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From Garrick to Gluck: The Reform of Theatre and Opera in the mid-Eighteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1967

Daniel Heartz
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Extract

Several attempts to renovate the stage took place towards the middle of the eighteenth century. Goldoni was substituting written comedies of character for the improvised and stereo-typed roles of the Commedia dell' Arte. Diderot and Lessing were introducing serious contemporary subjects which perforce affected acting, setting and costume. Cahusac, Noverre and Angiolini were working, by precept or example, to create a more dramatic ballet. On English stages Garrick was perfecting a style of acting that broke sharply with the stately declamation and movement of the past. All these and other ‘reforms’ came to a head in the decade after 1750. I propose to consider some of them with a view to the light they may shed on the celebrated reform of opera.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 94 , 1967 , pp. 111 - 127
Copyright
Copyright © 1968 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

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References

1 This paper is a sequel to ‘Opera and the Periodization of 18th-century Music’, read at the Tenth Congress of the International Musicological Society, Ljubljana, 1967, and forms part of a wider investigation of the eighteenth-century musical theatre.Google Scholar

2 For the original sources of the quotations see Oman, Carola, David Garrick, London, 1958, pp. 41ff.Google Scholar

3 Frank A. Hedgcock, A Cosmopolitan Actor: David Garrick and His French Friends, London, 1912, pp. 109–10.Google Scholar

4 With what success is a major point of discussion in Kalman Birnum, David Garrick, Director, Pittsburgh, 1961. On the crucial question of lighting at Drury Lane, Birnum cites Ralph G. Allen, The Stage Spectacles of Philip James de Loutherberg, unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University, 1960. Loutherberg, who worked for Garrick from 1772, experimented with transparencies and was in the vanguard of the Continental movement towards the realistic treatment of stage space. He was a disciple of Diderot.Google Scholar

5 For this summary view of Voltaire's position I am indebted to Jack Vrooman, who allowed me to study his manuscript, ‘Voltaire's Theatre: Theory and Practice from Oedipe to Mérope’, which is in course of publication. As the most influential Continental playwright of the mid-century, Voltaire has an importance for opera that requires a study in its own right.Google Scholar

6 Wladyslaw Folkierski, Entre le classicisme et le romantisme. Etude sur l'esthétique et les esthéticiens du XVIIIe siècle, Cracow and Paris, 1935, p. 407.Google Scholar

7 For the entire passage, see J.-G. Prod'homme, ‘Diderot et la Musique’, Zeitschrift der internationalen Musikgesellschaft, xv (1913–14), 160–62. The English translation here is mine, after Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, ed. Paul Vernière, Paris, 1959.Google Scholar

8 Alfred Richard Oliver (The Encyclopedists as Critics of Music, New York, 1947, p. 93) says that Diderot was ‘the only critic who saw that both camps were fumbling in the dark’. Jean Thomas shows that D'Alembert was equally perspicacious: ‘Diderot, les encyclopédistes et le grand Rameau’, Revue de Synthèse, Nouvelle Série, xxviii (1951), 46–67.Google Scholar

9 On Rousseau's changing ideas see Goldschmidt, Hugo, Die Musikästhetik des 18. Jahrhunderts, Zürich and Leipzig, 1915, Chapter 5, which shows that Rousseau could not achieve a consistent position at any time, because he had so many prejudices that had to be rationalized.Google Scholar

10 R. Loyalty Cru, Diderot as a Disciple of English Thought, New York, 1913, p. 316. The ambiguous positions with regard to Metastasio of Algarotti, Calzabigi and Ortes during the 1750s are discussed by Remo Giazotto, Poesia Melodrammatica e Pensiero Critico nel Settecento, Milan, 1952, Chapters 5 and 6.Google Scholar

11 See Seznec, Jean, ‘Diderot and Historical Painting’, Aspects of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Earl W. Wasserman, Baltimore, 1965, 129–42. In summary Seznec quotes Diderot as saying, ‘If only a sacrifice, a battle, a triumph, a public scene could be rendered with the same truth in all its details as a domestic scene by Greuze or Chardin!’ He then concludes: ‘And Diderot dreams of the ways of bringing some prosaic solidity into poetic artifice. This is of course what he himself has been trying to achieve with his drame bourgeois: to stuff the empty nobility of classical tragedy with the substantial simplicity of everyday life. There we detect one of the many links which connect his art criticism with his attempts at renovating literary forms.’Google Scholar

12 Roland Mortier, Diderot en Allemagne, Paris, 1954, p. 59. J. G. Robertson shows that Lessing was emboldened by the treatises of Diderot to disparage Voltaire, but that he was, as a playwright, beholden to both (Lessing's Dramatic Theory, Cambridge, 1939, p. 206).Google Scholar

13 The Letters were translated by Cyril Beaumont from the revised edition at Saint Petersburg in 1803, which English version (London, 1930) is quoted here. The original edition of 1760 served as the basis for the modern edition of André Levinson (Paris, 1927). There are many discrepancies between the various editions; in the original Lettre VIII, for example, we read that Mlle. Clairon would be the first tragic actress of the universe were it not for ‘des rares et sublimes talents de Mlle. Dumesnil, qui remuera infailliblement les coeurs sensibles aux accents et au cri de la nature’. The comparison is lacking in later editions.Google Scholar

