CHAPTER I
THE REGENERATION OF THE OPERA

While the deep, quiet stream of Bach’s genius flowed under the bridges all but unnoticed, the marts and highways of Europe were a babel of operatic intrigue and artistic shams. Handel in England was running the course of his triumphal career, which luckily forced him into the tracks of a new art-form; on the continent meantime Italian opera reached at once its most brilliant and most absurd epoch under the leadership of Hasse and Porpora; even Rameau, the founder of modern harmonic science, did not altogether keep aloof from its influence, while perpetuating the traditions of Lully in Paris. Vocal virtuosi continued to set the musical fashions of the age, the artificial soprano was still a force to which composers had to submit; indeed, artificiality was the keynote of the century.

The society of the eighteenth century was primarily concerned with the pursuit of sensuous enjoyment. In Italy especially ‘the cosmic forces existed but in order to serve the endless divertissement of superficial and brainless beings, in whose eyes the sun’s only mission was to illumine picturesque cavalcades and water-parties, as that of the moon was to touch with trembling ray the amorous forest glades.’ Monnier’s vivid pen-picture of eighteenth century Venetian society applies, with allowance made for change of scene and local color, to all the greater Italian cities. ‘What equivocal figures! What dubious pasts! Law (of Mississippi bubble fame) lives by gambling, as does the Chevalier Desjardins, his brother in the Bastille, his wife in a lodging-house; the Count de Bonneval, turbaned, sitting on a rug with legs crossed, worships Allah, carries on far-reaching intrigues and is poisoned by the Turks; Lord Baltimore, travelling with his physician and a seraglio of eight women, with a pair of negro guards; Ange Goudar, a wit, a cheat at cards, a police spy and perjurer, rascally, bold, and ugly; and his wife Sarah, once a servant in a London tavern, marvellously beautiful, who receives the courtly world at her palace in Pausilippo near Naples, and subjugates it with her charm; disguised maidens, false princes, fugitive financiers, literary blacklegs, Greeks, chevaliers of all industries, wearers of every order, splenetic grands seigneurs, and the kings of Voltaire’s Candide. Of such is the Italian society of the eighteenth century composed.

Music in this artificial atmosphere could only flatter the sense of hearing without appealing to the intelligence, excite the nerves and occasionally give a keener point to voluptuousness, by dwelling on a note of elegant sorrow or discreet religiousness. The very church, according to Dittersdorf, had become a musical boudoir, the convent a conservatory. As for the opera, it could not be anything but a lounge for the idle public. The Neapolitan school, which reigned supreme in Europe, provided just the sort of amusement demanded by that public. It produced scores of composers who were hailed as maestri to-day and forgotten to-morrow. Hundreds of operas appeared, but few ever reached publication; their nature was as ephemeral as the public’s taste was fickle, and a success meant no more to a composer than new commissions to turn out operas for city after city, to supply the insatiate thirst for novelty. The manner in which these commissions were carried out is indicative of the result. Composers were usually given a libretto not of their choosing; the recitatives, which constituted the dramatic groundwork, were turned out first and distributed among the singers. The writing of the arias was left to the last so that the singers’ collaboration or advice could be secured, for upon their rendition the success of the whole opera depended; they were, indeed, written for the singers—the particular singers of the first performance—and in such a manner that their voices might show to the best advantage. As Leopold Mozart wrote in one of his letters, they made ‘the coat to fit the wearer.’ The form which these operas took was an absolute stereotype; a series of more or less disconnected recitatives and arias, usually of the da capo form, strung together by the merest thread of a plot. It was a concert in costume rather than the drama in music which was the original conception of opera in the minds of its inventors.

