and is so easily accessible in translation, that it does not seem necessary to quote it in full here.21 Like many history-making documents, it embodied no ideas that had not been stated before; it was a defense of a fait accompli rather than a program for the future. It voiced the usual arguments against the caprice and vanity of singers and against the domination of musical stereotypes over the requirements of the text, and it set forth the purpose of the overture in much the same way that Algarotti had done. Most significantly, it enunciated Gluck’s musical aesthetic in a famous simile:
I have striven to restrict music to its true office of serving poetry by means of expression and by following the situations of the story, without interrupting the action or stifling it with a useless superfluity of ornaments; and I believed that it should do this in the same way as telling colors affect a correct and well-ordered drawing; by a well-assorted contrast of light and shade, which serves to animate the figures without altering their contours.22
Such self-abasement would have been inconceivable to an Italian composer of the old school, for whom the story existed only as a pretext for the music. In the preface to Paride et Elena (1770), Gluck (or Calzabigi) was even more explicit: “He who is concerned with truthfulness must model himself to his subject, and the noblest beauties of harmony and melody become serious faults if they are misplaced.”23 Such a theory strongly suggests the later doctrines of Wagner, and it has sometimes been cited as evidence of the latter’s ignorance of operatic history, or of his egoistic jealousy, that he failed to recognize the fundamental kinship of Gluck’s ideas with his own when he proclaimed that “the famous revolution of Gluck…really consisted only in the revolt of the composer against the arbitrariness of the singer.”24 But Wagner was right inasmuch as he was judging by results, not by professed intentions, for Gluck did not fully carry out the implications of his own theories. How far the comparative simplicity of his music was the result of his aesthetic beliefs, and how far the beliefs were ex post facto attempts to justify his practice, is not easy to say. He was not a great technician, and though he probably did know more about counterpoint than Handel’s cook, he certainly was not a match for either Hasse or Jommelli in facility of invention or power of sustained thematic development in long arias. Moreover, the art of singing was already on the decline; there were no more artists of the caliber of Farinelli, even if Gluck could or would have written for them. By way of compensation, orchestral technique was steadily improving. One cannot therefore totally exclude the possibility that Gluck’s ideas of the subordination of music, of formal freedom, plainness of diction, and importance of orchestration were, if not actually inspired, at least supported by very practical considerations. At any rate, they had a certain measure of success. When Charles Burney visited Vienna in 1772, he reported the operatic situation in these words:
Party runs as high among poets, musicians, and their adherents, at Vienna as elsewhere. Metastasio, and Hasse, may be said, to be at the head of one of the principal sects; and Calzabigi and Gluck of another. The first, regarding all innovations as quackery, adhere to the ancient form of the musical drama, in which the poet and musician claim equal attention from an audience; the bard in the recitatives and narrative parts; and the composer in the airs, duos, and choruses. The second party depend more on theatrical effects, propriety of character, simplicity of diction, and of musical execution, than on, what they style, flowery descriptions, superfluous similes, sententious and cold morality, on one side, with tiresome symphonies, and long divisions, on the other.25 … The chevalier Gluck is simplifying music…he tries all he can to keep his music chaste and sober, his three operas of Orfeo, Alceste, and Paride are proof of this, as they contain few difficulties of execution, though many of expression.26
I cannot quit Hasse and Gluck, without saying that it is very necessary to use discrimination in comparing them together. Hasse may be regarded as the Raphael, and … Gluck the Michael Angelo of living composers. If the affected French expression of le grand simple can ever mean anything, it must be when applied to the productions of such a composer as Hasse, who succeeds better perhaps in expressing, with clearness and propriety, whatever is graceful, elegant, and tender, than what is boisterous and violent; whereas Gluck’s genius seems more calculated for exciting terror in painting difficult situations, occasioned by complicated misery, and the tempestuous fury of unbridled passions.27
Reading between the lines, it is easy to see that Burney’s sympathies are temperamentally with Hasse rather than with Gluck, and this lends added weight to his testimony as to the enthusiasm with which both Orfeo and Alceste were received at Vienna. By comparison, Paride ed Elena, the next production of Gluck and Calzabigi, was a failure, and whether for this reason or another, they collaborated no more.
