Education: Chastity Triumphant

The cheers that are sweeping the Paris Opera mark the triumph of this spring’s new sensation: Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Alceste. They mark the triumph too of the “reformers” who are determined to abolish the exaggerated trills and cadenzas of the Italian stage. Writes Britain’s Charles Burney, author of the erudite new General history of Music: “The chevalier Gluck is simplifying music . . . He tries all he can to keep his music chaste.” Retorts popular Librettist Pietro Metastasio: Gluck is a composer of “surprising fire, but mad.”

When Gluck’s opera was originally published in Vienna in 1769, he wrote a preface outlining his plan to overcome “the mistaken vanity of singers.” his alternative: “I have striven to restrict music to its true office of serving poetry by means of expression and by following the situations of the story, without interrupting the action or stifling it with a useless superfluity of ornaments.” Although Italian prima donnas pay little attention to their words, Gluck heaped praises on the “heartfelt language” of his librettist, Ranieri Calzabigi, who also collaborated on Gluck’s first big success, Orfeo ed Euridice (1762).

While Gluck lived in Vienna, his music pupils included the Habsburg princesses, so when one of them became Queen Marie Antoinette two years ago, Gluck began planning to restage his operas in Paris. Although the pro-Italian faction there is strong (once headed by Philosopher and sometime Composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau), Gluck determined to make his opera even more starkly dramatic than before. The revised libretto stays closer to Euripedes’ original, restores Hercules as the hero who saves King Admetus and Queen Alcestis from death. Gluck has tightened many scenes and rescored his recitatives for full orchestra. At 62, with 44 operas completed, he stands today as a master.

Across the Rinne, Gluck’s triumph is likely to spread far, for opera is becoming increasingly fashionable. At Esterház, for example, where Franz Josef Haydn serves as Kapellmeister to Prince Nicolaus the Magnificent, the composer has been asked to stop writing chamber music for the prince to play on his baryton viol and to drill his 22-man orchestra in opera. Among those who heard Haydn was Archduke Ferdinand, who commissioned him to compose an opera, La Vera Costanza, to be staged in Vienna later this year.

As for Librettist Calzabigi, he has provided a text for a youth who once was one of Austria’s most promising child prodigies, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Their work, La Finta Giardiniera, was staged in Munich last year, and Mozart hopes to find sponsors for further productions. Mozart has been performing publicly on the harpsichord and violin since the age of six, but his remarkable gift seems to be turning mainly toward composition. Still only 20, he has already written ten Masses for his employer, the Archbishop of Salzburg, as well as a prodigious total of seven other operas, 18 violin sonatas, five violin concertos and 37 symphonies.

Despite his productivity, Mozart does not have much official support. Emperor Joseph II, commenting on Haydn’s love of thick orchestration in his operas, said to another composer who had not heard them: “You haven’t missed anything. He’s just as bad as Mozart in that respect.”