Pietro Metastasio, the most prolific of librettists, was eminently the purveyor of texts for these operas, just as Rinuccini, the idealist, had furnished the poetic basis for their nobler forerunners. Metastasio’s inspiration flowed freely, both in lyrical and emotional veins, but ‘the brilliancy of his florid rhetoric stifled the cry of the heart.’ His plots were overloaded with the vapid intrigues that pleased the taste of his contemporaries, with quasi-pathetic characters, with passionate climaxes and explosions. His popularity was immense. He could count as many as forty editions of his own works and among his collaborators were practically all the great composers, from Handel to Gluck and Cimarosa. As personifying the elements which sum up the opera during this its most irrational period we may take two figures of extraordinary eminence—Niccola Porpora and Johann Adolf Hasse.

I

Niccola Porpora (1686-1766), while prominent in his own day as composer, conductor, and teacher (among his pupils was Joseph Haydn), is known to history chiefly by his achievements as a singing master—perhaps the greatest that ever lived. The art of bel canto, that exaltation of the human voice for its own sake, which in him reached its highest point, was doubtless the greatest enemy to artistic sincerity and dramatic truth, the greatest deterrent to operatic progress in the eighteenth century. Though possessed of ideals of intrinsic beauty—sensuousness of tone, dynamic power, brilliance, and precision like that of an instrument—this art would to-day arouse only wonder, not admiration. Porpora understood the human voice in all its peculiarities; he could produce, by sheer training, singers who, like Farinelli, Senesino, and Caffarelli, were the wonder of the age. By what methods his results were reached we have no means of knowing, for his secret was never committed to writing, but his method was most likely empirical, as distinguished from the scientific, or anatomical, methods of to-day. It was told that he kept Caffarelli for five or six years to one page of exercises, and then sent him into the world as the greatest singer of Europe—a story which, though doubtless exaggerated, indicates the purely technical nature of his work.

Porpora wrote his own vocalizzi, and, though he composed in every form, all of his works appear to us more or less like solfeggi. His cantatas for solo voice and harpsichord show him at his best, as a master of the florid Italian vocal style, with consummate appreciation of the possibilities of the vocal apparatus. His operas, of which he wrote no less than fifty-three, are for the most part tedious, conventional, and overloaded with ornament, in every way characteristic of the age; the same is true in some measure of his oratorios, numerous church compositions, and chamber works, all of which show him to be hardly more than a thoroughly learned and accomplished technician.

But Porpora’s fame attracted many talented pupils, including the brilliant young German, Hasse (1699-1783), mentioned above, who, however, quickly forsook him in favor of Alessandro Scarlatti, a slight which Porpora never forgave and which served as motive for a lifelong rivalry between the two men. Hasse, originally trained in the tradition of the Hamburg opera and its Brunswick offshoot (where he was engaged as tenor and where he made his debut with his only German opera, ‘Antiochus’), quickly succumbed to the powerful Italian influence. The Italians took kindly to him, and, after his debut in Naples with ‘Tigrane’ (1773), surnamed him il caro sassone. His marriage with the celebrated Faustina Bordoni linked him still closer to the history of Italian opera; for in the course of his long life, which extends into the careers of Haydn and Mozart, he wrote no less than seventy operas, many of them to texts by the famed Metastasio, and most of them vehicles for the marvellous gifts of his wife. While she aroused the enthusiasm of audiences throughout Europe, he enjoyed the highest popularity of any operatic composer through half a century. Together they made the opera at Dresden (whither Hasse was called in 1731 as royal kapellmeister) the most brilliant in Germany—one that even Bach, as we have seen, was occasionally beguiled into visiting. Once Hasse was persuaded to enter into competition with Handel in London (1733), the operatic capital of Europe, where Faustina, seven years before, had vanquished her great rival Cuzzoni and provided the chief operatic diversion of the Handel régime to the tune of £2,000 a year! Only the death of August the Strong in 1763 ended the Hasses’ reign in Dresden, where during the bombardment of 1760 Hasse’s library and most of the manuscripts of his works were destroyed by fire. What remains of them reveals a rare talent and a consummate musicianship which, had it not been employed so completely in satisfying the prevailing taste and propitiating absurd conventions, might still appeal with the vitality of its harmonic texture and the beauty of its melodic line. Much of the polyphonic skill and the spontaneous charm of a Handel is evident in these works, but they lack the breadth, the grandeur and the seriousness that distinguish the work of his greater compatriot. Over-abundance of success militates against self-criticism, which is the essential quality of genius, and Hasse’s success was not, like Handel’s, dimmed by the changing taste of a surfeited public. Hasse’s operas signalize at once the high water mark of brilliant achievement in an art form now obsolete and the ultimate degree of its fatuousness.