Gluck remained dissatisfied. His new style met with no understanding and but little attention outside the Vienna circle. Durazzo, meanwhile, had gone as ambassador to Venice in 1764; Calzabigi left Vienna sometime in 1772 to take up residence in Italy. Gluck’s native tenacity rebelled at the prospect of only an incomplete triumph. Moreover, he had suffered financial reverses and doubtless felt the need to recoup his fortunes. Paris was the only city in Europe that offered the possibilities he sought, and his inclination to try his luck there was strengthened by the fact that the new dauphine of France, Marie Antoinette, who had formerly been his singing pupil at the imperial court, was still interested in his career. Fortunately also, the situation in Paris was favorable for him. The old French opera, incurably conservative, had declined steadily in prestige since the middle of the century and was under constant critical attack from the partisans of Italian music, led by Rousseau. Although Gluck himself was probably not well known in Paris, the works of the German symphonists had been favorably received there for many years. In 1772 Gluck began the composition of lphigénie en Aulide, a “tragédie opéra” on a libretto adapted from Racine’s tragedy by Du Roullet, a member of the French embassy staff at Vienna. By a combination of skillful diplomacy and the powerful intercession of Marie Antoinette, the score was accepted; Gluck directed the carefully rehearsed first performance at Paris on April 19, 1774, and the work had an immediate success.
What chiefly distinguishes Iphigénie en Aulide from Orfeo and Alceste is the greater rapidity and decisiveness of the action; it is a drama of events rather than a series of comparatively static pictures. As a consequence, the rhythm is more animated, the declamation more pointed, and the musical units shorter, more continuous, more completely intermingled, less self-sufficient than in the earlier works. When Burney visited Gluck at Vienna, the composer sang for him almost the whole of Iphigénie en Aulide, which he had (according to his custom) already composed in his mind though not yet set down on paper, and it was doubtless this work that led Burney to remark that “it seldom happens that a single air of his operas can be taken out of its niche, and sung singly, with much effect; the whole is a chain, of which a detached single link is but of small importance.”28 Gluck himself expressed the same idea: lamenting the insufficiency of melody and even of harmony for the expression of certain emotions, and speaking particularly of Achilles’ air “Calchas, d’un trait mortel percé” in lphigénie en Aulide, he said, “My magic consists only in the nature of the song that precedes this and the choice of instruments that accompany it.”29 Burney’s observation is especially applicable to the great scene at the end of Act II, where Agamemnon, wavering between his supposed duty to his country and his love for his daughter, in a magnificent monologue finally resolves to save Iphigenia’s life. Gluck’s power as a dramatist in this scene is surpassed only by some of the pages of his own later Iphigénie en Tauride. Another beautiful place is the farewell of Iphigenia in the third act (“Adieu! conservez dans votre âme”), surely, as Newman says, “one of the most perfect emotional utterances of the eighteenth century.”30 The overture to Iphigénie en Aulide, Gluck’s finest instrumental composition, still holds a place on symphonic programs.
