period, the less emotional situations are sometimes set to music which has little interest except as a document in the history of the art. This must not be taken to mean merely that Gluck could not, like Mozart and nearly all the great song-writers, set good music to a bad text. Such inability would prove Gluck’s superior literary taste without casting a slur on his musicianship. But it points to a certain weakness as a musician that Gluck could not be inspired except by the more thrilling portions of his libretti. When he was inspired there was no question that he was the first and greatest writer of dramatic music before Mozart. To begin with, he could invent sublime melodies; and his power of producing great musical effects by the simplest means was nothing short of Handelian. Moreover, in his peculiar sphere he deserves the title generally accorded to Haydn of “father of modern orchestration.” It is misleading to say that he was the first to use the timbre of instruments with a sense of emotional effect, for Bach and Handel well knew how to give a whole aria or whole chorus peculiar tone by means of a definite scheme of instrumentation. But Gluck did not treat instruments as part of a decorative design, any more than he so treated musical forms. Just as his sense of musical form is that of Philipp Emmanuel Bach and of Mozart, so is his treatment of instrumental tone-colour a thing that changes with every shade of feeling in the dramatic situation, and not in accordance with any purely decorative scheme. To accompany an aria with strings, oboes and flutes, was, for example, a perfectly ordinary procedure; nor was there anything unusual in making the wind instruments play in unison with the strings for the first part of the aria, and writing a passage for one or more of them in the middle section. But it was an unheard-of thing to make this passage consist of long appoggiaturas once every two bars in rising sequence on the first oboe, answered by deep pizzicato bass notes, while Agamemnon in despair cries: “J’entends retentir dans mon sein le cri plaintif de la nature.” Some of Gluck’s most forcible effects are of great subtlety, as, for instance, in Iphigénie en Tauride, where Orestes tries to reassure himself by saying: “Le calme rentre dans mon cœur,” while the intensely agitated accompaniment of the strings belies him. Again, the sense of orchestral climax shown in the oracle scene in Alceste was a thing inconceivable in older music, and unsurpassed in artistic and dramatic spirit by any modern composer. Its influence in Mozart’s Idomeneo is obvious at a first glance.
The capacity for broad melody always implies a true sense of form, whether that be developed by skill or not; and thus Gluck, in rejecting the convenient formalities of older styles of opera, was not, like some reformers, without something better to substitute for them. Moreover he, in consultation with his librettist, achieved great skill in holding together entire scenes, or even entire acts, by dramatically apposite repetitions of short arias and choruses. And thus in large portions of his finest works the music, in spite of frequent full closes, seems to move pari passu with the drama in a manner which for naturalness and continuity is surpassed only by the finales of Mozart and the entire operas of Wagner. This is perhaps most noticeable in the second act of Orfeo. In its original Italian version both scenes, that in Hades and that in Elysium, are indivisible wholes, and the division into single movements, though technically obvious, is aesthetically only a natural means of articulating the structure. The unity of the scene in Hades extends, in the original version, even to the key-system. This was damaged when Gluck had to transpose the part of Orpheus from an alto to a tenor in the French version. And here we have one of many instances in which the improvements his French experience enabled him to make in his great Italian works were not altogether unmixed. Little harm, however, was done to Orfeo which has not been easily remedied by transposing Orpheus’s part back again; and in a suitable compromise between the two versions Orfeo remains Gluck’s most perfect and inspired work. The emotional power of the music is such that the inevitable spoiling of the story by a happy ending has not the aspect of mere conventionality which it had in cases where the music produced no more than the normal effect upon 18th-century audiences. Moreover Gluck’s genius was of too high an order for him to be less successful in portraying a sufficiently intense happiness than in portraying grief. He failed only in what may be called the business capacities of artistic technique; and there is less “business” in Orfeo than in almost any other music-drama. It was Gluck’s first great inspiration, and his theories had not had time to take action in paper warfare. Alceste contains his grandest music and is also very free from weak pages; but in its original Italian version the third act did not give Gluck scope for an adequate climax. This difficulty so accentuated itself in the French version that after continual retouchings a part for Hercules was, in Gluck’s absence, added by Gossec; and three pages of Gluck’s music, dealing with the supreme crisis where Alceste is rescued from Hades (either by Apollo or by Hercules) were no longer required in performance and have been lost. The Italian version is so different from the French that it cannot help us to restore this passage, in which Gluck’s music now stops short just at the point where we realize the full height of his power. The comparison between the Italian and French Alceste is one of the most interesting that can be made in the study of a musician’s development. It would have been far easier for Gluck to write a new opera if he had not been so justly attached to his second Italian masterpiece. So radical are the differences that in retranslating the French libretto into Italian for performance with the French music not one line of Calzabigi’s original text can be retained.
In Iphigénie en Aulide and Iphigénie en Tauride, Gluck shows signs that the controversies aroused by his methods began to interfere with his musical spontaneity. He had not, in Orfeo, gone out of his way to avoid rondos, or we should have had no “Che faro senza Euridice.” We read with a respectful smile Gluck’s assurance to the bailli Le Blanc du Roullet that “you would not believe Armide to be by the same composer” as Alceste. But there is no question that Armide is a very great work, full of melody, colour and dramatic point; and that Gluck has availed himself of every suggestion that his libretto afforded for orchestral and emotional effects of an entirely different type from any that he had attempted before. And it is hardly relevant to blame him for his inability to write erotic music. In the first place, the libretto is not erotic, though the subject would no doubt become so if treated by a modern poet. In the second place a conflict of passions (as, for instance, where Armide summons the demons of Hate to exorcise love from her heart, and her courage fails her as soon as they begin) has never, even in Alceste, been treated with more dramatic musical force. The work as a whole is unequal, partly because there is a little too much action in it to suit Gluck’s methods; but it shows, as does no other opera until Mozart’s Don Giovanni, a sense of the development of characters, as distinguished from the mere presentation of them as already fixed.
In Iphigénie en Aulide and Iphigénie en Tauride, the very subtlety of the finest features indicates a certain self-consciousness which, when inspiration is lacking, becomes mannerism. Moreover, in both cases the libretti, though skilfully managed, tell a rather more complicated story than those which Gluck had hitherto so successfully treated; and, where inspiration fails, the musical technique becomes curiously amateurish without any corresponding naïveté. Still these works are immortal, and their finest passages are equal to anything in Alceste and Orfeo. Écho et Narcisse we must, like Gluck’s contemporaries, regard as a failure. As in Orfeo, the pathetic story is ruined by a violent happy ending, but here this artistic disaster takes place before the pathos has had time to assert itself. Gluck had no opportunities in this work for any higher qualities, musical or dramatic, than prettiness; and with him beauty, without visible emotion, was indeed skin-deep. It is a pity that the plan of the great Pelletan-Damcke critical édition de luxe of Gluck’s French operas forbids the inclusion of his Italian Paride e Elena, his third opera to Calzabigi’s libretto, which was never given in a French version; for there can be no question that, whatever he owed to France, the