Hasse and Porpora, then, were the leaders of those who remained true to the stereotyped form of opera, the singers’ opera, whose very nature precluded progress. They and a host of minor men, like Francesco Feo, Leonardo Vinci, Pasquale Cafaro, were enrolled in a party which resisted all ideas of reform; and their natural allies in upholding absurd conventions were the singers, that all-powerful race of virtuosi, the impresarios, and all the great tribe of adherents who derived a lucrative income from the system. Against these formidable forces the under-current of reform—both musical and dramatic—felt from the beginning of the century, could make little head. The protests of men like Benedetto Marcello, whose satire Il teatro alla moda appeared in 1722, were voices crying in the wilderness. Yet reform was inevitable, a movement no less momentous than when the Florentine reform of 1600 was under way—the great process of crystallization and refinement which was to usher in that most glorious era of musical creation known as the classic period. Like the earlier reform, it signified a reaction against technique, against soulless display of virtuosity, a tendency toward simplicity, subjectivity, directness of expression—a return to nature.

Though much of the pioneer work was done by composers of instrumental music whose discussion must be deferred to the next chapter, the movement had its most spectacular manifestations in connection with opera, and in that aspect is summed up in the work of Gluck, the outstanding personality in the second half of the eighteenth century. In the domain of absolute music it saw its beginnings in the more or less spontaneous efforts of instrumentalists like Fasch, Foerster, Benda, and Johann Stamitz. First among those whose initiative was felt in both directions we must name Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, the young Neapolitan who, born in 1710, had his brilliant artistic career cut short at the premature age of twenty-six.

II

Pergolesi was the pupil of Greco, Durante, and Feo at the Conservatorio dei Poveri at Naples, where a biblical drama and two operas from his pen were performed in 1731 without arousing any particular attention. But a solemn mass which he was commissioned to write by the city of Naples in praise of its patron saint, and which was performed upon the occasion of an earthquake, brought him sudden fame. The commission probably came to him through the good offices of Prince Stegliano, to whom he dedicated his famous trio sonatas. These sonatas, later published in London, brought an innovation which had no little influence upon contemporary composers; namely, the so-called cantabile (or singing) allegro as the first movement. Riemann, who has edited two of them,[1] calls attention to the richly developed sonata form of the first movement of the G major trio especially, of which the works of Fasch, Stamitz, and Gluck are clearly reminiscent. ‘The altogether charming, radiant melodies of Pergolesi are linked with such conspicuous, forcible logic in the development of the song-like theme, always in the upper voice, that we are not surprised by the attention which the movement aroused. We are here evidently face to face with the beginning of a totally different manner of treatment in instrumental melodies, which I would like to call a transplantation of the aria style to the instrumental field.’[2] We shall have occasion to refer to this germination of a new style later on. At present we must consider another of Pergolesi’s important services to art—the creation of the opera buffa.[3]

