GLUCK THE DOMESTIC, ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR, AND THE AMIABLE PICCINNI
While Händel was in London at the height of his autocracy, he was
visited by a composer named Gluck, whom we think of to-day as a
revolutionist in music, and a man of the utmost historical importance.
To the lordly Händel, however, he was more or less contemptible, and
people who know nothing else of either genius, know that Händel said,
"Gluck understood about as much counterpoint as my cook."
Gluck did not make a success on his London visit, and began to criticise
both his own work and contemporary schools of opera, with a thoroughness
that resulted in a determination to "reform it altogether." From London
he went to Vienna in 1748, and there he was soon a figure of importance,
moving in the best families, and entertained at the best homes. Among
the homes in which he was most cordially received, was that of the rich
banker and wholesale merchant, Joseph Pergin, who had a large business
with Holland. Both daughters of the house were, according to Reissman's
not particularly novel expression, "passionately fond of music." Gluck
was soon made thoroughly at home there.
"Soon also he was bound in most intimate affection to the elder
daughter, Maria Anne. She reciprocated the feelings, and the mother gave
her consent to the betrothal. Gluck dared to deem the year 1749, in
which this change took place, the happiest of his life; but it also
turned out to be his saddest, for the father refused his consent. This
man, haughty with his wealth, rejected the honoured artist, since he was
only a musician, and since, besides, his art offered no sufficient
promise or surety for the proper support of a young woman. The lovers
accepted the separation thus enforced, with patience, promising
themselves that it should not be for long, and that they would preserve
unbroken fidelity."
Gluck was called to Rome the next year, and there he had the news that
the stern father was dead. Accordingly, as soon as he could release
himself from his engagements, he hastened back to Vienna--as Schmid puts
it--"_auf dem Flügeln der Liebe nach Wien zurück_" On the 15th of
September, he was married to his Maria Anne, "with whom to his death he
dwelt in the happiest wedlock, and who went with him on his triumphal
journeys four years later." In 1754 the Pope knighted him; made him
Cavaliere, and henceforth this once poverty-smitten street fiddler and
strolling singer was known as Ritter von Gluck, the friend and protégé
of his countrywoman, Marie Antoinette.
No children were born to the couple, but they took into their home a
niece, and Gluck's wife devoted much of her time to the poor.
"He left his wife the chief heir. He even left it to her pleasure
whether his brothers and sisters should have anything or not, and said
in his will, 'Since the fundamental principle of every testament is the
appointment of an heir, I hereby appoint my dear wife, M. Anne von
Gluck, _née_ Pergin, as my sole and exclusive heir; and that no doubts
may arise, as to whether the silver and other personal property be mine
or my wife's, I hereby also declare all the silver and other valuables
to be the sole property of my wife, and consequently not included in my
previous bequests,'"
None of the letters of Gluck, that I have been able to find, concern his
married life, though many of them are in existence concerning his
operatic warfare.
Burney met him in 1773 in Paris, where he was living with his wife and
niece. In 1775, on his way back home from Paris, he stopped off at
Strasburg to meet the poet Klopstock. D.F. Strauss quotes a description
by a merchant of Karlsruhe of this scene: "Old Gluck sang and played,
_con amore_, many passages from the 'Messiah' set to music by himself;
his wife accompanying him in a few other pieces." On the 15th of
November, 1787, when Gluck was seventy-three years old, he was at his
home in Vienna under doctor's care. After dinner, it was his custom to
take coffee out-of-doors, in the free, fresh air and the golden
sunlight, where he used to have his piano placed when he would compose.
Two old friends from Paris had dined with him, and they were soon to
leave. Frau von Gluck left the guests for a moment, to order the
carriage. While she was gone, one of the guests declined the liqueur set
before him. Now Gluck was always addicted to looking upon the champagne
when it was yellow; in fact, he used always to have a bottle at each
wing of his piano, when he composed, and was wont to end his
compositions, his bottles, and his sobriety in one grand _Fine_. But now
he was forbidden to take wine, for fear of heating his blood.
On this day, however, he pretended to be angry at his guest for refusing
the choice liqueur. In a burlesque rage, he seized the glass, drained it
at a gulp, and jokingly begged the guests not to tell his wife. She came
back to the room to say that the carriage was ready. Frau von Gluck and
the guests left him for half an hour, and he bade them a cheerful
farewell. Fifteen minutes later his third stroke of apoplexy attacked
him, and his horrified wife returning found him unconscious. In a few
hours he was dead. This wife, with whom he lived so congenially, and
whose money gave him even more luxury than his operatic success could
have procured,--indeed, the very house he died in she had bought for
eleven thousand florins,--outlived him less than three years, dying
March 12, 1800, at the age of seventy-one. She was buried near him, and
her tomb, built by her nephew, has the following epitaph:
"Here rests in peace, near her husband, Maria Anne, Edle von Gluck, born
Pergin. She was a good Christian, and without ostentation a mother to
the poor. She was loved and cherished by all who knew her."
ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR
During the fierce battles Gluck fought in Paris, one of his most ardent
partisans was Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was a musician in a small way,
wrote songs, an enormously successful opera, "Le Devin du Village," and
other musical works, besides making an attempt to reform musical
notation, and writing a dictionary of music. The world, however, does
not accept him as a musician but as a writer, and his numerous and
curious love affairs are told in so much detail in his immortal
"Confessions," that I cannot attempt to treat them here. Vandam, in his
book on "Great Amours," dissects Rousseau's heart ruthlessly. For his
ability to do this, he must thank Rousseau most, for the unequalled
frankness of his own biography, Francis Greble, dissecting "Rousseau's
first love," has neatly dubbed him "the Great High Priest of those who
kiss and tell."
