only an artist of experience and assured standing, of strong intellectuality and genuine musical endowment, and of indomitable moral vigor, could have hoped alone and by one stroke, as it were, to accomplish this radical departure from the established traditions of the great Neapolitan school. Yet such an artist Gluck was, and his honor lies not so much in his theory as in his absolute success in bringing it to realization.
We have considerable evidence of Gluck's theoretic position about his
work in the prefaces or dedications which he had friends prepare for
Alceste (1769) and for Paride ed Elena (l770), and in his fairly numerous
and extensive letters. He sought to reason out a definite system of
æsthetic thought as applied to dramatic music. His views were remarkably
similar to those of the Italian scholar Francesco Algarotti, whose essay
on the opera was first published in 1755 and enlarged in 1763, and which,
therefore, he might have seen (whether he had actually done so is unknown).
But Gluck's theory and practice do not wholly correspond,
showing that he was more of an artist than a philosopher. In particular,
his musical instinct led him on to greater lyric exuberance and charm
than his bare theory indicated, so that the result was not simply a slavish
subordination of music to the 18th-century conception of the drama, but
an organic union on equal terms of the drama and music, each conceived
with artistic freedom. Hence his works have an enduring value.
154. Gluck's Immediate Contemporaries.—Here is an appropriate
place to insert some account of several workers in the operatic
field who were not closely identified either with Naples on
the one hand or with Paris on the other. Gluck's reaction was
primarily against the ideals of the Neapolitans, but it told equally
against other groups, including those of his own Vienna and of
Venice. With these representatives of northern Italy and Austria
may well be included the few Germans who came into operatic
prominence at this time. Some of these, with the Austrians,
are the more notable because they had some share in the early
attempts to create a Teutonic type of opera as over against the
prevailing Italian type.
Giuseppe Sarti (d. 1802), born in 1729 at Faenza, studied under Martini at
Bologna, and made his operatic début in 1752 with such success that almost
at once a place was made for him at Copenhagen, where he became court-conductor
and was honored for years. In 1775 he became involved in a case of
bribery and was banished. After teaching at Venice, in 1779 he was made
choirmaster at Milan, whence in 1784 he went to a similar post at St. Petersburg.
Of his over 50 operas, the best were those written after his return from
Denmark, such as Le gelosie villane (1776, Venice), Achille in Sciro (1781,