We have had occasion to observe in another chapter the success of the ‘Beggar’s Opera’ in England in 1723, which hastened the failure of the London Academy under Handel’s management. Vulgar as it was, this novelty embodied the same tendency toward simplicity which was the essential element of the impending reform; it was near to the people’s heart and there found a quick response. This ballad-opera, as it was called, was followed by many imitations, notably Coffey’s ‘The Devil to Pay, or The Wives Metamorphosed’ (1733), which, later produced in Germany, was adapted by Standfuss (1752) and Johann Adam Hiller (1765) and thus became the point of departure for the German singspiel. This in turn reacted against the popularity of Italian opera in Germany. The movement had its Italian parallel in the fashion for the so-called intermezzi which composers of the Neapolitan school began very early in the century to interpolate between the acts of their operas, as, in an earlier period, they had been interpolated between the acts of the classic tragedies (cf. Vol. I, p. 326 ff). Unlike these earlier spectacular diversions, the later intermezzi were comic pieces that developed a continuous plot independent of that of the opera itself—an anomalous mixture of tragedy and comedy which must have appeared ludicrous at times even to eighteenth century audiences. These artistic trifles were, however, not unlikely, in their simple and unconventional spontaneity, to have an interest surpassing that of the opera proper. Such was the case with La serva padrona, which Pergolesi produced between the acts of his opera Il pigionier (1733). This graceful little piece made so immediate an appeal that it completely overshadowed the serious work to which it was attached, and, indeed, all the other dramatic works of its composer, whose fame to-day rests chiefly upon it and the immortal Stabat mater, which was his last work.

La serva padrona is one of the very few operatic works of the century that are alive to-day. An examination of its contents quickly reveals the reason, for its pages breathe a charm, a vivacity, a humor which we need not hesitate to call Mozartian. Indeed, it leaves little doubt in our minds that Mozart, born twenty-three years later, must have been acquainted with the work of its composer. At any rate he, no less than Guglielmi, Piccini, Paesiello, and Cimarosa, the chief representatives of the opera buffa, are indebted to him for the form, since, as the first intermezzo opera capable of standing by itself (it was afterward so produced in Paris), it must be regarded as the first real opera buffa.

Most of the later Neapolitans, in fact, essayed both the serious and comic forms, not unmindful of the popular success which the latter achieved. It became, in time, a dangerous competitor to the conventionalized opera seria, as the ballad-opera and the singspiel did in England and Germany, and the opéra bouffon was to become in France. Its advantage lay in its freedom from the traditional operatic limitations (cf. Vol. I, page 428). It might contain an indiscriminate mixture of arias, recitatives, and ensembles; its dramatis personæ were a flexible quantity. Moreover, it disposed of the male soprano, favoring the lower voices, especially basses, which had been altogether excluded from the earlier operas. Hence it brought about a material change in conditions with which composers had thus far been unable to cope. In it the stereotyped da capo aria yielded its place to more flexible forms; one of its first exponents, Nicolo Logroscino,[4] introduced the animated ensemble finale with many movements, which was further developed by his successors. These wholesome influences were soon felt in the serious opera as well: it adopted especially the finale and the more varied ensembles of the opera buffa, though lacking the spicy parodistical element and the variegated voices of its rival. Thus, in the works of Pergolesi’s successors, especially Jommelli and Piccini, we see foreshadowed the epoch-making reform of Gluck.

There is nothing to show, however, that Pergolesi himself was conscious of being a reformer. His personal character, irresponsible, brilliant rather than introspective, would argue against that. We must think of him as a true genius gifted by the grace of heaven, romantic, wayward, and insufficiently balanced to economize his vital forces toward a ripened age of artistic activity. He nevertheless produced a number of other operas, mostly serious, masses, and miscellaneous ecclesiastical and chamber works. His death was due to consumption. So much legend surrounds his brief career that it has been made the subject of two operas, by Paolo Serrão and by Monteviti.

C. S.

III

About the close of Pergolesi’s career two men made their debuts whose lives were as nearly coeval as those of Bach and Handel and who, though of unequal merit, if measured by the standards of posterity, were both important factors in the reform movement which we are describing. These men were Jommelli and Gluck, both born in 1714, the year which also gave to the world Emanuel Bach, the talented son of the great Johann Sebastian.

