12. Paris operas.

Hindsight makes Gluck's move to Paris seem inevitable, so pervasive was French influence in his work over the preceding 20 years. An opera on the story of Iphigenia in Aulis drew in the greatest French tragedian, Racine, and the reform ideas of the Encylopedists, also embodied in Algarotti's Saggio, that the French should retain their operatic forms, while modernizing their musical language. If the two converted opéras comiques are excluded, the Gluck operas most French in character are Iphigénie en Aulide, Orphée, Armide and Echo et Narcisse. The failure of the latter, following the more italianate Alceste and Iphigénie en Tauride, is an indication of a shift in taste which Gluck had done much to encourage.

The Iphigénie operas and Armide follow the Viennese Orfeo and Alceste in their dependence on supernatural intervention and the merveilleux. In its original and stronger form, the end of Iphigénie en Aulide can be interpreted, in line with the Jansenist doctrine espoused by Racine, as naturalistic; the fair wind needed to take the Greeks to Troy is delivered, but no deity confirms the miracle. Gluck created a new form of operatic excitement with the verismo argument between Agamemnon and Achilles, and the latter's sacrilegious armed intervention to prevent the sacrifice (Rushton, H1992). Iphigénie en Aulide and Armide best show Gluck's study of earlier French opera in the inclusion of aria forms with short, repeated sections, and the design of monologues for Armida and Agamemnon, which mingle recitative and aria-like music. Agamemnon's magnificent second monologue emerges from Italian recitativo stromentato and the ombra tradition. The lashing string figure, admired by E.T.A. Hoffmann, which represents the Furies, is relegated by an unfortunate editorial decision to an appendix in the Sämtliche Werke (i/5); there is no authority for its preferred text, a simplified version which appears only in much later sources. The inclusion of an aria from an Italian opera in Orphée pointed to a future in which tragédie lyrique was dominated by Italian composers. Several longer arias in the Italian Alceste are in varied tempos, a type criticized by Rousseau in ‘Observations sur l’Alceste de M. Gluck’ (Collection complète des oeuvres de J.J. Rousseau, xvi, Geneva, 1782, p.378) as ‘not an aria, but a suite of several airs’, but nevertheless followed by Iphigenia's Act 1 aria in Iphigénie en Aulide, and by Alcestis's fine additional aria ‘Non, ce n'est point un sacrifice’ in the French Alceste. Roullet's version (it is much more than translation) reduced the spacious grandeur of Calzabigi's design and diluted the impact of Alcestis's visit to Hades, but the action is better paced and the opera more theatrically effective. In hastily adding Hercules' rescue of Alcestis, using an aria from Ezio, Gluck matched the excitement of the dénouement of Iphigénie en Aulide. In Armide, the design of Quinault's text required typically French forms, and the subject revived the colourist in him: ‘I strove to be more painter and poet than musician … Armide possesses a kind of delicacy not present in Alceste, because I have contrived to make characters speak so that you will know at once, from their way of expressing themselves, whether it is Armida who is speaking, or a confidante’ (letter in Année littéraire, viii, 1776, p.322; Lesure, C1984). The beauties of the instrumentation, notably in Renaud's monologue ‘Plus j'observe ces lieux’ and the magical end of Act 2, recall the central act of Orfeo.

Gluck's fashioning of his musical language to suit the subject is demonstrated by his abandonment of such refinement in Iphigénie en Tauride, where it is replaced by inspired use of pasticcio (Hortschanksy, H1966). There is new music in this opera, including the Scythian dances and recitatives of unmatched subtlety, and its dramatic sequence is sewn together in masterly fashion; but the longer arias, though hardly typical of the mid-century Italian style, are taken from earlier works, most famously ‘O malheureuse Iphigénie’ from Sextus's ‘Se mai senti spirarti’ (La clemenza di Tito). Gluck's disdain for the ‘hors d'oeuvre’ is evident in the lack of an overture; a contemporary noted in the Journal de Paris of 19 May 1779 that ‘the piece begins, so to speak, with the first coup d'archet’ (see Lesure, C1984), an introductory calm leading to ferocious development of the storm music from L'île de Merlin. The concluding ballet was supplied by Gossec, but within the opera several passages are developed from the ballet Sémiramis, including Orestes' impressive monologue ‘Le calme rentre dans mon coeur’, in which the agitated viola rhythm contradicts his words, and the subsequent chorus of Furies. The masterly incorporation of arias of Italian origin gave support to Gluck's Italian successors, who took Iphigenia's ‘Je t'implore et je tremble’ (adapted from Antigono and already recycled in Telemaco) as a model for their own vehement ostinato-based arias. Iphigénie en Tauride is often considered Gluck's finest work, and the greatest tragédie lyrique of the period.

Gluck, Christoph Willibald Ritter von