11. Italian reform operas.

The ‘Gluckian’ reform of opera owed much to the force of the composer's personality, musical and otherwise – to his ‘fuoco meraviglioso, ma pazzo’, in Metastasio's words (letter of 6 November 1751, quoted above). But it should also be seen in the context of a wider effort, led more by literary intellectuals than by composers and dating back several decades, towards imposition of more rational control on Italian serious opera than currently prevailed. In his correspondence, and in his Estratto dell'arte poetica d'Aristotele (completed in 1772, but written over several decades), the imperial poet himself articulated many of the same goals as were espoused by his antagonist Calzabigi. Decrying modern arias as mere ‘symphonies for the voice’ which obscured the audience's perception of the poetry, Metastasio (like Calzabigi) called for composers and singers alike to exercise restraint. Both authors likewise cited Horace's admonition that a drama should be ‘simple and unified’ in plan, and described opera as being ideally a series of scenic tableaux (quadri) presented for the spectators’ contemplation. But Metastasio's librettos were nevertheless constructed so as to favour a singer-orientated approach, with carefully placed similes and ‘good’ vowels. The tableaux created by Calzabigi, and realized musically by Gluck, were on a far vaster scale than Metastasio's, and in many other respects, too, the Viennese reform operas represented a far more radical cure than what the court poet would have thought advisable; for example, Calzabigi insisted that ‘one note should always be sufficient for one syllable’ (letter of 6 March 1767 to Kaunitz; see Helfert, A1938).

The Viennese reform developed in ways distinct from those of operatic reform movements elsewhere (whether realized or not), despite numerous features in common. Most progressive commentators were agreed on the desirability of reintegrating into dramma per musica the spectacle, dance and choral forces that had once been a part of that genre, and that French opera still retained. This was a special concern of Durazzo, and also of the librettist C.I. Frugoni in Parma, where works by Rameau were the starting-point of innovations in Italian opera. Le feste d'Apollo, which Gluck composed for this court in 1769, was on the model of French opéras-ballets, as Frugoni and Traetta's Le feste d'Imeneo (1760) had also been. In the libretto of that work Frugoni had excused the loose linking of acts in the latter work by noting that opera was a genre ‘little subject to the sway of reason’. In Vienna, however, such thinking was considered too lax, and it was in a full dramma per musica (Durazzo's own project, Armida, set by Traetta) that such diverse performing forces were first deployed, and in far more integrated fashion than in Parma.

At Stuttgart, another court where French and Italian operatic traditions were coming together, Niccolò Jommelli intermingled accompanied recitatives, programmatic orchestral music, choruses, ensembles and a variety of dramatically responsive aria forms in such works as Fetonte of 1768 (text by Mattia Verazi, after Quinault). But this long and costly work (in which 86 horses appeared on stage during a battle scene) lacked the simplicity and concision that Calzabigi considered necessary if an audience were to be moved. His attitude of classical restraint, along with Durazzo's francophilia and Gluck's experience composing operas in both French and Italian as well as ballet, combined at the Viennese court to create a unique possibility of reinventing opera.

The classical orientation of Calzabigi, evident in Orfeo ed Euridice from the moment the curtain rose on the almost archaeologically recreated ancient funerary ritual (e.g. the threefold calling of the name of the deceased), coloured the entirety of his collaboration with Gluck. Despite the ambiguous attributions of the prefaces signed by the composer, it is clear that Gluck largely shared his librettist's classical enthusiasms. He was reported to have been widely read, and, like Calzabigi, he had ready access to the Viennese aristocratic salons in which literary and artistic matters were much discussed. (His entrée into these circles probably became easier after he became a Knight of the Golden Spur in 1756.) As Gerber (D1941) noted, it is unlikely that Gluck actually met the art historian J.J. Winckelmann in Rome when there for the production of his Antigono in that year, as the latter was then quite unknown.) It is revealing that Gluck sought out subject matter from Greek tragedy, independently of Calzabigi, after the latter's departure from Vienna – most probably with his inner conviction mixing with a desire to exploit the goût grec then prevailing in France.

