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The Theory and Practice of Piccinnisme

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Julian Rushton
Julian Rushton*
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
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Extract

The operatic reforms of Gluck and his subsequent conquest of Paris have received much critical attention, but discussion of his rival Piccinni tends to be anecdotal rather than analytical. The term ‘Piccinnisme’ is also liable to misunderstanding. Terry, for example, setting the scene for J. C. Bach's French opera, refers to Gluck's ‘heresies’ against Lully and Rameau, and states that his opponents summoned Piccinni as a champion of orthodoxy. Although the previous alternatives to Gluck, in the critics' eyes, were those representatives of a style since decayed, Piccinni was certainly not their champion and his supporters must be numbered among those who would gladly have buried the traditional French opera once for all.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 98 , 1971 , pp. 31 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © 1972 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

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References

1 Eric Blom (Stepchildren of Music, London, 1925) is an honourable exception. A detailed discussion of Piccinni's French operas, from which this paper contains generalizations, is included in my unpublished thesis, Music and Drama at the Académie Royale de Musique (Paris) 1774–1789, Oxford University, 1969.Google Scholar

2 Terry, C. S., J. C. Bach, London, 1929, p. 132.Google Scholar

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5 Reprinted in G. M. le Blond, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de la révolution opérée dans la musique par M. le Chevalier Gluck, Naples, 1781, pp. 153–90.Google Scholar

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7 Ibid., p. 167. Compare the effect of Voltaire's ‘sensibilité’: ‘Audiences wept for Zaïre and for the impassioned Mérope … not to purge their emotions so much as to enjoy them’ (Daniel Heartz, ‘From Garrick to Gluck’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, xciv (1967/68), 114).Google Scholar

8 Le Blond, Mémoires, p. 169.Google Scholar

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11 Ibid.Google Scholar

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14 Encylopédie méthodique: Musique, 2 vols., Paris, 1791, and Liège, 1818.Google Scholar

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23 Le Blond, Mémoires, p. 185: ‘obbligato recitatives, where without the assistance of a clamorous orchestra, a voice, even a weak voice, upheld by a few chords, conveys to the soul all the feelings it expresses’.Google Scholar

24 See Rushton, Julian, ‘Iphigénie en Tauride: the Operas of Gluck and Piccinni’, Music & Letters, liii (1972), 424–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 See Dean, Winton, ‘Opera under the French Revolution’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, cxiv (1967/68), 93–95.Google Scholar

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28 Thus I cannot accept the description of Amadis by Ernest Warburton (‘J. C. Bach's Operas’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, xcii (1965/66), 104) as ‘along outmoded lines’; the remnants of French tradition (more Quinault ‘marmontelisé’) are over-shadowed by Italianate music.Google Scholar

29 Julian Rushton, ‘An Early Essay in Leitmotiv: J. B. Lemoyne's Electre’, Music & Letters, lii (1971), 398–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 The resemblance between the great quartet in Idomeneo and the quartet in Atys (performed 1780) is probably coincidental.Google Scholar

31 Gluck, p. 42.Google Scholar

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34 Bibliothèque musicale du théâtre de l'Opéra, Paris, 1878.Google Scholar