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To say that 'Armide' recalls the romantic grace of 'Paride ed Elena, is but half the truth. The lyrical grace of the earlier work is as it were concentrated and condensed in a series of pictures which for voluptuous beauty surpass anything that had been written before Gluck's day.
A serious-minded analyst might be tempted to admire the profound psychology of the author in mingling doleful accents with expressions of joy, but he would have his labor for his pains. The trio was taken from the opera Elena e Paride, where Gluck expressed strongly wrought up emotions. Doret did not keep these two passages and one can't blame him.
Unfortunately the libretto of 'Paride ed Elena, though possessing great poetical merit, is monotonous and deficient in incident, so that the opera has never won the success which it deserves, and is now almost completely forgotten. The admiration for the French school of opera which had been aroused in Gluck by hearing the works of Rameau was not by any means a passing fancy.
Massenet has told us that he borrowed right and left from his unpublished score, La Coupe du Roi de Thulé. That is what Gluck did with his Elena e Paride which had little success. I may as well confess that one of the ballets in Henry VIII came from the finale of an opéra-comique in one act.
For you may see him, through the eyes of Paride de Grassi, unable one Good Friday to remove his shoes for the adoration of the cross in consequence of his foot's affliction ex morbo gallico.
Tum-tum, ta-ta-ta . . ." He hummed a few bars of Gluck's "Paride ed Elenna," and paused, with the gesture of one holding a fiddle, on the verge of a reminiscence. "There was a time but I no longer compete. And to whom, General, are we indebted for this ah treat?"
Yet he held so consistently before him his ideal of dramatic truth, that his music has survived all changes of taste and fashion, and still delights connoisseurs as fully as on the day it was produced. 'Paride ed Elena, Gluck's next great work, shows his genius under a more lyrical aspect.
There is scarcely a trace of the delightful lyricism which rushes through 'Paride ed Elena' like a flood of resistless delight. Gluck had set his ideal of perfect declamatory truth firmly before him, and he resisted every temptation to swerve into the paths of mere musical beauty. He had not yet learnt how to combine the two styles.
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