The Third War of the Musical Enlightenment

Abstract

The Third War of the Musical Enlightenment ROBERT M. ISHERWOOD On March 31, 1780, the chevalier Christoph Willibald von Gluck wrote the following in a letter from Vienna to his friend Baron Tschudi in Paris: “But as to my going to Paris again, nothing will come of it, so long as the words ‘Piccinnist’ and ‘Gluckist’ remain current, for I am, thank God, in good health at present, and have no wish to spit bile again in Paris. ... I shall hardly allow myself to be persuaded again to become the object of the criticism or the praise of the French nation, for they are as changeable as red cockerels.... I could wish that someone might come one day to take my place and to please the public with his music, so that I might be left in peace, for I am still unable to forget the tittle/tattle to which friends and foes made me listen concerning Narcissus and the pills I have had to swallow, for Messieurs the Frenchmen cannot yet see any difference between a musical eclogue and a ‘poeme z 5 1 95 epique .... The acknowledged king of European opera, Gluck had recently become the center of controversy in the third war over music of the French Enlighten­ ment. Earlier, Gluck had conquered audiences throughout Italy and at the Viennese court with his operas in the Italian style. While still in Vienna, he had proclaimed a new philosophy of music drama to elucidate the principles behind his first great reform operas, Orfeo and Alceste, Basking in his 223 224 / ROBERT M. ISHERWOOD triumphs, he had come to France to breathe new life into the declining Op6ra. The reforms of Gluck and his librettist, Raniero Calzabigi, were more likely to succeed in France than in Italy because of the traditional French conception of opera as a lyric drama. Gluck’s reforms were preeminently dramatic. The problem was that this was not the main direction that the philosophes wanted opera to follow. Their conception of reform was more musically oriented, which entailed the infusion into French opera of Italian melody. Although the socially powerful Gluckists prevailed over the heirs of the philosophes (Marmontel, La Harpe, Chastellux, and others) in the struggle over operatic reform, Gluck had become embittered by the war of words and had withdrawn to Vienna. Thus, in 1780 he was living in semi-retirement, refusing the appeals of his friends and the rich invitations from the Opera to return to France. He had finished his career locked in a battle of opposing musical ideologies. For some years historians have interpreted the musical war of the 1770’s as a meaningless feud among journalists most of whom were musically ignorant. In his biography of Gluck, Martin Cooper dismisses the Gluck-Piccinni dis­ pute as “a question of journalism.”2 More recently, Norbert Dufourcq, an outstanding musicologist, charges that the whole controversy among the philosophes over the merits of French and Italian opera is a “faux probleme,” of no importance to the music historian.3 A second popular view of the musical war is that Gluck was the answer to the philosophes' call for reform.4 Alfred Richard Oliver, for example, cites Gluck’s selection of the drama Iphigenie en Aulide, which Diderot com­ mended as perfect for opera, as evidence of the concord between Gluck and the philosophes. Oliver finds Diderot’s ideas echoed in Gluck’s writings and operas, and he suggests that Diderot’s refusal to take part in the GluckPiccinni quarrel is evidence that in the minds of the Encyclopedists the re­ form opera had been achieved. Neither of these interpretations is satisfactory. In the first place the third musical war was not a brief skirmish confined to a few journalists. In fact it was only the latest battle in a continuous struggle to reform the French lyric theater. Originating in the reign of Louis XIV, musical controversy had erupted into open hostilities twice earlier in the eighteenth century: first, in the 1740’s, when the combat was between the proponents of Jean-Baptiste Lully, whose works were still performed regularly at the Opera years after his death in 1687, and the advocates of...