class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">44 This lent a liveliness and piquancy to his musical style, 45 and rendered it essentially French. 46

FRENCH OPERA.

Grétry accomplished wonders for musical form, as far as grace and freshness, lively emotion and wit go, but his powers did not attain to anything truly great or important to art. The art of melodious expression was developed by him almost to the exclusion of other means, such as rich and well-chosen härmonies, 47 artistic accompaniments, and instrumental effects, all of which he treated as subordinate and unimportant.

He inveighs against the misuse of the instruments, especially of the wind instruments, which Gluck's example had introduced, even if he were not personally responsible for it; 48 but he recommends the moderate use of them for characterisation, 49 and prides himself on his very questionable invention in his "Andromaque" of assigning special instruments to the recitatives of each principal character—Andromache, for instance, having always three flutes. 50 A saying of Grétry's, that in opera song is the statue, and the orchestra the pedestal, and that Mozart sometimes put the pedestal on the stage, has often been repeated. Whether this is authentic or not, the fact remains that Grétry's neglect of the orchestra was not altogether of set purpose, but that this branch of artistic education was unknown to him and interested him as little as did the minute elaboration and hard study which are dear to all first-rate musicians. His idea that a musician of genius may spoil his inventive powers by too much study is truly comical; what he tells of his own studies shows how shallow they were, and his productions are all of a piece. On the other hand he lays great weight upon reflection, which does not properly concern music at all; but his simplicity, which almost amounted to barrenness, served to heighten his truly excellent qualities, and to make him the popular idol he was. It is quite conceivable that the encyclopedists, who were the champions of Italian music, should have seen in him the man who united beauty and melody with Italian truth and characteristic expression. Diderot wrote under GLUCK. Grétry's portrait the motto: "Irritat, mulcet, falsis terroribus implet, ut magus"; 51 Rousseau thanked him for having reopened his heart to emotion by his music; 52 Grimm, who had received him with approbation from the first, 53 declared during the heat of the struggle between Gluckists and Piccinnists that connoisseurs and others were all agreed that no composer had succeeded like Grétry in fitting Italian melody to the French language, and in satisfying the national taste for wit and delicacy. 54 Suard and Arnaud, Gluck's supporters, stood by Grétry, 55 as well as Marmontel, who was opposed to Gluck. 56 And with what enthusiasm the public received his operas! Many of them—to mention only "Zemire and Azor"—made their way throughout Europe, and had unquestionably much influence on the formation of musical taste.

While comic opera was thus flourishing more and more richly and abundantly, the grand opera was confined almost exclusively to Lully and Rameau; it might almost seem that it had reached its limits, and that the interest of the public was henceforth to be centred on comic opera. 57 But fresh trials awaited the grand opera. Doubtless the light breezes which sprang from the reformed comic opera were precursors of the coming storm; but the actual impulse to it was not given in Paris itself.

FRENCH OPERA.

Christ. Wilh. Gluck (1714-1787), after doing good service to Italian opera in Italy and London, went to Vienna in 1748, and there wrote, partly for the Prince of Hildburg-hausen, partly and chiefly for the imperial court, a succession of Italian operas of no very striking originality. It was precisely the time when the traditional forms were becoming more and more conventional formulas, and when the vocal art was demanding the sacrifice of simplicity, nature, and truth to the whim of each virtuoso. The decadence of operatic music, which Metastasio bitterly laments (Vol. I., p. 163), inspired Gluck with the desire to lead it back to its first principles. He was a man of earnest thought and strong will. The tendency of German literature to give dignity and importance to poetry did not pass by him unnoticed, and he was a warm admirer of Klopstock, whose odes he set to music. 58 The efforts then being made to raise the German stage in Vienna had an influence on him, and his own first attempts at reformation were greeted with loud applause by Sonnenfels.

Gluck has professed his principles of dramatic composition in the well-known dedication to his "Alceste." He declares his opposition to the abuses introduced by the vanity of singers and the servility of composers, by which the most beautiful and stately drama becomes the most tiresome; he refused to interrupt the action at a wrong time by a ritornello, to sacrifice expression to a run or a cadenza, to neglect the second part of a song when the situation demands that peculiar stress shall be laid on it, in obedience to the custom which requires the fourfold repetition of the words of the first part, or to give an ending to the song against the sense of the text; his overtures were to be characteristic of the drama