The triumph of lphigénie en Aulide was followed by Paris performances of the revised versions of Orfeo (1774) and Alceste (1776), as well as by unsuccessful revivals of two of Gluck’s French opéras comiques. Meanwhile, the inevitable happened. A group of literati, headed by Jean François Marmontel, determined to furnish Paris the spectacle of a musical combat between the new lion and a representative of the Italian school. Their chosen champion was Niccolò Piccinni (1728–1800), a prolific composer of Italian operas.31 Trained at Naples, Piccinni wrote more than twelve operas for that city before composing for Rome La buona figliuola (1760), an opera buffa that would make him famous throughout Europe.32 Included among his pre-1760 works were examples of opere buffe (Le donne dispettose, 1754), opere serie (Zenobia, 1756), and intermezzos (La canterina, performed with L’Origille, 1760).33 Piccinni lent himself in all innocence to the proposed competition and came out of the affair a distressed and chastened man.34 The excitement in Paris over the squabbles of the “Gluckists” and “Piccinnists,” as over that of the Bouffonists (Querelle des Bouffons) twenty-five years earlier (dealt with in chapter fifteen), manifested a side of the Gallic temperament that usually leaves the Anglo-Saxon cold. Benjamin Franklin, then commissioner of the United States of America in Paris, was moved in 1778 to pen a satire in the manner of Swift:
We had been shown numberless skeletons of a kind of little fly, called an ephemera, whose successive generations, we were told, were bred and expired within the day. I happened to see a living company of them on a leaf, who appeared to be engaged in conversation. You know I understand all the inferior animal tongues. I listened through curiosity to the discourse of these little creatures; but as they, in their national vivacity, spoke three or four together, I could make but little of their conversation. I found, however, by some broken expressions that I heard now and then, they were disputing warmly on the merit of two foreign musicians, one a cousin, the other a moscheto; in which dispute they spent their time, seemingly as regardless of the shortness of life as if they had been sure of living a month. Happy people! thought I, you live certainly under a wise, just, and mild government, since you have no public grievances to complain of, nor any subject of contention but the perfections and imperfections of foreign music.35
Franklin’s badinage is less withering than the straight-faced observation of Symonds: “At times when politics have been dull, theology dormant, and science undemonstrative, even music has been found sufficient to excite a nation.”36
The pleasant idea was conceived of having both Gluck and Piccinni compose music for the same libretto, Quinault’s Roland. When Gluck found that Piccinni was already working on such a project, he refused and produced instead a setting of Quinault’s Armide, which was performed in September 1777, four months before Piccinni was ready with his Roland. The latter had a better reception than its composer had hoped for, though his reputation in French opera was not made secure until later with Atys (1780), Didon (1783), and Pénélope (1785). Meanwhile, Gluck’s Armide was received with enthusiasm by his friends and disparagement by his enemies. The score is indeed uneven, partly because of the old-fashioned five-act libretto, which included many scenes not capable of stimulating the composer to his best efforts. Comparisons with Lully were to be expected, and verdicts were freely rendered in favor of one or the other according to the prepossessions of the critic. The most remarkable feature of the music is its idyllic, sensuous charm, giving a foretaste of the Romantic style. This may be heard particularly in the air “Plus j’observe ces lieux” (Act II, scene iii) and in the scene of parting between Armide and Renaud (Act V, scene i), a surprisingly passionate love duet for the eighteenth century. The chaconne in the following scene is one of Gluck’s noblest instrumental creations, a worthy companion to the chaconne in Rameau’s Castor et Pollux.
