Colonna, or her father, shall solicit your support,
you will confine yourself to a money contribution
—and pledge yourself to nothing foolish."

"Of course not; but what else could I
pledge myself to?"

"Heaven knows! She is capable of asking
you to take the command of a troop."

GERMAN OPERA AND ITS MAKERS.

IN THREE CHAPTERS. CHAPTER II.

THE reason for returning to Gluck and for
assigning him a place apart is to be given.

There is no man named in the golden book
of musicians concerning whom so much learned
nonsense has been written, as this King of opera
composers; no one, the real quality and bearings
of whose genius have been so much misunderstood.
In this country, especially, ignorance on
the subject has only been equalled by prejudice.

The facts of Gluck's life may be told in a
paragraph. He was the son of a Bohemian
forest-guard, born and trained in an atmosphere
of wild national music. He received some education
in Prague from masters whose names are
little known (Czernahorsky's the best). He
was at Vienna in the year 1736. When he was
twenty years of age, he was taken over into
Italy, by a patron whom he found there, Count
Melzi, and was placed in the hands of Sammartini
(one of the greatest theorists of his time).
After writing eight Italian operas for Milan,
Cremona, Venice, and Turin, he was invited to
London during the disastrous year 1745.
Failing to produce any effect here, he returned
to Vienna, and wrote profusely for the Opera
House of that capital, to Italian and French text,
apparently making little advance till the year
1761. In that year Gluck produced his ballet
"Dom Juan," at Vienna, in the following year
his "Orfeo," and six years later "Alceste," the
famous dedication of which opera to the Grand-
Duke of Tuscany, has caused more misapprehension,
and done more mischief (this is saying
much), than any dramatic preface of apology or
attack in being—Victor Hugo's to his
suppressed "Cromwell" not forgotten. How
Gluck followed the fortunes of Marie Antoinette,
whose music-master he had been—how
invited by her to Paris, he there produced his
two Iphigenias ("en Aulide" and "en Tauride")
and his "Armida,"—how the tremendous
battle ensued between the partisans of French
and Italian opera, the philosophic and sensual
connoisseurs, not, it may be, unwilling to mortify
the Austrian Princess through her protégé,
are matters familiar to every one who has
looked into any history of modern Music, or any
set of memoirs concerning the stormy feverish
years which preceded the first Revolution. Let
us look at the sequel. For upwards of ninety
years, the five grand operas of Gluck have kept
the stage. They are heard from time to time
(even as are the great tragedies of Shakespeare),
whensoever adequate means of representation
shall present themselves. The amount of weak
and obsolete matter they contain is singularly
small: the amount of beauty and invention is
difficult to overstate. It would puzzle the most
grudging amateur who is afraid of enjoying three
pleasures in place of two, to mention any other
opera, one hundred years old, which can live its
hundred nights in a modern theatre, as did
"Orphée" a season or two ago in Paris, when it
was revived for that matchless artist among
modern singers:—Madame Viardot. Yet even
her genius, great and creative as it is, could not
have breathed life into what was essentially
dead. Recollect, too, in these days of complication,
when a Meyerbeer dare not trust his
music without a multitude of characters, without
the aid of ice-ballets and processions, and
a pageantry demanding cost and care, and
incessant renewal, to keep its splendours in order—
that for the presentation of "Orphée" sufficed,
three women—one only demanded to be a great
actress—supported by a chorus. Hundreds of
musical compositions have been written in
praise of Music; Handel's "Cecilian Ode," and
"Alexander's Feast," and the superb concert-
scene in "Solomon," among the number, but this
Opera of Gluck on the remote and hackneyed
Greek legend towers above them all. Think of
that grave and melancholy opening chorus at
the tomb—the first song of Orpheus with Echo,
"Objet de mon amour," the melody of which,
with its three-bar rhythm, clearly suggested to
Mozart Susanna's admired air "Deh! vieni non
tardar," in Figaro. Think of the scene with the
Furies and Spirits of Death, in which the singer,
inspired by Love, breaks the rampart of Hate and
Oblivion, by pleadings potent enough to draw

                Iron tears down Pluto's cheek.

Think of that even more wonderful scene in
the Elysian fields "of asphodel," where the
gliding shades pass by Orpheus, while he
questions every face in the agony of hope. Think of
that chorus of unseen voices which thrills every
nerve, when at last the hand of Eurydice is
placed in that of her rescuer (the most intense,
yet gentlest, supernatural effect in music).
Think of that last burst of despair over the body
of the rescued bride, delivered again to Death,
in punishment for the disobedience of him to
whom she has been reunited. Whether any
stage music which depends on truth of
expression, giving free scope to the highest and
deepest genius of the executant, can be found
to exceed, or even to equal, this in simple,
symmetrical beauty, may be doubted.

It would be pleasant to pass through the
other four classical operas of Gluck, in order to
specify the resistless power, the vigorous fancy,
the firm control of that demon of extravagance,
which, under pretext of originality, has led so
many a good man astray, were this the place for
minute criticism, or cumulative evidence. What
if we were to claim him as one of the school of
Purcell? Gluck told Burney—a witness whose
facts have never been once overthrown—that he
had been led to study the expression, heretofore
wanting in his works, during his sojourn in
England; and that, under the conditions of his
painful rivalry with Handel (who, too, had mastered