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Worst of all, it was his own pupil and protégé, Anfossi, who supplanted him. The tender-hearted Piccinni, like Palestrina, was so overcome with this humiliation, that he fell ill, and kept his bed for several months.
Piccinni sinks into insignificance by the side of Gluck, but he was nevertheless an able composer, and certainly the leading representative of the Italian school at the time. He did much to develop the concerted finale, which before his day had been used with caution, not to say timidity, and was so constant in his devotion to the loftiest ideal of art that he died in poverty and starvation.
The next year, 1776, Piccinni was called to Paris as an unwilling conscript in the musical revolution, which was raging no less fiercely than the American Revolution of the same time. It was a bitter December day when Piccinni arrived in Paris with his wife, and his eldest daughter, aged eighteen.
The celebrated Faustina, whose quarrel with Cuzzoni is as famous in the history of music as the war between Gluck and Piccinni, was less daring. Dr. Burney visited her when she was seventy-two years old and asked her to sing. "Alas, I cannot," she replied, "I have lost all my faculties."
Piccinni was rocking the cradle of his youngest child, born that same year; another of his children tugged at his coat to make him tip over the cradle; the mother revelling in the spectacle. She fled in dismay at seeing the stranger, who stood at the door, enjoying the scene himself.
Madame Jeannin used often to speak of her grandfather, who adored the violoncello, and used to sing airs of Gluck, and Dalayrac, and Berton. There was a large volume of them in the house, and a pile of Italian songs. For the old gentleman was like M. Andrieux, of whom Berlioz said: "He loved Gluck." And he added bitterly: "He also loved Piccinni." Perhaps of the two he preferred Piccinni.
There have been the home-keeping breeders of children, and contentment, such as Willaert, Orlando di Lasso, Palestrina, the Bachs, Gluck, Piccinni, Weber, Mendelssohn, and Schumann; and Bizet, whose wife said after his death, that there was not a moment of their six years' honeymoon she could regret or would not re-live.
When Sacchini died, Piccinni delivered the funeral oration, and when, a year later, Gluck died in Vienna, Piccinni made a vain effort to organise a fitting memorial festival. He remained upon the field of battle, and the victory for the time must be granted him, in spite of certain defeats.
We hear much of the unscrupulous opposition that his partisans made to the reforms of Gluck, but we should also take into consideration the unscrupulous opposition that the partisans of Gluck made to the prosperity and honest endeavours of Piccinni, a man of no mean talent, whose misfortune and not whose fault it was, that he was not a genius of the first order.
She rendered it with the true spirit of the master; and I have it from him, that he never heard his works, especially his 'Cara Cecchina' sung with such perfect art, and what would put it above art, so much soul, and expression, as by his wife." In 1773 Piccinni found himself suddenly deprived of the fickle support of the Roman public.
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