Paris Imagines Gluck

The promotion of Gluck’s music between c1830 and c1870 was supported by interlocking networks of impresarios, publishers and vocal artists. The efforts of these agents overlapped directly with the performative undertakings described in the previous chapter, while literary and artistic figures established sites of Gluck reception independent of strictly musical enterprises.

Towards ‘Rediscovery’

Throughout the period c1830-c1870, there were plans of various sorts to bring Gluck back into the theatre but none were successful. Gluck’s compositions for the stage found their way back to the theatre in different ways, ranging from short coherent sequences of numbers to complete acts in concerts to occasional semi-staged performances given by the pupils of the Paris Conservatoire.

Gluck in Performance

Although Gluck’s works for the French theatre were absent from the stage after 1830, Gluck’s music was widely known through various forms of concert: the concert historique, the concert series and freely-promoted concerts. Of great importance were the initiatives of François Delsarte who not only programmed large amounts of Gluck but who also developed a realistic mode of delivery which was to spill over eventually into the theatre.

Gluck in the Theatre

The 1859 revival of Gluck’s Orphée at the Théâtre-Lyrique is well known, the revival of Alceste at the Opéra in 1861 less so. Taken together with the 1867 production of the composer’s L’arbre enchanté and the 1868 one of Iphigénie en Tauride describes a history of decline with the success of the revivals in inverse proportion to the levels of participation of the 1859 Orphée, Pauline Viardot.

Introduction

The history of Gluck’s music in Paris during its first hundred years is thought to be well understood: a successful series of productions and revivals from the 1770s to around 1800, followed by a series of more fitful revivals from 1811 until the end of the Bourbon Restoration in 1830. At that point, so the story goes, Gluck effectively disappears until the revival of ...

Conclusion

Genealogies of Music and Memory began with two questions: how was Gluck’s music remembered during the nineteenth century, and did it really collapse in ruins during the 1820s with just one lonely archaeologist, Hector Berlioz, to inspect the fragments and lovingly cherish them for posterity? The answer to the second question—a clear and emphatic negative—is merely a subset of the first, which is the question that the book was designed to answer. The text has sought to examine a broad range of ways in which Gluck was imagined while his works were absent from the Parisian stage, and then to trace the networks, actors, and agents identified there into the various types of more complete—and in some cases staged—productions of the composer’s works from the 1830s to the 1860s. Musical and cultural practices identified in the forty years before the 1859 ...