14 Furnishing the subject of another lecture, ‘Operatic Innovation at Parma: the Rameau adaptations of Frugoni and Traëtta’, delivered at the Convegno sul Settecento Parmense nel 2° Centenario della Morte di Carlo Innocenzo Frugoni, May 1967.Google Scholar

15 Robert Haas, Gluck und Durazzo im Burgtheater (Die Opéra Comique in Wien), Leipzig, 1925. The best account of the background of the Viennese reform remains that of Hertha Michel, ‘Ranieri Calzabigi als Dichter von Musikdramen und als Kritiker’, Gluck-Jahrbuch, iv (1918), 99–171. She points out that Calzabigi to the end of his life quotes Diderot almost word for word, while being careful never to mention his name (p. 149).Google Scholar

16 Corrado Ricci, I Teatri di Bologna, Bologna, 1880, p. 636. The translation is that of Edward O. D. Downes, The Operas of Johann Christian Bach as a Reflection of the Dominant Trends in opera seria, 1750–1780, unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 1958, i. 104. I am indebted to the work of Downes for stimulating several lines of investigation that led to the present effort.Google Scholar

17 As early as the first performance a critic praised Angiolini's novel feat of ‘uniting choreography with the choruses and the story in such a way as to give the performance an appearance no less splendid than exemplary’ (Gluck-Jahrbuch, ii (1915), 107). Subsequent criticism was apt to give the music credit for making this possible. La Harpe called the opera the first ‘où la musique ne se séparait jamais de l'action’. Grétry went even further: ‘c’était la musique elle-même qui était devenue l'action’. See Lionel de la Laurencie, Orphée de Gluck. Etude et Analyse, Paris, 1934, pp. 97, 110.Google Scholar

18 Most commentators, content to follow each other's example, name Winckelmann's Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst, Dresden, 1755, in this regard, forgetting that priority in the archaeological approach lies elsewhere. Visual experiences such as those provided by the Recueil d'antiquités of Caylus (Paris, 1752–67) must have had a greater impact upon the theatre than any essay. Dramas in the antique style began during Calzabigi's period of residence in Paris with Guymond de la Touche's Iphigénie en Tauride (see the criticisms of Grimm and Diderot in the Correspondance littéraire, ii [1755–60], 152 ff.). It should be recalled that Calzabigi himself was an antiquary, and that he contributed a ‘Dissertazione sopra due marmi figurati dell'antica citta d'Ercolano’ to the Saggi of the Etruscan Academy of Cortona, vol. vii, Rome, 1758. He was also a connoisseur of English letters and translator of Milton, Thomas Gray, Thomson and Ossian (Michel, Ranieri Calzabigi, p. 110).Google Scholar

19 Domenico Corri, in A Select Collection of the Most Admired Songs [Edinburgh, 1788], i. 38–43, gives three excerpts from Orfeo with the indication ‘sung by Sigr. Guadagni’. The vocal line is indeed remarkably free of added ornamentation, except for brief sallies at the cadences, in line with what Burney says.Google Scholar

20 Sternfeld, F. W., ‘Expression and Revision in Gluck's Orfeo and Alceste’, Essays presented to Egon Wellesz, ed. Sir Jack Westrup, Oxford, 1966, p. 118: ‘It is the size of Gluck's canvas that is the vital element. Concertato, tonality, rhythm, texture, affect not one but ten numbers; the scena comprises the first half of an entire act.’Google Scholar

21 La Laurencie, Orphée de Gluck, assembles several eighteenth-century assessments of Gluck's indebtedness to Rameau (pp. 59, 91–92, 101), and agrees with Abert about one direct thematic resemblance between the two infernal scenes (pp. 262–3).Google Scholar

22 Haas, Gluck und Durazzo im Burgtheater, p. 61.Google Scholar

23 For example, in a letter of 1776: ‘I have striven to be … more painter and poet than musician’ (The Collected Correspondence and Papers of Christoph Willibald Gluck, ed. H. and E. H. Mueller von Asow, London, 196a, p. 84). Compare a subsequent passage of Burney's Music in Germany (i. 269): ‘But though M. Gluck studies simple nature so much in his cantilena, or voice-part; yet in his accompaniments, he is not only often learned, but elaborate; and in this particular, he is even more than a poet and musician, he is an excellent painter; bis instruments frequently delineate the situation of the actor, and give a high colouring to passion’ (Burney's italics).Google Scholar

24 Ernest Newman discredits Gluck's statement as mere flattery of Burney (Gluck and the Opera, London, 1895, p. 27). Rudolf Gerber reads the same as an arcane reference to Handel's ‘influence’ (Christoph Willibald Gluck, Potsdam, 1930, p. 36). Alfred Einstein rejects both explanations, but offers no alternative (Gluck, London, 1936, p. 27).Google Scholar

25 Garrick returned to London from a season in Dublin on 10 May 1746. Between 11 and 27 June he appeared as Lear, Hamlet, Richard III, Othello and Macbeth. The operatic company at the King's Theatre, for which Gluck was engaged as musical director, extended its season until 24 June. The prima ballerina who made her debut in Gluck's Artamene (Mlle. Violette, alias Eva Weigl, from Vienna) was soon to become Mrs. Garrick. For casts of operas and plays day by day see The London Stage 1660–1800, Part 3:1729–1747, ed. Arthur H. Scouten, Carbondale, Illinois, 1961.Google Scholar