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Updated: May 19, 2025
When it came to the mug's turn to be made into spoons, it half broke poor little Gluck's heart; but the brothers only laughed at him, tossed the mug into the melting pot, and staggered out to the alehouse, leaving him, as usual, to pour the gold into bars when it was all ready. When they were gone, Gluck took a farewell look at his old friend in the melting pot.
She had the gracious condescension to hear all the pieces through, at Gluck's request, before they were submitted to the stage for rehearsal. Gluck said he always improved his music after he saw the effect it had upon Her Majesty.
"The French public will have for the first time," he said, "the pleasure of hearing two operas on the same theme, with the same incidents, the same characters, but composed by two great masters of totally different schools." "But," objected the alarmed Italian, "if Gluck's opera is played first, the public will be so delighted that they will not listen to mine."
"That mutton looks very nice," said the old gentleman at length. "Can't you give me a little bit?" "Impossible, sir," said Gluck. "I'm very hungry," continued the old gentleman; "I've had nothing to eat yesterday nor today. They surely couldn't miss a bit from the knuckle!" He spoke in so very melancholy a tone that it quite melted Gluck's heart.
In the Seventeenth Century the French pitch was even more flat, and it is a great pity, for it is almost impossible to perform our old music, on account of the insuperable obstacles. This is not the case in Germany, however, or in Italy, and that is the reason why the works of Sebastian Bach and Mozart can be sung. The same is true of Gluck's Italian works.
It really is most annoying. You can't think how that amused me. I then begged that I might not be made to suffer for the accident, and hoped she would sing another song. After some consultation with her husband, he said, 'She will sing you something of Gluck's. Meantime, the Princess of Gotha had come in, and we five proceeded through various corridors and rooms to the Queen's sitting-room.
In Berlioz's Mémoires you can read about the enthusiasm, the tears, and the feeling, that the performances of Gluck's and Spontini's operas aroused; and in the same book one sees clearly that this musical warmth lasted until 1840, after which it died down little by little, and was succeeded by complete musical apathy in the second Empire an apathy from which Berlioz suffered cruelly, so that one may even say he died crushed by the indifference of the public.
The rolling-pin was descending on Gluck's head; but, at the instant, the old gentleman interposed his conical cap, on which it crashed with a shock that shook the water out of it all over the room. What was very odd, the rolling-pin no sooner touched the cap, than it flew out of Schwartz's hand, spinning like a straw in a high wind, and fell into the corner at the further end of the room.
Musically it was radically different in character from the opera, as it was from the liturgical drama. But none the less it contained some of the germs of the modern opera. It had its solo, its chorus and its ballet. But while the characters of these were almost as clearly defined as they are in Gluck's "Orfeo," their musical basis, as we shall see, was altogether different.
Berlioz berated all this music. He had seen Gluck's works on the stage in his youth, but he could see nothing in them that was not "superannuated and childish." With all respect to Berlioz's memory, it deserved a kinder judgment than that. When one reaches the depths of this music, although it may be at the price of some effort, he is well repaid for his pains.
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