THE AMIABLE PICCINNI
In this same war of operatic schools and composers which raged in Paris
upon the reforms of Gluck, the Italian composer Piccinni was haled to
the front as an unwilling opponent of Gluck.
The world is needlessly cruel to those who happen to interfere in any
way with the favourites of posterity, and Piccinni's name is a byword in
the history of music. 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.
But we are not concerned here with the history of music, only with the
intimate history of musicians. Piccinni's domestic life was so
beautiful, that it makes it all the more pitiable that he should have
been dragged willy-nilly into a contest for which he had neither
inclination nor ability. Piccinni fell in love with a pupil, like him an
Italian, Vicenza Sibilla. When he was twenty-eight he married her. His
biographer Ginguené says: "She joined to the charms of her sex, a most
beautiful and touching voice. All that happy disposition, assiduous
study under so good a master could accomplish, especially when teacher
and pupil loved each other passionately, and were equally impassioned
for the art, which one taught, and the other learned, it is all that
which you must imagine, to get an idea of the talent of Mme. Piccinni.
He did not wish her to go on the stage, where everything promised her
the greatest success and the most brilliant fortune; but at home almost
every evening, at the private concerts, or, as the Italians say, in all
the 'academies' where one is glad to be invited, she sang only her
husband's music. 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. 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. Two years later, the Prince of
Brunswick's younger brother went to Naples to visit him, and there he
happened upon a domestic scene which gives us a pretty notion of
Piccinni's home life.
"He surprised Piccinni in the midst of his family, and was amazed at the
tableau. 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. The young prince made himself known, begged pardon for his
indiscretion, and said with feeling, 'I am charmed to see that so great
a man has so much simplicity, and that the author of "The Good Daughter"
[one of his most successful operas] can be so good a father.'"
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. "Devoted to his art, foreign to all intrigue,
to all ambition, to the morals, tastes, customs, and language of the
country, Piccinni lived in his family circle, and devoted himself
quietly to his work, in oblivion of the efforts that the Gluckists made
to thwart the success, and even to prevent the representation, of his
work. It must be said that Gluck himself stooped to be the instigator of
these intrigues."
In spite of all, the day came for the presentation of Piccinni's opera,
"Roland," and the family broke into tears when he went to the theatre.
He alone was calm in the midst of this desolation, reassured his wife,
and departed with his friends. He returned home in a triumph, which was
perhaps greater than the work deserved, but certainly not greater than
so good a man merited.
Piccinni was large-hearted enough to cherish no malice against either of
his rivals, Sacchini or Gluck. 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. Then the French Revolution
broke out, and he lost his favour with the public, and the friendship of
the aristocracy became a danger to his very life. He went to Naples,
where he found some success, and was well received by the court. But
everything seemed now to conspire against him. The Republicans of Paris
had driven him to Italy, into the arms of the aristocracy there;
whereupon, in 1792, his daughter married a French Republican. This
brought him into such disgrace with the Italian court that he did not
dare leave his house, and fell into neglect and poverty.
In 1798 he made his way back to Paris, and there his reunited family
gave little operas, sung by his wife and daughters. Here "one heard with
pleasure always new airs taken from his Italian operas, sung by Mme.
Piccinni, with a voice that age had rendered more grave and less light,
without making it less beautiful or touching, and with a method as wise
as it was learned, and well opposed to these pretentious displays, these
eternal embroideries which disfigure Italian song to-day, and which
Piccinni never admitted into his school, but which he always detested."
So says Ginguené of the theories of Piccinni, which are not, as we see,
so opposed to the theories of Gluck as we are sometimes urged to
believe. In the course of time Napoleon took up Piccinni, but he was too
old to revive under this new favour, and Ginguené has this last picture
of him:
"It was in this state that he had the courage to give a concert at his
home. The small number of amateurs who gathered there will long remember
the impression of that which one may call the last song of the swan.
They were profoundly moved to hear Mme. Piccinni sing with due
expression the beautiful air from 'Zendia,' _Lasciami, o ciel pietoso_!
composed in all the vigour of youth, by this illustrious man, now old
and unfortunate. He accompanied it now with a languishing hand, but with
eyes relighted by this beautiful production of his genius. They will not
forget the admirable 'Sommeil d'Atys,' nor the trio from 'Iphigenia in
Aulis' executed, as it had been in Naples, by the mother and the two
daughters, grouped behind a husband and father who seemed, in
accompanying them, to be reborn in the touching accord of those voices,
so tender and so dear, and to feel again some spark of that fire which
had animated him when he produced those sublime works."
Poor old Piccinni died in 1800 at the age of seventy-two, and his tomb
said that he was "_Cher aux Arts et à l'Amitie_." He left to his widow
and six children no property but the memory of his genius. Madame
Piccinni was given a pension, but she proudly declined to accept it
purely as a charity, and asked that four pupils of the Conservatoire be
assigned to her for instruction, which was done. Piccinni left two
sons; the younger had some success as an opera writer, and the elder had
a natural son, who was quite successful as a composer of operas.
Of the other participants in the Gluck-Piccinni feud there is not much
to say. Sacchini was a man of notoriously luxurious and voluptuous life,
but I do not find that he married. Salieri--whom Gluck assisted in the
most generous manner, even to the extent of having one of Salieri's
operas produced under his own name, and declaring the true author when
it was a success--was married, and had many daughters, who lavished upon
him much affection. Méhul was befriended by a Doctor Gastoldi, and
married a daughter of his benefactor. They had no children, but adopted
a nephew.
It may be well here, while we are in the midst of opera composers, to
take a glance at some of the predecessors of these men, beginning with
the first of all opera composers, who, in his declaration of what opera
should be and do, very curiously foreshadowed almost the exact words of
Gluck and Wagner, revolutionists, who were really reactionists.