Books, Arts & Manners: Gluck, Handel, & the German Sentence

Beaumarchais, forgetting his Sevillian barber, once remarked that “Il y a trop de musique dans la musique de théâtre.” Christoph Gluck, forgetting his success in Paris at “revolutionizing opera,” remarked that the French product “reeks with music.” Gabriel Fauré, who to many would epitomize the French school, rhapsodized that in abandoning Italianate artistry—“that titillator of the ear”—Gluck had “penetrated the spirit to move the heart” in his “powerful and expressive art.” Virgil Thomson, dismissing Gluck as a musical confectioner, heard in the same operas “troupes of angels tripping down the major scale” and “gentlemen attempting from love’s sickness to fly-y-y-y-y in vain.” And he summed up, in wry admiration, Handel’s oratorios as derived from “the German literary sentence, of which the outcome remains in suspense till the very end when the verb appears.”

Is this confusing? Berlioz held Gluck in high esteem as composer and orchestral manipulator. Probably with alarming obtuseness, I react to Handel’s Messiah and other of the oratorios in their annual reruns much as Bernard Shaw did to the Brahms German Requiem—one hearing is enough penance for a lifetime. But it is not that easy. Gluck may have subordinated music to libretto—drama comes first, the composer’s contribution second—and lacked adequate training. But he did away with the recitativo secco—the dry gargling which with harpsichord accompaniment had filled the time between arias—and gave us a lilting orchestral background in amelioration of musical Original Sin.

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Ralph de Toledano

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Beaumarchais, forgetting his Sevillian barber, once remarked that “Il y a trop de musique dans la musique de théâtre.” Christoph Gluck, forgetting his success in Paris at “revolutionizing opera,” remarked that the French product “reeks with music.” Gabriel Fauré, who to many would epitomize the French school, rhapsodized that in abandoning Italianate artistry—“that titillator of the ear”—Gluck had “penetrated the spirit to move the heart” in his “powerful and expressive art.” Virgil Thomson, dismissing Gluck as a musical confectioner, heard in the same operas “troupes of angels tripping down the major scale” and “gentlemen attempting from love’s sickness to fly-y-y-y-y in vain.” And he summed up, in wry admiration, Handel’s oratorios as derived from “the German literary sentence, of which the outcome remains in suspense till the very end when the verb appears.”

Is this confusing? Berlioz held Gluck in high esteem as composer and orchestral manipulator. Probably with alarming obtuseness, I react to Handel’s Messiah and other of the oratorios in their annual reruns much as Bernard Shaw did to the Brahms German Requiem—one hearing is enough penance for a lifetime. But it is not that easy. Gluck may have subordinated music to libretto—drama comes first, the composer’s contribution second—and lacked adequate training. But he did away with the recitativo secco—the dry gargling which with harpsichord accompaniment had filled the time between arias—and gave us a lilting orchestral background in amelioration of musical Original Sin.