9. ‘Opéras comiques’.

The nature of Gluck's involvement with French opéra comique changed several times during his decade as musical director of the French theatre in Vienna. Although at first he was required by Durazzo merely to supervise the arrangement of imported Parisian works, contribute replacement ariettes and lead performances, in 1758 he began composing complete original scores in the genre. His first opéras comiques were seen as curiosities, for while the relatively new genre was popular throughout Europe, few original works were then being written outside Paris. Initially, Gluck's resettings of Parisian texts suffered from court-imposed censorship, and in the pasticcio Le diable à quatre (1759) his anonymous ‘airs nouveaux’ still rubbed shoulders with parodied Italian ariettes. But soon his works were competing successfully on the stage of the Vienna Burgtheater with the most recent operas by Duni, Monsigny and Philidor. Gluck did not seriously envisage having his opéras comiques staged in Paris, although performances of two of his works in the genre were an incidental result of his visits to France in the 1770s. This was due in part to the prejudice in France against resettings of operas by living composers; those of Gluck's comic operas that were given there had started as vaudeville comedies. The unavailability in Vienna of original opéra comique texts was a serious handicap; La rencontre imprévue (1764, originally called Les pèlerins de la Mecque), the one work for which a professional librettist (Dancourt) was on hand, was a revision of a 1726 text chosen in consideration of the poet's old-fashioned tastes. Still, in L'ivrogne corrigé (1760) Gluck was able to insist on improvements in the Parisian libretto by Anseaume (originally set by J.-L. Laruette) and thereby to create a mock-hell scene of impressive musical architecture. The skills that he developed in writing this comic opera were of much help to Gluck in the composition of Orfeo ed Euridice in 1762.

Critics described Gluck's earliest opéras comiques as italianate, and indeed, echoes of Pergolesi are to be found in several of them. The multi-sectional act finales in La rencontre imprévue likewise have their origin in opera buffa. But Cythère assiégée of 1759 (Favart's parody of Quinault and Lully's Armide) demonstrates his quick mastery of French declamation and musical style. In this and other works in the genre Gluck imitated both the newly composed ariettes (with frequent ports de voix (under-appoggiaturas) and inégal rhythms) and the traditional vaudeville melodies (notably in L'arbre enchanté and L'ivrogne corrigé). Yet he remained largely immune to certain Parisian trends in the genre, such as the romance and ensembles for large numbers of singers. Tonic-accented rhythms characteristic of Gluck's Bohemian homeland are prominent in both Cythère assiégée and L'arbre enchanté, though he mostly excised them when revising these operas for French audiences in 1775. In other respects, too, Gluck made use in his opéras comiques of musical resources unavailable to composers working for the Opéra Comique in Paris: ‘Turkish’ music (in Le cadi dupé and La rencontre imprévue), large choral forces (in Cythère assiégée) and italianate coloratura (La rencontre imprévue).

The influence of Gluck's opéras comiques extended well beyond Vienna. Habsburg connections ensured that his works were well known in Brussels in the Austrian Netherlands, and performances of Cythère assiégée at the court of Mannheim in 1759 earned Gluck a large tun ‘full of excellent wine’ from the elector, according to Burney (BurneyGN, i, 292). Both Le cadi dupé and La rencontre imprévue circulated widely in German translation and served as models for Singspiel composers in Austria (e.g. Gluck's protégé Ditters), southern Germany and even northern Germany. La rencontre imprévue was translated (by Carl Frieberth) as an opera buffa and set by Haydn for Eszterháza in 1775. A Viennese revival (in German) of Gluck's comic opera in the early 1780s provided much of the musical inspiration for Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, in which many of the same cast members sang.

Gluck himself was able to re-use much music from his Viennese opéras comiques in the divertissements of his lyric tragedies for Paris, particularly Armide. But although the two genres were rapidly converging in Paris, Gluck's opéra comiques for Vienna avoid the serious subject matter and situations of certain works by the likes of Philidor, Monsigny and Grétry.

Gluck, Christoph Willibald Ritter von