Читать книгу The Love Affairs of Great Musicians (Vol. 1&2) - Hughes Rupert - Страница 18

In this same war of operatic schools and composers which raged in Paris upon the reforms of Gluck, the Italian composer Piccinni was haled to the front as an unwilling opponent of Gluck.

The world is needlessly cruel to those who happen to interfere in any way with the favourites of posterity, and Piccinni's name is a byword in the history of music. We hear much of the unscrupulous opposition that his partisans made to the reforms of Gluck, but we should also take into consideration the unscrupulous opposition that the partisans of Gluck made to the prosperity and honest endeavours of Piccinni, a man of no mean talent, whose misfortune and not whose fault it was, that he was not a genius of the first order.

But we are not concerned here with the history of music, only with the intimate history of musicians. Piccinni's domestic life was so beautiful, that it makes it all the more pitiable that he should have been dragged willy-nilly into a contest for which he had neither inclination nor ability. Piccinni fell in love with a pupil, like him an Italian, Vicenza Sibilla. When he was twenty-eight he married her. His biographer Ginguené says: "She joined to the charms of her sex, a most beautiful and touching voice. All that happy disposition, assiduous study under so good a master could accomplish, especially when teacher and pupil loved each other passionately, and were equally impassioned for the art, which one taught, and the other learned, it is all that which you must imagine, to get an idea of the talent of Mme. Piccinni. He did not wish her to go on the stage, where everything promised her the greatest success and the most brilliant fortune; but at home almost every evening, at the private concerts, or, as the Italians say, in all the 'academies' where one is glad to be invited, she sang only her husband's music. She rendered it with the true spirit of the master; and I have it from him, that he never heard his works, especially his 'Cara Cecchina' sung with such perfect art, and what would put it above art, so much soul, and expression, as by his wife."

In 1773 Piccinni found himself suddenly deprived of the fickle support of the Roman public. Worst of all, it was his own pupil and protégé, Anfossi, who supplanted him. The tender-hearted Piccinni, like Palestrina, was so overcome with this humiliation, that he fell ill, and kept his bed for several months. Two years later, the Prince of Brunswick's younger brother went to Naples to visit him, and there he happened upon a domestic scene which gives us a pretty notion of Piccinni's home life.

"He surprised Piccinni in the midst of his family, and was amazed at the tableau. Piccinni was rocking the cradle of his youngest child, born that same year; another of his children tugged at his coat to make him tip over the cradle; the mother revelling in the spectacle. She fled in dismay at seeing the stranger, who stood at the door, enjoying the scene himself. The young prince made himself known, begged pardon for his indiscretion, and said with feeling, 'I am charmed to see that so great a man has so much simplicity, and that the author of "The Good Daughter" [one of his most successful operas] can be so good a father.'"

The next year, 1776, Piccinni was called to Paris as an unwilling conscript in the musical revolution, which was raging no less fiercely than the American Revolution of the same time. It was a bitter December day when Piccinni arrived in Paris with his wife, and his eldest daughter, 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.