artists of all the camps were moved by the same preoccupations and were working at the same task. Only the formula adopted was not in all cases the same. Metastasio, a lover of il bel canto, and one of the last to preserve its true tradition,[1] was unwilling to sacrifice it. And what musician would reproach him for this? He wished the voice—poetry and music—always to be the centre of the picture; he distrusted the excessive development of the orchestra of those days; he found it all the more dangerous in that he was conscious of its strength and endeavoured to harness it in the service of his ideal of musical tragedy, harmoniously proportioned,[2] We must be truthful; under Gluck the drama gained much, but poetry nothing. You will no longer find in him, or in Jommelli, the Racinian declamation, which was yet further softened and refined during the course of the eighteenth century, but a heavy, emphatic, paraded, shouted utterance: and it needed to be shouted, to dominate the din of the orchestra! Compare a scene from Gluck's Armida with the corresponding scene in Lully's Armida;[3] in these two lyric tragedies what a difference of declamation! In Gluck the declamation is slower; there is repetition; the orchestra roars and mutters; the voice is that of a Greek tragic mask: it bellows.
In Lully, and even more in Metastasio's musical
- ↑ Burney, in Vienna, heard an excellent singer, Mlle. Martinetz, to whom Metastasio had taught singing. He adds that Metastasio was one of the last who understood the tradition of the old Italian bel canto, of Pistocchi's and Bernacchi's school. We might add, of Francesco Gasparini's.
- ↑ "La esatta proporzione dello stile drammatico proporio dell' Opera in musica," as Arteaga says, who refers to this quality as Metastasio's chief characteristic, that which made him superior to all other artists.
- ↑ In the scene in which Armida invokes Hatred.
