ABSTRACT
By the middle of the 1820s, the 50-year tradition of performing Gluck's stage works in Paris was coming to an end, and the discipline of professional music criticism was just beginning to emerge. Apart from a short period during the Terror, Gluck's French operas had never been entirely absent from the stage of the Paris Opera. Berlioz's reviews are presented today as paradigmatic examples of nineteenth-century criticism. Berlioz's exposure to the operas of Gluck has been explained often: his voracious reading of the article on Gluck in Michaud's Biographie universelle, his examination of scores in the Conservatoire library and his first experience of Gluck in the theatre are all familiar from the Memoires. Castil-Blaze's main complaint lay with the measured recitative, which, he claimed, occupied more than half the score.