The last important work of Gluck, and his masterpiece, was Iphigénie en Tauride, first performed at Paris May 18, 1779.37 The libretto, written by Nicolas-François Guillard on the model of Euripides, is the best poem Gluck ever set, and the entire work, a real drama in music, probably comes as close as possible to the ideal of a modern revival of the spirit of Greek tragedy.38 It is an extraordinary and happy mixture of ancient and modern motifs. The sense of an inexorable Fate that drives human beings on to catastrophe is combined with vivid, contrasting characterization and masterly depiction of emotion: the noble pathos of Iphigenia; the sullen, superstitious cruelty of Thoas; the fearful remorse of Orestes; the friendship between him and Pylades; and the mysterious brother-sister love between Orestes and Iphigenia. All these were things calculated to call forth Gluck’s highest powers. These are displayed in the accompanied recitative, “Cette nuit j’ai rêvu le palais de mon père,” near the beginning of the first act, wherein Iphigenia relates her dream, which obscurely prefigures the course of the entire tragedy and serves in a manner as a substitute for the prologue of Euripides. It is not difficult to see in the music of these pages the source and model for nineteenth-century composers of similar scenes—Cherubini, Weber, Berlioz, even Wagner and Richard Strauss. Equally powerful is the gloomy air of Thoas, “De noirs pressentiments,” with its heavy dotted rhythm and rising arpeggio figures in the bass reaching up “like tentacles of the underworld.”39
The choruses intensify by contrast the outlines of these individual characters. Unlike in Alceste and the earlier Iphigénie, the chorus here takes no direct part in the action, except for a moment at the climax of the last act. For example, the priestesses of Diana (sopranos and altos) furnish an immobile, neutral-colored background for Iphigenia. Similarly, the chorus of Scythians (tenors and basses) is little else than spectacle, closely connected with a series of ballets whose descent from the exotic scenes of the traditional French ballet is obvious despite the alla turca style and the conventional “Turkish” instruments (cymbals, triangle, muffled drums) of the late eighteenth century.40 As for the chorus of the Eumenides in Act II, it is the personification of Orestes’s conscience, haunting him in a symbolic and terrible dream.
Iphigénie en Tauride has no formal overture but rather an introduction depicting first “the calm,” then a “storm”—no mere tour de force of nature painting (as often in earlier French opera) but a prelude leading naturally into the first scene, which opens with the cry of Iphigenia and the chorus, “Grands dieux! soyez-nous secourables!” Of the many fine details of the orchestral accompaniment in the course of the opera, one in particular may be mentioned: Orestes, left alone after Pylades has been arrested by the temple guards, falls into a half stupor; in pitiable self-delusion he tries to encourage the feeling of peace that descends upon him momentarily, singing “Le calme rentre dans mon crœur.” But the accompaniment, with a subdued, agitated sixteenth-note reiteration of one tone, and with a sforzando accent at the first beat of every measure, betrays the troubled state of his mind, from which he cannot banish the pangs of remorse for his past crime. It is perhaps the first occurrence in opera of this device of using the orchestra to reveal the inward truth of a situation, in distinction from, even in contradiction to, the words of the text—a practice that Wagner was later to incorporate in a complete system.
An important feature of this opera is the way in which Gluck returns to long-breathed, purely musical, even lyrical forms in the arias. It is as though the extreme of revolt against the dominance of music over poetry had passed, and the two were coming together again on equal terms. It is an example of the final stage of artistic revolutions, which usually end by taking over much of that which at first they had rejected. We are accustomed to regard Monteverdi, Gluck, and Wagner as three revolutionary figures in the history of opera, but we tend too much to emphasize what each rejected of the past and to lose sight of the fact that the end result in every case was an enrichment of the musical substance of opera by the incorporation of many earlier musical achievements, though in a new guise or with new significance. Gluck, as has already been mentioned, often used numbers from his earlier operas when composing a new score. Borrowings of this sort are especially frequent in his reform operas, and we are thus confronted with the realization that the works in which he is supposed to have renounced the ways of Italian opera are, to a considerable degree, made up of music from his own Italian operas of an earlier date.41 The opening of the overture and the aria “Diane impitoyable” in lphigénie en Aulide borrows material from Le Fête d’Apollo and Telemaco. The last-named work likewise supplied the overture to Armide. In Iphigénie en Tauride, the chorus of the Eumenides is taken from Semiramide riconosciuta, Iphigenia’s aria “O malheureuse Iphigenie” from La clemenza di Tito, and other portions from Telemaco. The reversion to musical opera, however, is more than a matter of a few borrowed numbers. The whole score of lphigénie en Tauride, particularly the arias, shows a tendency toward gathering the music into longer, more continuous, and more highly developed units. Even the old da capo appears in Orestes’s “Dieux qui me poursuivez,” a fine instance of the dramatically appropriate use of this form, and two of the other arias have the same pattern. Altogether, we may see in this work a reconciliation of the two elements, words and music, the conflict of which had so much occupied the thoughts of Gluck and his contemporaries.
