French Opera - Gluck in Paris

Gluck in Paris

While opéra comique flourished in the 1760s, serious French opera was in the doldrums. Rameau had died in 1764, leaving his last great tragédie en musique, Les Boréades, unperformed. No French composer seemed capable of assuming his mantle. The answer was to import a leading figure from abroad. Christoph Willibald von Gluck, a German, was already famous for his reforms of Italian opera, which had replaced the old opera seria with a much more dramatic and direct style of music theatre, beginning with Orfeo ed Euridice in 1762. Gluck admired French opera and had absorbed the lessons of both Rameau and Rousseau. Under the patronage of his former music pupil, Marie Antoinette, who had married the future French king Louis XVI in 1770, Gluck signed a contract for six stage works with the management of the Paris Opéra. He began with Iphigénie en Aulide (19 April 1774). The premiere sparked a huge controversy, almost a war, such as had not been seen in the city since the Querelle des Bouffons. Gluck's opponents brought the leading Italian composer, Niccolò Piccinni, to Paris to demonstrate the superiority of Neapolitan opera and the "whole town" engaged in an argument between "Gluckists" and "Piccinnists".

On 2 August 1774 the French version of Orfeo ed Euridice was performed, with the title role transposed from the castrato to the haute-contre, according to the French preference for high tenor voices which had ruled since the days of Lully. This time Gluck's work was better received by the Parisian public. Gluck went on to write a revised French version of his Alceste, as well as the new works Armide (1777), Iphigénie en Tauride (1779) and Echo et Narcisse for Paris. After the failure of the last named opera, Gluck left Paris and retired from composing. But he left behind an immense influence on French music and several other foreign composers followed his example and came to Paris to write Gluckian operas, including Salieri (Les Danaïdes, 1784) and Sacchini (Oedipe à Colone, 1786).