Nicola Jommelli was born at Aversa (near Naples). At first a pupil of Durante, he received his chief training under Feo and Leo. His first opera, L’Errore amoroso, was brought out under an assumed name at Naples when the composer was but twenty-three, and so successfully that he had no hesitation in producing his Odoardo under his own name the following year. Other operas by him were heard in Rome, in Bologna (where he studied counterpoint with Padre Martini); in Venice, where the success of his Merope secured him the post of director of the Conservatorio degli incurabili; and in Rome, whither he had gone in 1749 as substitute maestro di capella of St. Peter’s. In Vienna, which he visited for the first time in 1748, Didone, one of his finest operas, was produced. In 1753 Jommelli became kapellmeister at Ludwigslust, the wonderful rococo palace of Karl Eugen, duke of Württemberg, near Stuttgart. Like Augustus the Strong of Saxony, the elector of Bavaria, the margrave of Bayreuth, the prince-bishop of Cologne, this pleasure-loving ruler of a German principality had known how to s’enversailler—to adopt the luxuries and refinements of the court of Versailles, then the European model for royal and princely extravagance. His palace and gardens were magnificent and his opera house was of such colossal dimensions that whole regiments of cavalry could cross the stage. He needed a celebrated master for his chapel and his opera; his choice fell upon Jommelli, who spent fifteen prosperous years in his employ, receiving a salary of ‘6,100 gulden per annum, ten buckets of honorary wine, wood for firing and forage for two horses.’

At Stuttgart Jommelli was strongly influenced by the work of the German musicians; increased harmonic profundity and improved orchestral technique were the most palpable results. He came to have a better appreciation of the orchestra than any of his countrymen; at times he even made successful attempts at ‘tone painting.’ His orchestral ‘crescendo,’ with which he made considerable furore, was a trick borrowed from the celebrated Mannheim school. It is interesting to note that the school of stylistic reformers which had its centre at Mannheim, not far from Stuttgart, was then in its heyday; two years before Jommelli’s arrival in Stuttgart the famous Opus 1 of Johann Stamitz—the sonatas (or rather symphonies) in which the Figured Bass appears for the first time as an integral obbligato part—was first heard in Paris. The so-called Simphonies d’Allemagne henceforth appeared in great number; they were published mostly in batches, often in regular monthly or weekly sequence as ‘periodical overtures,’ and so spread the gospel of German classicism all over Europe. How far Jommelli was influenced by all this it would be difficult to determine, but we know that when in 1769 he returned to Naples his new manner found no favor with his countrymen, who considered his music too heavy. The young Mozart in 1770 wrote from there: ‘The opera here is by Jommelli. It is beautiful, but the style is too elevated as well as too antique for the theatre.’ It is well to remark here how much Jommelli’s music in its best moments resembles Mozart’s. He, no less than Pergolesi, must be credited with the merit of having influenced that master in many essentials.

Jommelli allowed none but his own operas to be performed at Stuttgart. The productions were on a scale, however, that raised the envy of Paris. No less a genius than Noverre, the reformer of the French ballet, was Jommelli’s collaborator in these magnificent productions; and Jommelli also yielded to French influences in the matter of the chorus. He handled Metastasio’s texts with an eye to their psychological moments, and infused into his scores much of dramatic truth. In breaking up the monotonous sequence of solos, characteristic of the fashionable Neapolitan opera, he actually anticipated Gluck. All in all, Jommelli’s work was so unusually strong and intensive that we wonder why he fell short of accomplishing the reform that was imminent. ‘Noverre and Jommelli in Stuttgart might have done it,’ says Oscar Bie, in his whimsical study of the opera, ‘but for the fact that Stuttgart was a hell of frivolity and levity, a luxurious mart for the purchase and sale of men.’

