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M. Halévy had been at the same college with him, and they had pored together over the same legends of old time, but working without M. Meilhac on Orphée aux Enfers, M. Halévy showed his inferiority, for Orphée is the old-fashioned anachronistic skit on antiquity funny if you will, but with a fun often labored, not to say forced the fun of physical incongruity and exaggeration.
The frequent movement in octaves imparts a nobility and dignity to her expression which are altogether absent in the words. The paraphrase of the words of the air from Gluck's Orphee is amusing enough as a jeu d' esprit, but surely cannot be taken seriously. Hanslick seems to have misapprehended the music; it does not express grief, and is not intended to.
It is of Gaëtan that the story is told in connection with Gluck, when the opera of "Orphée" was put in rehearsal. The dancer wished for a ballet in the opera. "Write me the music of a chacone, Monsieur Gluck," said the god of dancing. "A chacone!" ejaculated the astonished composer; "do you think the Greeks, whose manners we are endeavoring to depict, knew what a chacone was?"
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.
Then he brought home a new violin, and he said to me, 'I shall go; I shall play; I am Orphee, and dinners shall rise! I was glad, and kissed him; and he said, 'This is Sandra's gift to me, showing the violin. I only knew what that meant two days afterwards. Is a girl not seventeen fit to be married?"
Many of Gluck's compatriots came to Mézières to see Orphée and they were loyal enough to recognize the superiority of the performance. Some even had the courage to say, "We murder Gluck in Germany." I discovered that fact a long time ago. In my youth I was indignant when I saw Paris, where Gluck wrote his finest works, quite neglecting them, whereas Germany continued to promote them.
There is a fine example of this excellent system in Lully's famous aria from Medusa to prove what strength results from a close relation between the accent of the verse and the music. Gluck was one of the most fervent disciples of this system, but Orphée, as we know, was derived from Orfeo.
On the twenty-eighth day of March he fell in with a French squadron, commanded by the marquis du Quesne, consisting of four ships, namely, the Foudroyant, of eighty guns, the Orphée, of sixty-four, the Oriflamme, of fifty, and the Pléiade frigate, of twenty-four, in their passage from Toulon to reinforce M. de la Clue, who had for some time been blocked up by admiral Osborne in the harbour of Carthagena.
The beautiful choruses sung by the fresh voices of the pupils made such a success and the whole work was so enthusiastically applauded that it was revived at the Opéra-Comique and won back a success which it has never lost. We also heard there Gluck's Orphée long before that masterpiece was revived at the Théâtre-Lyrique.
As the son of a dramatist and the nephew of a popular composer, he had easy access to the stage. He began as the librettist-in-ordinary to M. Offenbach, for whom he wrote Ba-ta-clan in 1855, and later the Chanson de Fortunio, the Pont des Soupirs and Orphée aux Enfers.
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