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Darlow, Mark.Dissonance in the Republic of Letters: The Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinnistes. Oxford: Legenda, 2013. 240 pp. £45.00 / $89.50. ISBN 978–1–907975–54–7, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 50, Issue 4, October 2014, Page 504, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqu045
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Extract
The history of opera in eighteenth-century Paris is defined by quarrels. Best known is the ‘Querelle des bouffons’ when, in the 1750s, Paris audiences were scandalized and delighted by the apparition of opera buffa on a stage mainly devoted to lyric tragedy and spectacular opéra-ballet. In the 1770s, the continued opposition of French and Italian music was complicated by the arrival of a German (originally from Bohemia), Christoph Gluck, who produced eight operas in France from 1774 to 1779, effectively closing the old repertory of tragédie-lyrique. Having tutored young Habsburgs, Gluck was perceived as a protégé of Marie-Antoinette. He had trained in Italy but could not pass for a true Italian, and a rivalry was set up with the brilliantly successful Neapolitan, Niccolò Piccinni. Mark Darlow's excellent book is less concerned with questions about the extent to which Piccinni and other Italians imitated Gluck than with the wider context of the Querelle. This includes the politics of the Opéra itself, as well as the literary, social and political dimensions of the affair. He has gone beyond the published collections of polemic to sources hitherto ignored; his bibliography and catalogue of ‘Quarrel texts’ require twelve pages each. I have very few niggles, unfit to mention here. Unlike earlier operatic fist-fights, Darlow suggests, this one reached a kind of reconciliation, establishing Paris as an international operatic centre well ahead of its acknowledged centrality in the next century.
