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Updated: May 11, 2025
But the character of Manly is the best illustration of our meaning. Molière exhibited in his misanthrope a pure and noble mind, which had been sorely vexed by the sight of perfidy and malevolence, disguised under the forms of politeness. As every extreme naturally generates its contrary, Alceste adopts a standard of good and evil directly opposed to that of the society which surrounds him.
As he said in his Memoirs, this aversion hid from him the true worth of Don Juan and Le Nozze di Figaro. One wonders whether he knew that his idol, Gluck, wrote music for Italian texts not only in the case of his first works but also in Orphée and Alceste. And whether he knew that the aria "O malheureuse Iphigenie" was an Italian song badly translated into French.
All it has to do is to bring itself into accord with society. The character of Alceste is that of a thoroughly honest man. But then he is unsociable, and, on that very account, ludicrous. A flexible vice may not be so easy to ridicule as a rigid virtue. It is rigidity that society eyes with suspicion.
It was sometimes Alceste who offered to be buried quick with Ophelia in the grave; and it was often Hamlet who interjected his scraps of poetic cynicism between the pretty and scandalous prattlings of Célimène and her petticoaterie. But perhaps Alceste came nearest to the heart of our young maid as she grew up.
Its success determined him at once to acquaint the musical world with his purpose to reform the opera by making it dramatically musical instead of purely lyric, thus paving the way for the great innovator of Baireuth. "Alceste," produced in 1767, was the first embodiment of these ideas.
He began to develop that purity of style which we find in "Alceste," "Iphigénie en Tauride" and others. "Alceste" was the second opera on the reformed plan which simplified the music to give more prominence to the poetry. It was produced in Vienna in 1769, with the text written by Calzabigi. The opera was ahead of "Orfeo" in simplicity and nobility, but it did not seem to please the critics.
Set a Tartuffe's all-devouring eyes, and the sour humor of an Alceste in a sallow-parchment visage, and try to imagine for yourself the gait, bearing, and expression of a man who thought himself as good a doctor as the illustrious Bianchon, and felt that he was held down in his narrow lot by an iron hand. Are the hatreds and jealousies of democracy incomprehensible after this?
'Creations' one may well say, for you anticipated Nature herself: you gave us, before she did, in Alceste a Rousseau who was a gentleman not a lacquey; in a mot of Don Juan's, the secret of the new Religion and the watchword of Comte, l'amour de l'humanite.
His touch is firmer, and he rarely shows that inclination to drop back into the old conventional style, which occasionally mars the beauty of 'Orfeo. Gluck wrote a preface to the published score of 'Alceste, which is one of the most interesting documents in the history of music.
The comedy of types necessarily tends to keep within the limits of the known, and Molière in spite of Alceste and Don Juan is characteristically a character-drawer, as Racine is characteristically a psychologist. Ibsen is a psychologist or he is nothing. Earl Skule and Bishop Nicholas, Hedda Gabler and John Gabriel Borkman are daring explorations of hitherto uncharted regions of the human soul.
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