One day when I went to see Auber in his little house in the Rue St. Georges I found the author of “La Muette de Portici” and the “Domino Noir” at the piano with one of Grétry’s scores in front of him. “Just look at this passage,” said Auber, “it is very curious, considered as to the succession of chords. This harmony is certainly not correct, and would never have entered the mind of what is called a musical savant. And yet if you try to change it you may make it more accurate, but it will be wanting in relief and expression.” That is because the awkwardness of Grétry is the awkwardness of an artistic genius, and awkwardness of that kind is a thousand times better than the accuracy of the cold and unimaginative musician.
I said above that Grétry had the first intuition of the leit motiv in “Richard Cœur de Lion,” as a device for recalling to the spectator either an event, a scene, an essential object or a personage, with their distinctive peculiarities, at the same time preserving unity of style in the general construction of his work;—I said that he also imagined an invisible orchestra such as that which exists in the Wagner Theatre at Bayreuth. Grétry speaks as follows in his work, “Mémoires et Essais sur la Musique,” in the chapter entitled: “Plan for a new Theatre”:
“I should like the auditorium of my theatre to be small, holding at the most a thousand persons, and consisting of a sort of open space without boxes, small or great, because these nooks only encourage scandal or worse. I should like the orchestra to be concealed so that neither the musicians nor the lights on their music-stands would be visible to the spectators. The effect would be magical, the more so as it is always understood that the orchestra is not supposed to be there. A solid stone wall ought, in my opinion, to separate the orchestra from the theatre, so that the sound may reverberate in the auditorium.”
GRÉTRY CROSSING THE STYX.
“Grétry in crossing the Styx plays upon his lyre to beguile the time. ‘Why do you not row?’ he asks Charon.... ‘Because I am listening!’”
Drawn by Joly and engraved by Duplessi-Berlaus.
FRANÇOIS ADRIEN BOIELDIEU
Reproduction of a lithograph portrait by Grevedon, 1826, after a painting by Riesener.
