For context, wiki’s summary serves as well as any:
Gluck had long pondered the fundamental problem of form and content in opera. He thought both of the main Italian operatic genres, opera buffa and opera seria, had strayed too far from what opera should really be and seemed unnatural. Opera buffa had long lost its original freshness. Its jokes were threadbare and the repetition of the same characters made them seem no more than stereotypes. In opera seria, the singing was devoted to superficial effects and the content was uninteresting and fossilised. As in opera buffa, the singers were effectively absolute masters of the stage and the music, decorating the vocal lines so floridly that audiences could no longer recognise the original melody. Gluck wanted to return opera to its origins, focusing on human drama and passions and making words and music of equal importance.
The practical results from this in Gluck’s operas and later in everyone else’s were:
far less repetition of text within an aria, no da capo arias little or no opportunity for vocal improvisation or virtuosic displays of vocal agility or power no long melismas no ritornellos or shorter ones a more predominantly syllabic setting of the text to make the words more intelligible a blurring of the distinction between recitative and aria, declamatory and lyrical passages, with altogether less recitative accompanied rather than secco recitative simpler, more flowing melodic lines an overture that is linked by theme or mood to the ensuing action.
Or, as Gluck himself put it to Burney in his old age: It was my intention to confine music to its true dramatic province, of assisting poetical expression, and of augmenting the interest of the fable; without interrupting the action, or chilling it with useless and superfluous ornaments; for the office of music, when joined to poetry, seemed to me, to resemble that of colouring in a correct and well disposed design, where the lights and shades only seem to animate the figures, without altering the out-line.
What Fritz’ beef with this was: have returned the book to the library, so can’t quote directly, but he thought it was robbing opera of its heroic quality. Also, he may or may not have held it against Gluck that he was a Habsburg protegé. (Gluck taught Marie Antoinette singing, which was why she later as Queen brought him to Paris where he took French opera by storm. MT’s other kids were also fans - brother Leopold directed one of Gluck’s compositions at a court concert.
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Aside: Gluck’s opera innovations
Date: 2019-10-08 06:12 am (UTC)Gluck had long pondered the fundamental problem of form and content in opera. He thought both of the main Italian operatic genres, opera buffa and opera seria, had strayed too far from what opera should really be and seemed unnatural. Opera buffa had long lost its original freshness. Its jokes were threadbare and the repetition of the same characters made them seem no more than stereotypes. In opera seria, the singing was devoted to superficial effects and the content was uninteresting and fossilised. As in opera buffa, the singers were effectively absolute masters of the stage and the music, decorating the vocal lines so floridly that audiences could no longer recognise the original melody. Gluck wanted to return opera to its origins, focusing on human drama and passions and making words and music of equal importance.
The practical results from this in Gluck’s operas and later in everyone else’s were:
far less repetition of text within an aria, no da capo arias
little or no opportunity for vocal improvisation or virtuosic displays of vocal agility or power
no long melismas
no ritornellos or shorter ones
a more predominantly syllabic setting of the text to make the words more intelligible
a blurring of the distinction between recitative and aria, declamatory and lyrical passages, with altogether less recitative
accompanied rather than secco recitative
simpler, more flowing melodic lines
an overture that is linked by theme or mood to the ensuing action.
Or, as Gluck himself put it to Burney in his old age: It was my intention to confine music to its true dramatic province, of assisting poetical expression, and of augmenting the interest of the fable; without interrupting the action, or chilling it with useless and superfluous ornaments; for the office of music, when joined to poetry, seemed to me, to resemble that of colouring in a correct and well disposed design, where the lights and shades only seem to animate the figures, without altering the out-line.
What Fritz’ beef with this was: have returned the book to the library, so can’t quote directly, but he thought it was robbing opera of its heroic quality. Also, he may or may not have held it against Gluck that he was a Habsburg protegé. (Gluck taught Marie Antoinette singing, which was why she later as Queen brought him to Paris where he took French opera by storm. MT’s other kids were also fans - brother Leopold directed one of Gluck’s compositions at a court concert.