Already during his lifetime it became a commonplace to compare Gluck's musical art to the ‘noble simplicity’ that Winckelmann found in the best of ancient Greek sculpture. And indeed, a great deal of the music from Orfeo onwards fits neatly into Winckelmann's category of the ‘elevated’ (erhabene), or ‘truly beautiful’ (wahrhafte Schöne), in which grandeur and unity of expression prevail over the variety and charm to be found in the merely ‘beautiful’. In Gluck's frequent recourse to the sublime – to close accumulations of plot reversals and revelations, and of the affect-laden musical effects that illustrated them – he also practised a kind of theatre in which, as in Winckelmann's account of certain feats of Greek oratory, the audience is powerless (except in retrospect) to identify or analyse the specific means by which it is being moved. As Calzabigi wrote late in life (intending his remarks to reflect also on the poetry he had supplied to the composer), ‘Gluck was enamoured of sentiments snatched from simple nature, of grandiose passions at the boiling point, in a state of violence, and of noisy theatrical tumult’ (Risposta [di] Don Santigliano; see Bellina, A1994, p.398). These contrary impulses, both consonant with elements of Winckelmann's aesthetics of Greek art – a pictorially orientated, serene stasis on the one hand, and a headlong rush of theatrical and musical coups on the other – form the two poles of Gluckian music drama.

In a specifically Viennese context, Gluck's works resonated strongly with the morally tinged aesthetics of Gottfried van Swieten (an early Gluck enthusiast) and Joseph von Sonnenfels and their efforts at educational and theatrical reform. Van Swieten's plan for revamping the educational system of the monarchy was founded on A.A.C. Shaftesbury's notion that one learns moral behaviour more readily through feeling its pleasurable effects than through logic and reason, and the theatre was an ideal venue for an edifying cultivation of feeling. In a way, van Swieten's scheme was simply a more systematic application of a policy already in effect with regard to the imperial children, whose moral instruction was a prime consideration not only for feste teatrali and similar entertainments, but even (according to Durazzo) for high-minded opéras comiques such as Monsigny's Le roi et le fermier and Gluck's La rencontre imprévue. Sonnenfels's multipartite review of Alceste is suffused with Shaftesbury's language of feeling: Gluck is a composer who knows all ‘the accents of the passions … the accents of the soul’ and whose ‘arias are novel, and of an expressive melody of which the ending especially transported me outside of myself’ (Sonnenfels, C1768, pp.16–17, 19). It was Gluck's good fortune that his and Calzabigi's reform operas coincided with the birth of serious Viennese theatrical criticism (if not yet music criticism per se), through which his goals were explicated and endorsed both within and beyond the boundaries of the empire (through reprintings and paraphrases).

Although the theatrical criticism of Sonnenfels and his allies was directed in large part at a growing class of non-noble bureaucrats and professionals, it should be emphasized (as has been done by Gallarati, C1975) that Gluck was throughout his career a courtly composer. Nearly all of his operas, and even some ballets, were written for court occasions, and while some (Orfeo, Sémiramis) were deemed inappropriate on account of their subject matter, other works, including even reform operas, contained more or less veiled allegories directed at the imperial family. In Paris Gluck relied heavily on the patronage of the former Habsburg archduchess Marie Antoinette, and he paid homage to her explicitly in the solo with chorus ‘Chantez, célébrez votre reine’ in Iphigénie en Aulide. In Vienna, the conversations of noble spectators before, during and after performances (notably in Kaunitz's nightly assemblée) greatly facilitated the reception of theatrical innovations by Durazzo and his team, as is clear from Zinzendorf's excited comments of 19 April 1761 on how ‘Yesterday's tragedy was performed in the new style that we owe to Melle Clairon in Paris, who has abolished all affected exclamations and mannerisms on stage …’ (see Zinzendorf, C1747–1813), or in 1762 on Gluck's informal previews of numbers from Orfeo.