Jommelli’s last Stuttgart opera was Fetonte.[5] When he returned to Italy in 1769 he found the public mad with enthusiasm over a new opera buffa entitled Cecchina, ossia la buona figliuola. In Rome it was played in all the theatres, from the largest opera house down to the marionette shows patronized by the poor. Fashions were all alla Cecchina; houses, shops, and wines were named after it, and a host of catch-words and phrases from its text ran from lip to lip. ‘It is probably the work of some boy,’ said the veteran composer, but after he had heard it—‘Hear the opinion of Jommelli—this is an inventor!’

The boy inventor of Cecchina was Nicola Piccini, another Neapolitan, born in 1728, pupil of Leo and Durante, who was destined to become the most famous Italian composer of his day, though his works have not survived to our time. His debut had been made in 1754 with Le donne dispettose, followed by a number of other settings of Metastasio texts. We are told that he found difficulty in getting hearings at first, because the comic operas of Logroscino monopolized the stage. Already, then, composers were forced into the opera buffa with its greater vitality and variety. Piccini’s contribution to its development was the extension of the duet to greater dramatic purpose, and also of the concerted finale first introduced by Logroscino. We shall meet him again, as the adversary of Gluck. Of hardly less importance than he were Tommaso Traetto (1727-1779), ‘the most tragic of the Italians,’ who surpassed his contemporaries and followers in truth and force of expression, and in harmonic strength; Pietro Guglielmi (1727-1804), who with his 115 operas gained the applause of all Italy, of Dresden, of Brunswick, and London; Antonio Sacchini (1734-1786), who, besides grace of melody, attained at times an almost classic solidity; and Giovanni Paesiello (1741-1816), whose decided talent for opera buffa made him the successful rival of Piccini and Cimarosa.

Paesiello, with Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801), was the leading representative of the buffa till the advent of Mozart. As Hadow suggests, he might have achieved real greatness had he been less constantly successful. ‘His life was one triumphal procession from Naples to St. Petersburg, from St. Petersburg to Vienna, from Vienna to Paris.’ Ferdinand of Sicily, Empress Catharine of Russia, Joseph II of Austria, and even Napoleon were successively his patrons; and his productiveness was such that he never had time, even had he had inclination, to criticise his own works. Of his ninety-four operas only one, ‘The Barber of Seville,’ is of historic interest, for its popularity was such that, until Rossini, no composer dared to treat the same theme. Cimarosa deserves perhaps more extended notice than many others on account of his Matrimonio segreto, written in Russia, which won unprecedented success there and in Italy. It is practically the only one of all the works of composers just mentioned that has not fallen a victim to time. Its music is simple and tuneful, fresh and full of good humor.

The eighteenth century public based its judgments solely on mere externals—a pleasing tune, a brilliant singer, a sumptuous mise-en-scène caught its favor, the merest accident or circumstance might kill or make an opera. To-day a composer is carried off in triumph, to be hissed soon after by the same public. Rivalry among composers is the order of the day. Sacchini, Piccini, Paesiello, Cimarosa, are successively favorites of Italian audiences; in London Christian Bach and Sacchini divide the public as Handel and Bononcini did before them; in Vienna Paesiello and Cimarosa are applauded with the same acclaim as Gluck; in St. Petersburg Galuppi,[6] Traetta, Paesiello, and Cimarosa follow each other in the service of the sovereign (Catharine II), who could not differentiate any tunes but the howls of her nine dogs; in Paris, at last, the leading figures become the storm centre of political agitations. All these composers’ names are glibly pronounced by the busy tongues of a brilliant but shallow society. Favorite arias, like Galuppi’s Se per me, Sacchini’s Se cerca, se dice, Piccini’s Se il ciel, are compared after the manner of race entries. Florimo, the historian of the Naples opera, dismissed the matter with a few words: ‘Piccini is original and prolific; Sacchini gay and light, Paesiello new and lithe, Cafaro learned in harmony, Galuppi experienced in stagecraft, Gluck a filosofia economica.’ They all have their merits—but, after all, the difference is a matter of detail, a fit subject for the gossip of an opera box. Even Gluck is but one of them, if his Italian operas are at all different the difference has escaped his critics.