Gluck’s last opera, Echo et Narcisse (1779), was not a success at Paris, in spite of some beautiful individual numbers, and he took the disappointment badly. He returned at once to Vienna, where he died in 1787.
It is difficult to define Gluck’s true significance for the history of opera. His essential achievement was the restoration of a more even balance between music and poetry, between what we may call the audible surface of opera and its dramatic content. His goal was to elevate the drama to a more important place and to reduce the musical excrescences of the preceding period. Paradoxically, he accomplished this by simplifying the libretto and enriching the music, by replacing the intricacies of Metastasian intrigue with the elemental actions of Greek drama, the roulades and ornaments of Hasse with his own harmonically conceived, orchestrally supported, oratorically molded melody, for which he obtained many suggestions from French opera. Gluck had a genius for achieving effects of sublimity by apparently simple means. At the same time, he enriched opera by bringing into it elements from both the ballet and the oratorio and by utilizing all resources of the operatic style in long complex scenes held together by broad principles of musical form.42 His reform works combined the simplicity of the opéra comique, the grandeur of the tragédie lyrique, the vocal charm of Italian opera seria, and the symphonic achievements of the Italian and German schools in an international, or rather supranational, opera, which corresponded at once to the demand of his contemporaries for naturalness, their interest in classical forms, and their passion for art with the moral aim of offering great models of heroism for contemplation. His success was due not only to his fiery temperament and his powers as a musician but also to his intellectual grasp of the moving ideas of his age, his gift for taking practical advantage of the means at hand, his willingness to compromise when necessary, and his peasant-like obstinacy in the pursuit of certain fundamental aims.
Nothing could be more misleading on the subject of Gluck than his own oft-quoted statement to the effect that when composing an opera he endeavored above all things to forget that he was a musician. Such a remark has all the characteristics of an epigram for the benefit of the French literary critics whom it was his interest to conciliate. Even if he himself by any chance believed there was an atom of meaning in it, there is no reason for us to take it seriously. On the contrary, he never forgot he was a musician, but he also never forgot that it was a drama he was composing, and so far as the later works are concerned, he composed it so carefully, his settings were so uniquely right, that he marks the beginning of the end of that era that regarded any libretto as any composer’s property and saw nothing extraordinary in seventy different settings of the same poem, all, if not perhaps equally good, at least equally suitable to the words. Gluck’s operas survive not because of their poems or because of anyone’s theories, but because of Gluck’s music, and his music survives while that of many cleverer composers is forgotten because it is in itself the drama, not a mere fashionable dress to cover a text.
The influence of Gluck on later composers was largely indirect. Something of his spirit may be sensed in Mozart’s Idomeneo of 1780 and Haydn’s Armida of 1784, but only at Paris did Gluck’s operas become part of the regular repertoire. Here too were presented some works by other composers in a style clearly derived from Gluck. Such were Didon (1783) by Niccolò Piccinni; Oedipe à Colone (1787) by Antonio Sacchini (1730–86), who worked at Paris after 1781;43 and Les Danaïdes (1784) and Tarare (1787) by Antonio Salieri (1750–1825), an Italian composer chiefly resident at Vienna.44 Salieri became a principal figure in the musical life of Paris, thanks to his lifelong friendship with Gluck; when Gluck no longer had the strength or desire to compose for the Paris Opéra, he offered Salieri the opportunity to take his place. Joseph II added his support to this idea, enthusiastically recommending the young composer to the management of the Opéra. Following the successful production of Les Danaïdes, Salieri’s first work for Paris, he continued to write for the Opéra, even though he was at the same time engaged by the emperor to create works in the opera buffa style for Vienna. His Tarare, a five-act tragédie lyrique with prologue, proved to be one of his finest operatic works, earning for him considerable acclaim from Parisian audiences.45
The influence of Gluck can also be traced in the French operas of Méhul, Cherubini, and Spontini, continuing on to the greatest of his nineteenth-century spiritual descendants, Berlioz. But the line, particularly as regards Berlioz, is through similarity of dramatic aims and ideals rather than in actual musical idiom. Outside France, Gluck made little permanent impression. Italy practically ignored him; there were a few performances of his later works in Germany in the eighteenth century, but on the whole that country remained under the Italian spell until a national opera began to develop with the approach of Romanticism.46 Gluck was, like Handel, the end of an epoch rather than the beginning. He sums up the classical age of serious opera as Handel does that of the late Baroque. The qualities of sincerity, uprightness, and honest dealing with the art of music are common to both men.