In light of such opportunities for the casual education of the Viennese audience, the music and poetry of Orfeo ed Euridice served as their own manifesto. Certainly the opera was not ambiguous in its anti-Metastasian aims. Calzabigi's poetry was almost completely devoid of metaphors and similes, and placed a mere three characters in a fluid context of dances and choruses (or both simultaneously). The action was reduced to essentials: a demonstration of the persuasive powers of music, and a cautionary tale on the dangers of curiosity, with Orpheus bewailing the loss of his wife already as the curtain rose. (The example of Rameau's Castor et Pollux is not difficult to discern behind this scene.) Gluck's approach as composer was no less radical, particularly in his near-complete elimination of coloratura and of opening ritornellos in the solo numbers. Above all, the opera was remarkable in its emphasis on continuity, which was achieved chiefly through the enchaining of harmonically open-ended sections of music and through the complete avoidance of recitativo semplice in favour of orchestrally accompanied recitatives (so as to avoid sharp contrasts of texture with the set pieces). This continuity and the nearly syllabic vocal writing were calculated to prevent applause, and thus also to promote the audience's absorption in the spectacle. Such aims were not exclusive to opera; the reforms of the English actor David Garrick – teacher of the Viennese Orpheus, Guadagni – likewise encouraged sustained verisimilitude, and the spectator's complete absorption was also a prime concern of contemporary French painting and its criticism (e.g. in Diderot's Salons).

The skill with which choral, orchestral and balletic forces were integrated with solo song in Orfeo has scarcely been equalled in the subsequent history of opera. In the first act Gluck arranged blocks of music in static, symmetrical blocks, befitting a mourning ritual. Yet across the first scene there is also a clear progression from Orpheus's initial broken utterances, through recitative, to fully formed song, the latter in a strophic romance clearly indebted to opéra comique. The first scene of Gluck's second act is even more continuous, though with a more complex dynamic, in which an increasingly ardent Orpheus is pitted against a chorus of furies that steadily weaken in their resolve to block his path to the Underworld. In the crux of the scene, the arioso and chorus ‘Deh placatevi con me’, Gluck makes calculated use of the galant style in Orpheus's plaintive melody, which the furies answer with unison cries of ‘No’, irregular in both notation and resolution. The offending passage inspired both criticism and high praise, from the likes of Rousseau and Berlioz. Also controversial in Orfeo was the air ‘Che farò senza Euridice’, which some spectators found too cheerful a reaction by the protagonist to the second loss of his wife. To this Gluck responded (in the foreword to Paride ed Elena) that with the slightest change in the singer's expression, the air ‘would become a dance for marionettes [un saltarello di burattini]’.

No less remarkable than the simplicity and fluidity of Gluck's music was its orchestration, which featured a pastoral and consciously archaic echo-orchestra of chalumeau and muted strings, cornett, trombones and english horns for the mourning and Underworld scenes, and an actual harp to accompany Orpheus's plea to the Furies. (Some of these novelties of scoring were normalized in the Paris version of 1774.) Gluck's manner of handling instruments was as imaginative as his choice of them, as in the orchestra's imitation of the barking of Cerberus (a passage singled out for praise by Berlioz in his orchestration treatise), or in the arioso ‘Che puro ciel’, a piece of word-painting (considerably reworked from earlier versions in Ezio and Antigono) whose long legacy was to include the ‘Szene am Bach’ in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony.

For Alceste, their next opera on the ‘new plan’, Calzabigi and Gluck deemed it necessary to publish an explanatory preface along with the score – not so much because of the risk of local miscomprehension, but rather (as is explained in the dedication of the score of Paride ed Elena) because they hoped that this species of spectacle would find imitators elsewhere. The fame of this statement of principles has to some extent eclipsed that of the opera itself, in part because the subject, text and musical elaboration of Alceste were so closely calculated to local events and personalities, namely the fortitude of Maria Theresa following the death of her consort Francis Stephen. The latter is immediately recognizable in the herald's description of Admetus (in the opening scene) as ‘more a father than a sovereign’, and throughout the opera the audience is encouraged to conflate the heroine, in her grief and in her role as materfamilias, with Maria Theresa. (The dedication of the libretto makes this identification explicit.) But as Noiray has argued (in L’avant-scène opéra, G1985), Calzabigi and Gluck exploited the circumstance of the empress's grief in order to produce a spectacle that was utterly uncompromising – in contrast to Orfeo, with its festive overture and lieto fine. Indeed, the criticisms that the opera was too uniformly sombre – a ‘Seelenmesse’ (Requiem Mass) – and Calzabigi's later claim that no sound was heard from the spectators but sighs testify alike, from different perspectives, to this basic feature of the work.

