To music set by Gluck, and sung by thee!)
Just as sincerely did Wieland, the great master of poetry, pay homage to music and its great exponent. "I have moments," he wrote on July 13th, 1776, "in which I long inexpressibly for the ability to produce a lyric work worthy to receive life and immortality through Gluck. And oh! that we might once be fortunate enough to see and hear him in our midst! That I might see the man face to face and in his presence give some slight expression to the emotions kindled by the little I have heard (and very poorly rendered) of his splendid works!" The year before, Wieland had spoken still more specifically in regard to the Gluck reform; in 1775, he wrote in the "German Mercury": "At last we have lived to see the epoch in which the mighty genius of a Gluck has undertaken the great work of a musical reform. The success of his 'Orpheus' and 'Iphigénie' would lead us to hope everything, if, in those capitals of Europe where the Fine Arts have their chief centre, innumerable obstacles did not oppose his undertaking. To restore their original dignity to those arts which the populace have been accustomed to regard as the tools of sensual enjoyment, and to seat Nature firmly on a throne which has been long usurped by the arbitrary power of fashion, luxury and voluptuousness, is a great and daring venture. Gluck has shown us what might be done by music, if in our day there were an Athens anywhere in Europe, and if, in this Athens should appear a Pericles who should do for the opera what he did for the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides."
Words of this kind were not spoken in vain; their power, together with Gluck's music, could not but succeed in breaking down the opposition of even the strictest adherents to the old régime, and before the beginning of another century all the master's enemies had left the field. From that time to the present day, there has been no serious-minded lover of music who has not cheerfully agreed with the motto to be found upon the bust of Gluck in the Grand Opera in Paris:
"Il préféra les Muses aux Sirènes."
(He preferred the Muses to the Sirens.)
FRESCO IN VIENNA OPERA HOUSE REPRESENTING GLUCK'S "ARMIDE."
From a photograph.