reformation meet with approval, and urged that a true tragedy ought always to be the foundation of an opera. As an example, he suggested Racine's "Iphigénie en Aulide," and commissioned him to arrange it as an opera, and to take the preliminary steps for its production in Paris. Gluck accepted the proposal without hesitation.,
The circumstances were, in fact, very favourable. The principal difficulty against which Gluck had hitherto to contend, viz., the deep-rooted partiality for Italian music and its accepted forms, did not exist in Paris; for opera seria in its developed form had made as little way there as the display of fine execution, and even lovers of Italian music would have been loth to introduce its abuses and exaggerations of set purpose. French opera, on the contrary, in accordance with the genius of the nation, made its first principle dramatic and characteristic expression, which could only be attained by correct yet free treatment of musical forms, and by well-considered treatment of recitative. Choruses, too, which were for Gluck an important aid to climax and dramatic effect, were indispensable in French opera; and since Rameau's time the orchestra had been successfully employed as a means of characteristic expression. But the French school had hitherto failed to combine dignity and beauty with their dramatic force and expression; and here Gluck's Italian training enabled him to supply the deficiency. As far as comic opera was concerned, Grétry had preceded him with similar efforts, and had accustomed the ear of the Parisians to the mingling of French and Italian music. But to carry out such a reformation in the grand opera required a man of commanding qualities; and such an one Gluck had proved himself to be.
The choice of subjects was a happy one. Racine's tragedy was known as a masterpiece to the whole nation, and unless the adaptation were very clumsily made, success for the poetic share of the opera was assured. The advance on earlier operas is a very decided one. An important event forms the centre of the plot, dramatic contrasts, passions, and characters, are effectively portrayed. It is true that the spirit of the age of Louis XIV. runs
through it all;[73] we have Greeks in patches and powder, Monseigneur Achille and Princesse Iphigénie behave with becoming courtesy and gallantry, and even the artistic representation is made subordinate to the ceremonial. But Gluck had been trained among these impressions, the forms were not irksome to him, and the greatness of his artistic individuality is nowhere more plainly seen than in his power of exhibiting at momentous crises the purely human and poetic emotions stripped of their outward disguise, and reflecting the ideal spirit of antique art by means of music in a way of which the poet had never dreamed. Gluck did not venture to depart from the national form of the versification; he was well aware that he must yield to the demands of French taste if he wished to influence the French on his main points. He not only strove to conform to external conditions, as, for instance, to the great extension of the ballet,[74] endeavouring to turn them to his own ends; he carefully studied the language, in order to declaim it and treat it musically in a way suitable to its character; he also eagerly studied the operas of his predecessors, Lully and Rameau, that he might adopt all that was truly and genuinely national in them. The influence of these studies may be recognised even in details; but Gluck turned to account whatever he adopted in a perfectly free and independent manner, and developed it still further. His most important innovation was the substitution of free Italian recitative, with the grand capabilities for characteristic expression given to it by Gluck himself, for the old "psalmodie." He changed throughout the fundamental character of the musical representation, and here he had no predecessors; for the treatment of the several parts of the composition after the Italian style, comic opera had, as we have seen, in some degree prepared the way. A
