ABSTRACT
‘The Cast and Setting’. To set the stage for the following account, this chapter supplies essential background material about the founding in 1777 of the Journal de Paris (JP), its first commercial daily paper, and events preceding it. Since 1774, Christoph Willibald Gluck’s works had held a lucrative near-monopoly at the Paris Opéra. With the new JP as their platform, his supporters (later revealed as François Arnaud and Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard) published a barrage of anonymous unprovoked defamatory attacks on two members of the Académie Française who wanted the Opéra to be open to any deserving composer but had no comparable forum with which to defend themselves: Jean-François Marmontel, librettist for Niccolò Piccinni’s opera Roland, and Jean-François de La Harpe, editor of the Journal de politique et de littérature. The librettist for Gluck’s first Paris opera, François-Louis-Gand Leblanc Du Roullet, probably wrote the letters signed by Gluck. This chapter also discusses the performance of Gluck’s operas, which are so different from our own. His astonishing volume and high-pitched emotion were what drew a crowd in Paris, appalling those of greater sensibility. Although Gluck did improve performance standards in general, Arnaud advised him to retain these elements. Knowledge of what they were hearing is vital to understanding the criticism that followed.
