Volume 35, Number 16 · October 27, 1988
Inventor of Modern Opera
By Charles Rosen
Oeuvres
by Caron de Beaumarchais
Gallimard, 1,696 pp., fr165
Like so many other eighteenth-century men of letters, Beaumarchais wanted to reform opera. This was the grandest of all musical genres, but everyone felt it to be, for one reason or another, absurd. 'There is too much music in the music of the theater,' wrote Beaumarchais. 'It is always overloaded; and, to use the naive expression of a justly famous man, the famous chevalier Gluck, our opera stinks of music: puzza di musica.' In spite of the authority of Gluck, this is a writer's typical irritation: too much music, not enough action. Beaumarchais even tried his hand at writing librettos: his only published example is a ridiculous allegory called Tarare with characters like The Genius of the Reproduction of Beings: it was appropriately set to music by a pupil of Gluck—Salieri, who was to achieve posthumous fame as a mythical enemy of Mozart.
Review, 4596 words
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