By Duplessis
All the histories and memoirs of the time speak of the quarrel between the followers of Gluck and Piccini. Piccini represented the old Italian style and Gluck stood for the new dramatic style—the latest thing out it happened to be. The Piccinists accused Gluck of composing operas with little melody, no truth to nature, little elegance or refinement, and a noisy Orchestra. “Gluck’s modulations,” they said, “were awkward and he had no originality, no finish, no polish.” In short, Gluck was everything that was abominable.
Dr. Burney informs us that: “No door in Paris was opened to a visitor without the question being asked—‘Monsieur, are you a Picciniste, or a Gluckiste?’”
The Piccinists are forgotten: the Gluckists still live. We are among them; for, to our way of thinking, nothing more noble and inspired than Orfeo was ever written. And if polish and elegance are to be found anywhere in music, they appear in the scores of Gluck.
“Yet, if he had merely carried to perfection the work begun by Lully and Rameau; if his efforts had been limited to removing the harpsichord from the Orchestra, introducing the harp and trombones, employing the clarinets, scoring with skill and effect, giving more importance and interest to the overture and using with such magic effect the artifice of momentary pauses to vary or emphasize speech in music,—if he had done no more than this, he would have earned our gratitude, but he would not in that case have been one of the monarchs of art.
“What then did he accomplish that was so extraordinary?
“He grasped the idea that the mission of music was not merely to afford gratification to the senses, and he proved that the expression of moral qualities is within its reach. He disdained all such tricks of the trade as do not appeal to the heart—in fact, he preferred the Muses to the Sirens. He aimed at depicting historic, or legendary, characters and antique social life; and in his works of genius he put into the mouths of each of his heroes accents suited to their sentiments and to the spirit of the time in which they lived. He made use of the Orchestra to add to the force of a dramatic situation, or (in one noble instance) to contrast external repose with the internal agitation of a remorseful conscience. In a word, all his French operas show him to have been a noble musician, a true poet and a deep thinker.”
Gluck also contributed to the development of the ballet and made the dance a vital part of the story of the opera, as, for instance, the ballet of the Spirits of the Blest in Orfeo.
His ballet-music is very beautiful in form and melody and choice of instruments that play it.
“With Gluck,” says Romain Rolland, “the ballet lost some of the delightful exuberance it had had in Rameau’s operas; but what it lost in originality and richness, it gained in simplicity and purity; and the dance airs in Orfeo are like classic bas-reliefs, the frieze of a Greek Temple.”