Although less caustic than his private letter to Kaunitz on the subject of the cast, Calzabigi's preface to Alceste (written in Gluck's name) was the most forceful declaration to date of the principles of the new, anti-Metastasian type of serious opera:

When undertaking to write the music for Alceste I set myself the goal of divesting it of all those abuses that, introduced to it either by the misplaced vanity of singers, or by the excessive indulgence of composers, have for such a long time disfigured Italian opera, and made of the most splendid and most beautiful of all spectacles the most ridiculous, and the most tedious. I have sought to restrict music to its true purpose of serving the poetry, as regards the expression, and the situations of the fable, without interrupting the action or chilling it with useless and superfluous ornaments, and I have believed that it should do the same thing [for the poetry] as vivacity of colour and a well-varied contrast of light and shade do for a correct and well-ordered drawing, serving to animate the figures without altering their contours. Thus I have wanted neither to stop an actor in the greatest heat of the dialogue in order to wait for a tiresome ritornello, nor to stop in the middle of a word on a favourable vowel, nor to show off the agility of his beautiful voice in a long passaggio, nor to wait for the orchestra to give him time to recover his breath for a cadenza. I did not believe it my duty to pass quickly over the second, and perhaps most impassioned and important, part of an aria [text], in order to have time in which to repeat regularly four times over the words of the first part, and to conclude the aria where its sense perhaps does not finish, in order to give the singer the opportunity of showing that he can vary a passage in a number of capricious ways; in short, I have sought to ban all those abuses against which good sense and reason have for some time cried out in vain.

I have fancied that the overture should apprise the spectators of the action that is to be represented, and form, so to speak, its argument; that the use of concerted instruments should be regulated in proportion to the interest and passion [of the text], and not leave that sharp contrast in the dialogue between aria and recitative, that [their use] not truncate a period nonsensically, nor inopportunely interrupt the force and heat of the action.

Furthermore I have believed that my greatest effort should consist of seeking a beautiful simplicity; and I have avoided making a display of difficulties at the expense of clarity; I have not judged it to be praiseworthy to invent some novelty that did not naturally arise from the situation and from the expression; and there is no rule of composition that I have not thought necessary to sacrifice willingly for the sake of the effect.

These are my principles. Luckily my intentions were served marvellously by the libretto, in which the celebrated author, imagining a new plan for the drama, had replaced florid descriptions, superfluous comparisons and sententious, cold moralizing with the language of the heart, strong passions, interesting situations and an ever-varied spectacle. Success has justified my maxims, and the universal approval of such an enlightened city [as Vienna] has clearly shown that simplicity, truth and naturalness are the great principles of the beautiful in all artistic productions.

With the exception of the remarks on the overture, everything in the preface could just as easily apply to Orfeo. One important difference between the operas was signalled in Sonnenfels's review at the very outset: its lack of castrato singers. But this was not fundamental to Gluck and Calzabigi's reform, for their next opera, Paride ed Elena, featured the castrato Millico in one of the title roles. Two other features of Alceste, passed over in silence by Calzabigi but noted by Sonnenfels, were rather more significant: the poet's obvious debt to Euripides, which, for informed spectators, made Alceste more palpably a Greek-revival drama than Orfeo; and the way in which ‘Every part of [Gluck's] music, considered by itself, constitutes a very agreeable whole, which however stands in such a harmonious relationship with the greater whole that, if tones could be made visible, the Gluckian movements would make up the most well-proportioned body (Sonnenfels, C1768, p.18). Indeed, to an extent far greater even than in Orfeo, chorus and solo song are intermingled in Alceste. There was precedent in French tragédie lyrique for the manner in which Gluck knitted together the various tableaux in Alceste, with choral refrains returning in subsequent scenes, after intervening material (whether sung or danced). But as Petrobelli (G1987) has noted, Gluck himself was responsible for many subtle but telling musical and rhetorical changes (affecting the structure of Calzabigi's original libretto), which helped forestall tedium and permitted him to extend his scene complexes to unheard-of lengths. In these large musical edifices the solo interjections of the two confidants, Ismene and Evander, provided worthy musical occupation for a type of character all too often employed for amorous intrigues in Metastasian dramas. As implied by Sonnenfels, the solo numbers in Alceste are scarcely to be appreciated out of their contexts; those of Alcestis especially develop organically, often in surprising directions. Notwithstanding the remarks in the preface on avoiding sharp musical contrasts, Gluck introduces his heroine in simple recitative, as if to depict her sense of abandonment, and in the ensuing aria is unafraid to resort to traditional coloratura as an appropriate illustration of her phrase ‘qualche raggio di pietà’ (a few rays of pity). In subsequent arias, though, he eschews ornament in favour of a heartfelt simplicity of expression so pure (nowhere more than in the heroine's ‘Non vi turbate, no’) that several of them were later adapted as sacred parodies.

