The Opera ALCESTE

I continue these classical broadcasts, with Arabic commentary upon them, twice a week: at half past seven every Saturday evening, and at half past seven also every Wednesday evening.

Tonight I present the overture of a piece entitled Alceste, by the great composer Gluck, who lived some two hundred years ago and was beloved of Europe, and of Italy and France in particular.

We have presented before this his opera Orpheus. As for the opera Alceste, whose overture is presented tonight, it is counted among the finest things Gluck composed, and among the finest in this genre altogether. In it appears his marvelous power to create melody and to compose the voices around it, to a degree that sets him above all the composers of his age. We might have said that this

opera is free of any flaw, were it not for the parts of it that were lost when it was carried from Italy to Paris; and no one has been able to restore them to their original—not even Gluck himself. What makes this loss the more serious is that the missing parts belong to the very substance of the piece, where the opera reaches the height of the conflict in Alceste's soul between duty and feeling. Had Gluck not been so attached to this opera, he would have composed it over again. If we set aside this loss—and it does not enter into what we shall hear tonight—we may say that no one in the history of opera, neither before Gluck nor after him, has succeeded in embodying the emotion of love, and in creating the violent dramatic conflict, in music, as Gluck succeeded in this opera whose overture we hear this evening.

Its story, in brief, turns on this: Alceste, in her self-effacing love for her husband Admetus, chose to add to his life what remained of her own, and the gods accepted the exchange. But Hercules—the strong and wise—arrives at the very moment when Alceste intended to carry out that great sacrifice, and restores her to her husband after obtaining leave of Death. On this idea the opera turns from its beginning to its end.

The musicians begin with a musical exposition, many-voiced and many-colored, of all the beauty and love a man can imagine; then it develops and sinks low, as though we were drawing near the sacrifice; then it quavers and trembles, carrying us into a theatrical atmosphere which, we feel, is preparing us to witness a tragedy; then, upon its strains, we pass into a state of bewilderment, as though Alceste hesitated to count her deed a kind of sacrifice, asking herself: Where am I?—and as though heavenly voices were disputing with her over that cruel mercy which takes away the life of one human being to lengthen the life of another.

And we hear the bugles and trumpets and all the wind instruments representing the voices of heaven, as if they were arguing with Alceste's voice, while the various stringed instruments represent the atmosphere in which that singular crisis arose.

Perhaps among Gluck's greatest achievements is that he was able to assign to every instrument of the orchestra a particular meaning for it to express; and after him every instrument came to have its meaning among musical composers.

Such is the standing of the opera Alceste in the world of opera; and it is, as you see, a new page not only in the history of opera but in the history of music. And yet, when it was played for the first time, some of its parts having been lost, Gluck cried out in grief and disappointment: Alceste has fallen! And Jean-Jacques Rousseau answered him: Yes—but she has fallen from heaven! And in truth we shall feel now, as we listen to the overture of this piece, that we are hearing music come to us from heaven.