1. Of Gluck’s approximately one hundred dramatic works, about half have been preserved either wholly or in part. For a technical study of all the operas before Orfeo, with musical examples, see Kurth. “Die Jugendopern Glucks.” For studies of Gluck’s career in Vienna, see Gluck in Wien: Kongressbericht Wien 1987 and B. A. Brown, Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna. See also the special issues of Chigiana (1975); Marx, Gluck und die Oper; Newman, Gluck and the Opera; Heartz, “Coming of Age in Bohemia: The Musical Apprenticeships of Benda and Gluck”; and a biography by Prod’homme.
2. Serenata is the eighteenth-century name for a small opera or dramatic cantata, often of a pastoral nature and employing few characters, composed for a special occasion related to a patron’s household (such as a birthday or wedding).
3. Letter to Farinelli, November 16, 1751, in Burney, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Abate Metastasio, 1:402.
4. Haas, Gluck und Durazzo; Holzer, “Die komische Opern Glucks.”
5. Gluck’s involvement with the Viennese opéra comique extends from La Fausse Esclave (1758) to La Rencontre imprévue. See B. A. Brown, “Gluck’s Rencontre imprévue.” Count Carl von Zinzendorf attended the première of this opéra comique. He recorded his impressions of this theatrical event, and of many others in Vienna as well, in his journals, which are extant in the Haus-Hof-und Staatsarchiv, Vienna.
6. Letter to Durazzo, November 19,1763, in Favart, Mémoires, 2:169.
7. Cf. Haas, “Die Wiener Ballet-Pantomime im 18. Jahrhundert”; Testa, “Il binomio Gluck-Angiolini”; B. A. Brown, Gluck and the French Theater in Vienna, chap. 8.
8. Musical material from Don Juan reappears in Gluck’s later works (Orfeo and Armide) and in a symphony by Boccherini.
9. Cf. H. Abert, “Gluck, Mozart und der Rationalismus,” in his Gesammelte Schriften, 311–45.
10. Winckelmann, Sämtliche Werke, 1:1–58. He may have obtained the phrase from Gottsched:“Man sollte in der Opernmusik mehr auf eine edel Einfalt sehen, als auf die unförmlichen Ausschweifungen der Italiener” (Versuch einer kritischen Dichtkunst, 3:1734, quoted in Reichel, “Gottsched und Johann Adolf Scheibe,” 665).
11. See Strunk, ed., Source Readings (1950 ed.), 657–72. A summary of Algarotti’s teachings, with copious quotations, will be found in Newman, Gluck and the Opera, part 2, chap. 2.
12. Cf. Michel, “Ranieri Calzabigi,” Gluck-Jahrbuch (1918), 4:99–171; Hammelmann and Rose, “New Light on Calzabigi and Gluck.”