Although Gluck complained in 1770 that Alceste had not yet inspired other composers to similar efforts, the opera was eventually widely influential, notably in Sweden, where the young composer and ardent Gluck-admirer J.M. Kraus had similarly lavish choral and balletic forces at his disposal. Leopold Mozart, who was in Vienna with his young son at the time of the première in 1767, was dismissive of Alceste and its cast of opera buffa singers, but later implicitly recommended its oracle scenes, with their crescendo and diminuendo of trombones, as models for those in his son's Idomeneo, even while urging him (in a letter of 29 December 1780) to make his oracular pronouncement a ‘masterpiece of harmony’, which Gluck's was not. Perhaps the greatest lesson Wolfgang Mozart learnt from the elder composer's opera was that of continuity, which he applied rigorously throughout Idomeneo, with the same goal of the audience's complete immersion in the spectacle.

With Paride ed Elena, Calzabigi and Gluck again took up the Homeric material (already drawn upon in Telemaco) that was to inspire the composer's two Iphigenia operas for Paris, and the ‘Greekness’ of the work was emphasized in other ways as well. The poet cast his text in five acts, as in ancient Greek drama; as in Orfeo, precisely at the centre of the drama is a reiterated song (strophic, in this case) by the male protagonist who, accompanying himself on the harp, attempts to overcome the resistance of his auditor. Gluck's determination to impart a primitive tone to much of the music of the opera was a bold and interesting experiment, suggestive of the concurrent resurgence of interest in the stark early orders of Greek architecture. Despite a certain uniformity of sentiment (a problem also in Alceste) and a distinct lack of vocal variety (all five characters being portrayed by sopranos, whether male or female), the roles are well distinguished, with Paris the more ardent of the lovers and prone to outbursts of coloratura, and Cupid (Amore) a childlike and taunting provocateur. Many of Gluck's accompaniments are psychologically revealing, in a way that looks forward to Iphigénie en Tauride – as in the penultimate scene of Act 5, where the violas' agitated repeated notes underscore Helen's irresolution. This music and that which follows, recapitulated from the overture, provides an ironic undertone to what in dramatic terms is actually a very open ending, as Paris and Helen ignore Pallas Athene's prediction of flames, destruction and death in Troy. For a Viennese public by now accustomed to associating vocal display with decadence, the incautious lovers' sudden turn to coloratura must have been all too indicative of their moral weakness.

Gluck scholars, and to a lesser extent audiences of his operas, have long been troubled by the composer's supposed ‘backsliding’ in the more traditional Italian serious operas that he wrote during the period of his Viennese reform. Allegorical works to be performed by Habsburg archdukes and archduchesses were easily excused, but dramas produced for professional singers were less so. Prod'homme (D1948) went so far as to suggest that Telemaco (performed in January 1765) had been conceived before Orfeo, since its use of extensive simple recitatives, and of numbers borrowed from operas as early as Sofonisba of 1744, seemed to him incompatible with the operatic principles underlying the works written with Calzabigi. But complaints about inconsistency on Gluck's part fail to take into account the literary genres and subject matter involved. Heroic stories such as that of Telemachus required a considerable amount of exposition and dialogue, for which the exclusive use of accompanied recitative would be tiresome and inappropriate. For operas commissioned for foreign venues – as in the case of Il trionfo di Clelia (Bologna, 1763) – it was usually preferable to give performers material suited to their talents, which generally tended towards vocal agility more than towards realistic acting in the manner of Guadagni. (Calzabigi made this same point from the opposite perspective in arguing for an appropriate cast for the reform opera Alceste in his letter to Kaunitz of 6 March 1767, quoted in §4 above.) The realization that the ‘new plan’ of serious Italian opera, although historically the most progressive, was only one among several in which Gluck excelled, should help present-day listeners to an appreciation of the many musical and dramatic beauties to be found in his more conventional works. This Berlioz was able to do only to a certain extent, for although in perusing the score of Telemaco he found much to admire, his experience in the theatre of Gluck's reform operas made the instances of coloratura in the work seem intolerable.

Gluck, Christoph Willibald Ritter von