GLUCK, Christoph Willibald 1714-1787

Echo et Narcisse Drame Lyrique en trois Actes avec un Prologue ... Mis en Musique ... Représenté pour la premiere fois par l'Académie [Royale] de Musique le Mardy 21 Septembre 1779 Prix [40]. [Full score]

Paris: Chez des Lauriers Md. de Papiers, Rue St. Honoré à côté de celle des Prouvaires Ou trouve aussi toutes sortes de papiers réglés pour copier la Musique, [ca. 1779].

Folio. Contemporary quarter dark brown calf with marbled boards, spine in decorative compartments gilt with titling gilt to spine. 1f. (recto title, verso blank), 256 pp.

With blank overpaste to title, obscuring the words "Par M. Le Baron de T."

Signature "L. Wessén" in ink to front pastedown and "A. Benzinger" to free front endpaper.

Binding worn, rubbed, and bumped; lower portion of upper joint partially split. Occasional small stains, foxing, browning, tears, and light dampstaining; minor loss to blank outer margin of pp. 139 and 149; several small holes to p. 237. Quite a good copy overall on quality paper.

First Edition, variant issue. Hopkinson, p. 63, with attributes of 47A(c) (except here there is no plate number and the price "40" appears in manuscript), and 47A(e), as "Royale" has been erased (here in pencil). Wotquenne 47. BUC p. 386. RISM G2739

First performed in Paris at the Opéra on 24 September 1779.

"Echo et Narcisse was a failure at its early performances largely because the audiences and critics expected high drama along the lines of Alceste, Armide and Iphigénie en Tauride. But Echo et Narcisse is a different type of work; it belongs to the pastoral tradition, still popular at this date, and a genre to which Gluck frequently returned. Comparisons were (and are still) made with Gluck’s more popular dramas because Echo et Narcisse contains numbers and scenes similar to those that had made greater impressions before. It is not a weak opera, and there is much fine music in it ..." Jeremy Hayes in Grove Music Online

Gluck was a "Bohemian-Austrian composer of Italian and French opera, a leading figure in opera of the second half of the 18th century, and the person chiefly credited with the ‘reform’ of opera after the age of Metastasian opera seria. ... Force of circumstance may have led Gluck to Paris to complete his operatic career, but in artistic terms Paris can be seen as his inevitable final destination. His years of grounding in opéra comique and the ballet and (via Traetta) his response to the French tragédie lyrique tradition had already provided the impetus for his overhaul of the opera seria; now it was time to confront that tradition on its own territory. On more than one occasion, indeed, Gluck explicitly owned the French influence, and its particular effect on his preparation for Paris. Between them the eight operas that he produced for the Académie Royale de Musique in Paris – the two Iphigénie operas; the radical revisions for Paris of the Vienna ‘reform’ operas Orfeo and Alceste; the similar revisions of the Vienna opéras comiques Cythère assiégée and L’arbre enchanté; Armide, a new opera on a libretto that Quinault had written for Lully more than 90 years earlier; and the last opera, Echo et Narcisse – are all different attempts at the confrontation and revival of that lyric tradition." Jeremy Hayes, Bruce Alan Brown, Max Loppert, and Winton Dean in Grove Music Online.

Item #40424

Price: $1,800.00  other currencies