Operatic growth was somewhat hindered in music loving Germany by the exigencies of the Thirty Years War, and for many years Hamburg was the only German town where opera found a haven. It was for the free city that Handel wrote his earliest works. Afterward, when he had made a conquest of Italy and was acknowledged the fore most composer of his age, he went to London, where he produced his famous " Rinaldo " at the Queen's Theater in the Haymarket. Here he wrote many of his forty-one operas and became the favorite of the town, until, in deep disgust at the bankruptcy brought on by the machinations of his enemy Buononcini, he discarded the form and took to writing the oratorios for which his special stamp of genius had suited him. But the Hamburg Theater is chiefly indebted to Reinhard Keiser, who composed over one hun dred and twenty operas and gave his labors inspiration in spite of this dangerous fecundity.
And now that opera was getting well past the century mark, we find that those who presided over its destinies had lost sight of the important fact that simplicity is beauty. It had become seriously disfigured by embellishment and overelaboration. No one was amazed when, in the most dramatic situations, the action was suspended while the hero or heroine indulged in displays of vocalism in whose tangles emotion gasped and finally gave up the ghost. It had come to a pass where composer and librettist might well collab orate without any knowledge of each other's ideas, so little did the first consider the second. It is not strange that one Signor Marcello, drawing up plans and specifications for an ideal composer, mentioned with some sarcasm, an entire ignorance of poetry, and an inability to distinguish the sense of the discourse. So far had consistency been lost sight of, that in Hamburg, ./Eneas, perchance in private life a citizen of Venice, voiced his sentiments in his own Italian and received the reproaches of a Teutonic Dido in good gutteral German, and no one fancied it in the least ludicrous. Then, too, in the course of events, something like a vocal tyranny had become evident, and the composer was compelled to minister to the caprice or limitations of the singer at the expense of his own convictions. But rebellion was uprearing its hitherto drowsy head, and while he who was to lead the fray was pondering upon " the abuses introduced by the injudicious vanity of singers," the thoroughly vexed Handel was holding his prima donna, Signora Cuzzoni, out of a high window in the hope of bringing her to a more proper mind to appreciate the dictates of art. And while opera was crying aloud to be digged from the pit into which it had fallen, one Christoph Willibald Gluck was busily engaged in writing twenty works, strictly adhering to the accepted style.
At last Gluck looked up from his labors and discerned the truth. He was then well along in life; he was over sixty before he gave to the world the full expression of his theo ries. Like the majority of mankind, he learned his most valuable lessons through bitter experience. He went to Eng land in 1746, where he produced " Piramo and Tisbe," a pasticcio, or hybrid affair made up of selections from earlier works. Having no unity or intrinsic worth, it was naturally a wretched failure. It was, nevertheless, similar to the typ ical Italian opera, which had been degraded to little more than a miscellaneous concert with a thread of plot running through it.
Gluck was a great original thinker and innovator; he recognized the good in everything pertaining to his art; he knew how to assimilate the best; unlike Mozart, he trusted to nothing like intuition, but must have the why and where fore. He was a passionate lover of nature, which means that he despised the artificial. In consequence of this rare combination of traits, he was able to do this for the opera : He treated it as an integral whole for the first time; he made it individual, with a character and atmosphere of its own; he developed the overture, making it a foreshadowing of the play, a thing designed, to quote his own words, " to prepare the spectator for the character of the piece." He gave the chorus its proper place in the drama; he did away with recitative secco and restored the aria to its pristine simplicity. To the orchestra, by which he secured hitherto undreamed of effects, he added clarinets, harps, trombones, and percussion instruments, and banished the harpsichord to the garret, where Handel had practiced surreptitiously upon its cousin, the clavichord.
Gluck began the task of cleaning out the Augean stables with his opera " Orfeo," which, brought out in 1762, placed him at the, head of all living opera composers. It may have been to make his exposition the more vivid that he chose for this, the oldest opera now remaining in repertoire, the same legendary episode that Peri had treated in the first of all the operas. Strange to say, he followed with several works in the old style, which can only be explained as pot boilers. But in 1767 appeared "Alceste," in which he com pletely embodied his theories. That these reformatory meas ures were in no manner without intention is proved in the dedication of this work, addressed to the Duke of Tuscany by " Y. R. H.'s most humble, most devoted, most obliged servant." " I seek to put music to its true purpose, that is, to support the poem, and thus to strengthen the expression of the feeling and the interest of the situation without inter rupting the action. I have, therefore, refrained from inter rupting the actor in the fervor of his dialogue by introducing the accustomed tedious ritornelle, nor have I broken his phrase at an opportune vowel that the flexibility of a fine voice might be exhibited in a lengthy flourish; nor have I written phrases for the orchestra to afford the singer an . opportunity to take a long breath preparatory to the accepted flourishes. Nor have I dared to hurry over the second part of an aria when such contained the passion and most im portant matter, to find myself in accord with the conven tional repeat of the same phrase four times. As little have I permitted myself to close an aria where the sense was incomplete, solely to afford the singer an opportunity of introducing a cadenza. In short, I have striven to abolish all those bad habits against which sound reasoning and true taste have been struggling now for so long in vain." In 1770, " Paris and Helen " was produced in the new lines. All this had occurred in Vienna, which remained quite unmoved and uninterested, and so lost its opportunity to be the seat of an important revolution.