But all of these composers, as well as some of their predecessors, worked consciously or unconsciously in a regeneration that was slowly but surely going forward. The working out of solo and ensemble forms into definite patterns; the development of the recitative from mere heightened declamation to a free arioso, fully accompanied, and to the accompagnato not followed by an aria at all; the introduction of concertising instruments which promptly developed into independent inner voices and broadened the orchestral polyphony, the dynamic contrasts—at first abrupt, then gradual—which Jommelli took over from the orchestral technique of Mannheim; the ingenious construction of ensembles and the development of the finale into a pezzo concertanto—all these tended toward higher organization, individual and specialized development, though purely musical at first and strictly removed from the influence of other arts. The dramatic elements, the plastic and phantastic, which, subordinated at first, found their expression in ‘laments’ and in simile arias (in which a mood was compared to a phenomena of nature), then in ombra scenes, where spirits were invoked, and in similar exalted situations, gradually became more and more prominent, foreshadowing the time when the portrayal of human passions was to become once more the chief purpose of opera.

IV

The last and decisive step in the revolution was the coming of Gluck. ‘It seems as if a century had worked to the limit of its strength to produce the flower of Gluck—the great man is always the composite genius of all the confluent temporal streams.’[7] Yet he himself was one of these composite forces from which the artistic purpose of his life was evolved. The Gluck of the first five decades, the Gluck of Italian opera, of what we may call the Metastasio period, was simply one of the many Italians unconsciously working toward that end. His work through two-thirds of his life had no more significance than that of a Leo, a Vinci, or a Jommelli. Fate willed, however, that Gluck should be impressed more strongly by the growing public dissatisfaction with senseless Italian opera, and incidentally should be brought into close contact with varied influences tending to the broadening of his ideas. Cosmopolite that he was, he gathered the essence of European musical culture from its four corners. Born in Germany, he was early exposed to the influence of solid musicianship; trained in Italy he gained, like Handel, its sensuous melody; in England he heard the works of Handel and received in the shape of artistic failure that chastisement which opened his mind to radical change of method. In France, soon after, he was impressed with the plastic dramatic element of the monumental Lully-Rameau opera. Back in Vienna, he produced opéra comique and held converse with lettered enthusiasts. Calzabigi, like Rinuccini in 1600, brought literary ideas of reform. Metastasio was relegated—yet not at once, for Gluck was careful, diplomatic. He fed his reform to the public in single doses—diluted for greater security, interspersed with Italian operas of the old school as sops to the hostile singers, jealous of their power. Only thus can we explain his relapses into the current type. He knew his public must first be educated. He felt the authority of a teacher and he resorted to the didactic methods of Florence—of his colleagues of 1600, whom Calzabigi knew and copied. Prefaces explaining the author’s purpose once more became the order of the day; finally the reformer was conscious of being a reformer, of his true life mission. Except for what human interest there is in his early life we may therefore pass rapidly over the period preceding 1762, the momentous year of Orfeo ed Euridice.

Born July 2, 1714, at Weidenwang, in the upper Palatinate, Christoph Willibald Gluck’s early years were passed in the forests of Bavaria and Bohemia. His father, Alexander Gluck, had been a game-keeper, who, having established himself in Bohemia in 1717, had successively entered the employ of various territorial magnates—Count Kaunitz in Neuschloss, Count Kinsky in Kamnitz, Prince Lobkowitz in Eisenberg, and, finally, the grand-duchess of Tuscany in Reichstadt. His intention toward his son had been at first to make of him a game-keeper, and it is recorded that young Christoph was put through a course of Spartan discipline with that end in view, during which he was obliged to accompany his father barefooted through the forest in the severest winter weather.