The Love Affairs of Great Musicians (Vol. 1&2). Hughes Rupert
aged eighteen. "Devoted to his art, foreign to all intrigue, to all ambition, to the morals, tastes, customs, and language of the country, Piccinni lived in his family circle, and devoted himself quietly to his work, in oblivion of the efforts that the Gluckists made to thwart the success, and even to prevent the representation, of his work. It must be said that Gluck himself stooped to be the instigator of these intrigues."
In spite of all, the day came for the presentation of Piccinni's opera, "Roland," and the family broke into tears when he went to the theatre. He alone was calm in the midst of this desolation, reassured his wife, and departed with his friends. He returned home in a triumph, which was perhaps greater than the work deserved, but certainly not greater than so good a man merited.
Piccinni was large-hearted enough to cherish no malice against either of his rivals, Sacchini or Gluck. When Sacchini died, Piccinni delivered the funeral oration, and when, a year later, Gluck died in Vienna, Piccinni made a vain effort to organise a fitting memorial festival.
He remained upon the field of battle, and the victory for the time must be granted him, in spite of certain defeats. Then the French Revolution broke out, and he lost his favour with the public, and the friendship of the aristocracy became a danger to his very life. He went to Naples, where he found some success, and was well received by the court. But everything seemed now to conspire against him. The Republicans of Paris had driven him to Italy, into the arms of the aristocracy there; whereupon, in 1792, his daughter married a French Republican. This brought him into such disgrace with the Italian court that he did not dare leave his house, and fell into neglect and poverty.
In 1798 he made his way back to Paris, and there his reunited family gave little operas, sung by his wife and daughters. Here "one heard with pleasure always new airs taken from his Italian operas, sung by Mme. Piccinni, with a voice that age had rendered more grave and less light, without making it less beautiful or touching, and with a method as wise as it was learned, and well opposed to these pretentious displays, these eternal embroideries which disfigure Italian song to-day, and which Piccinni never admitted into his school, but which he always detested." So says Ginguené of the theories of Piccinni, which are not, as we see, so opposed to the theories of Gluck as we are sometimes urged to believe. In the course of time Napoleon took up Piccinni, but he was too old to revive under this new favour, and Ginguené has this last picture of him:
"It was in this state that he had the courage to give a concert at his home. The small number of amateurs who gathered there will long remember the impression of that which one may call the last song of the swan. They were profoundly moved to hear Mme. Piccinni sing with due expression the beautiful air from 'Zendia,' Lasciami, o ciel pietoso! composed in all the vigour of youth, by this illustrious man, now old and unfortunate. He accompanied it now with a languishing hand, but with eyes relighted by this beautiful production of his genius. They will not forget the admirable 'Sommeil d'Atys,' nor the trio from 'Iphigenia in Aulis' executed, as it had been in Naples, by the mother and the two daughters, grouped behind a husband and father who seemed, in accompanying them, to be reborn in the touching accord of those voices, so tender and so dear, and to feel again some spark of that fire which had animated him when he produced those sublime works."
Poor old Piccinni died in 1800 at the age of seventy-two, and his tomb said that he was "Cher aux Arts et à l'Amitie." He left to his widow and six children no property but the memory of his genius. Madame Piccinni was given a pension, but she proudly declined to accept it purely as a charity, and asked that four pupils of the Conservatoire be assigned to her for instruction, which was done. Piccinni left two sons; the younger had some success as an opera writer, and the elder had a natural son, who was quite successful as a composer of operas.
Of the other participants in the Gluck-Piccinni feud there is not much to say. Sacchini was a man of notoriously luxurious and voluptuous life, but I do not find that he married. Salieri—whom Gluck assisted in the most generous manner, even to the extent of having one of Salieri's operas produced under his own name, and declaring the true author when it was a success—was married, and had many daughters, who lavished upon him much affection. Méhul was befriended by a Doctor Gastoldi, and married a daughter of his benefactor. They had no children, but adopted a nephew.
It may be well here, while we are in the midst of opera composers, to take a glance at some of the predecessors of these men, beginning with the first of all opera composers, who, in his declaration of what opera should be and do, very curiously foreshadowed almost the exact words of Gluck and Wagner, revolutionists, who were really reactionists.
CHAPTER XII.
A FEW TUNESTERS OF FRANCE AND ITALY—PERI, MONTEVERDE, ET AL.
Though it sounds strange to speak of the "invention" of opera, that is the word which may be applied to the work of Jacopo Peri and his friends. They, however, thought of it rather as a revival of the manner of the ancient Greek tragedy, which was, in a sense, a crude form of Wagnerian recitation, with musical accompaniment.
As the English novel owes its origin to the commission given to Mr. Samuel Richardson to prepare a Ready Letter Writer, which he decided to put in the form of a story told in letters, so grand opera, which has almost rivalled the novel in the world's favour, found its origin in a conference among certain aristocratic gentlemen, of the city of Florence, concerning the possibility of reviving part of Greek tragedy. As an experiment, they prepared a small work called "Dafne" for private presentation at the palace of the Corsi. Rinuccini was the first of a long and usually incompetent lineage of librettists. The music was written by Peri and Caccini. It was appropriate that they should have chosen the love affairs of the first musician Orpheus and the coy Daphne, seeing what a vast amount of love-making, pretended and real, the school of opera has handed down upon the world. Reissman has reckoned it out that twenty thousand lovers are joined or are parted every night in the world's theatres.
Peri played the part of Apollo, and he was fitted to play the sun-god by his aureole of notoriously ardent hair. According to Fétis, Peri was very avaricious. Of noble birth himself, he grew rich on the favour of the Medicis, and added to his wealth by marrying a daughter of the house of Fortini, who incidentally brought with her a very handsome dot. She bore him a son, who won an early fame by his mathematics, his temper, and his dissipations, which led his tutor, the famous Galileo, to call him his demon. And this is all I know of the love affairs of the father of modern opera.
His collaborator, Caccini, who was more famous among his contemporaries than Peri, states in the preface to a book of his, that he was married twice, both times to pupils. His former wife was a well-known singer, and his daughters were musicians, the elder, Francesca, being also a composer.
The name of Monteverde is immortal in the history of music, because, although no one sings his songs now, or hears his operas, even the strictest composers make constant use of certain musical procedures, which were in his time forbidden, and which he fought for tooth and nail. Irisi says that he entered the Church after the death of his wife, and as he entered the priesthood in 1633, it would seem that she died when he was about sixty-five years of age. He had two sons, the elder of whom became a priest, and a tenor in his father's church; the younger son became a physician—a good division of labour, for those patients whom the doctor lost could send for the priest.
Monteverde's successor at St. Mark's was Heinrich Schütz, a great revolutionist in German music, whose chief work, and the first German opera, was "Dafne," written to a libretto by Rinuccini, possibly the same one used by Peri. When he was thirty-four, he married on June 1, 1619, a girl named Magdalena, who is described as "Christian Wildeck of Saxony's land steward's bookkeeper's daughter," which description Hawkins compares to that of "Pontius Pilate's wife's chambermaid's sister's hat." She died six years later, having borne him two daughters. He lived the rest of his eighty-seven years as a widower, and joined the pathetic line of musicians who have gone deaf.
LULLY THE IMP