Gluck, Berlioz and Castil-Blaze: The Poetics and Reception of French Opera

Abstract

By the middle of the 1820s, the 50-year tradition of performing Gluck's stage works in Paris was coming to an end, and the discipline of professional music criticism was just beginning to emerge. Apart from a short period during the Terror, Gluck's French operas had never been entirely absent from the stage of the Paris Opera. Berlioz's reviews are presented today as paradigmatic examples of nineteenth-century criticism. Berlioz's exposure to the operas of Gluck has been explained often: his voracious reading of the article on Gluck in Michaud's Biographie universelle , his examination of scores in the Conservatoire library and his first experience of Gluck in the theatre are all familiar from the Memoires . Castil-Blaze's main complaint lay with the measured recitative, which, he claimed, occupied more than half the score.

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