13. Cf. Einstein, “Calzabigi’s ‘Erwiderung’ von 1790.”
14. Letter in the Mercure de France, 1781, quoted in Einstein, Gluck (1936 ed.), 67–68.
15. Letter in the Mercure de France, August 1784, 135.
16. See Heartz, “Orfeo ed Euridice.”
17. See Meyer, Die Behandlung des Recitatives in Glucks italienischen Reformopern.
18. Cucuel, “Les Opéras de Gluck dans les parodies.”
19. Il trionfo di Clelia was commissioned for the opening of the Teatro Comunale at Bologna in 1763. See Unger, “Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Trionfo di Clelia.”
20. The aria of Hercules, “C’est en vain qua l’enfer,” was probably arranged (by Gossec) from an aria in Gluck’s Ezio.
21. See, for example, Strunk, ed., Source Readings (1950 ed.), 673–75.
22. As translated in Einstein, Gluck (1936 ed.), 93–99.
23. Quoted in Cooper, Gluck, 143.
24. Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften, 3:237.
25. Paraphrased from the preface to Alceste.
26. Burney, The Present State of Music in Germany, 2:232–33, 237.
27. Ibid., 2:349–50.
28. Burney, The Present State of Music in Germany, 2:262.
29. Reported in Le Journal de Paris, August 21, 1788, 1010, and quoted in Downes, “The Operas of Johann Christian Bach,” 1:202.
30. Newman, Gluck and the Opera, 128.
31. Cametti, “Saggio cronologico”; H. Abert, “Piccinni als Buffokomponist,” in his Gesammelte Schriften, 346–64. For studies of particular operas, see M. Hunter (Griselda), Rushton (Iphigénie en Tauride), and Ensslin (Catone in Utica).
32. For a discussion of his comic operas, see chapter fifteen.
33. Piccinni’s La canterina invites comparison with Haydn’s setting of the same text.
34. For details, see Pascazio, L’uomo Piccinni e la querelle célèbre; Desnoiresterres, Gluck et Piccinni; Strunk, ed., Source Readings (1950 ed.), 676–83.
35. Franklin, “The Ephemera,” 207. Quoted by permission of the publisher.
36. Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, 244.
37. Soon after its Paris premiere, Joseph II arranged for a performance of Iphigénie en Tauride, in German, by the National Singspiel in Vienna.
38. See Rushton, “Iphigénie en Tauride: The Operas of Gluck and Piccinni.”
39. Marx, Gluck und die Oper, 2:273. This rising broken-chord figure in the bass is a characteristic device of Gluck’s to suggest the supernatural.
40. The Scythian dances in both of the Iphigénie operas may be looked upon as models for later composers (such as Mozart and Meyerbeer) who created oriental operatic scenes. Gluck’s Le cinesi also includes the percussive sounds of “Turkish” music, which lend this court entertainment an air of exoticism in its non-European setting.
41. For a tabulation of these borrowings, see Hortschansky, Parodie und Entlehnung im Schaffen … Glucks, appendix 4.
42. Similar constructions are found in operas and oratorios earlier in the eighteenth century. See, for example, Handel’s Semele (1744), Act I, scenes i–iv.
43. Oedipe à Colone remained a favorite French repertory opera well into the nineteenth century. On Sacchini, see Jullien, La Cour et l’opéra sous Louis XVI and Thierstein, “Five French Operas of Sacchini.”
44. On Salieri, see Angermüller, Antonio Salieri: Sein Leben und seine weltlichen Werke; Rice, Antonio Salieri and Viennese Opera. On Salieri and the Paris Opéra, see Jullien, La Cour et l’opéra sous Louis XVI.
45. Beaumarchais’ libretto for Tarare was reworked into an Italian version by Da Ponte and entitled Axur, re d’Oremus. In his setting of the new libretto, Salieri not only composed a considerable amount of new music but also reused some of the musical material from Tarare. As a tragicomica, this new five-act opera was even more successful than its French counterpart, with some 100 performances staged in Vienna between 1788 and 1805.
46. For example, Iphigénie en Tauride was performed at the Weimar court theater in 1796 under the direction of Friedrich Schiller; see Longyear, “Schiller and Opera.”