Beschreibung:

Christoph Willibald von Gluck
Alceste Tragedie Opera En Trois Actes Par Gluck Representée pour la Iere fois par l’Académie N[ation].ale de Musique le 30 Août 1776 [full score], Paris: Chez Des Lauriers Md de Papier rue St Honoré à cote de celle des Prouvaires, [1783 or later], BERLIOZ'S ANNOTATED COPY 293 pages, large folio (33.3 x 24.6cm), full score, engraved throughout, BERLIOZ'S PERFORMING ANNOTATIONS IN PENCIL ON PP.41, 59-92, 126-130, plate number 2, stamp and annotations of Eugène Manson, organist at the Madeleine, to title, front endpaper annotated by Albi Rosenthal, modern half calf 
"Ah!…Alceste…Armide. Now there are operas for you". Thus Berlioz, in a letter dated 22 June 1824 to his friend Edouard Rocher, expressing an early enthusiasm for Gluck's great opera. It was a lifelong adoration of the eighteenth-century composer and operatic reformer, whose oeuvre stood with that of Virgil, Beethoven and Shakespeare in Berlioz’s pantheon. Gluck’s music had great significance for the French composer. Indeed, Berlioz can be regarded as his true heir. Berlioz admired the Classical poise and restraint of Gluck’s reform operas of the 1760s and 1770s, where, with limited use of vocal display, the music is used to underline the message and power of the words. Not quite a case of "prima le parole e poi la musica", but nearly so. Restraint, it is true, is not a word normally associated with Berlioz. But despite the apparent bombast and grandiose structures in his larger works, the spirit of Gluck stands next to Berlioz like the shade of Virgil in Dante. Winton Dean has pointed out the passage in Alceste in Act 3, where the hero confronts the infernal spirits (TNG, vii.472): the repeated note passage on the horns and the "hollow octaves" of the chorus against a turbulent orchestral accompaniment, echoes throughout Berlioz’s music. It can be no accident that Berlioz turned to Virgil for his last great opera Les Troyens. Musically, that work owes a great deal to Gluck.
Berlioz supervised a revival of Alceste in Paris with Pauline Viardot in the role in 1861. It is possible that he used this score at that time. His annotations comprise tempo and dynamic markings and indications for muted passages etc. After a further revival in 1866, Berlioz wrote to Humbert Ferrand: "A whole generation is hearing this marvel for the first time and prostrating itself with love before the master’s inspiration. The other day I had near me in the auditorium a woman who was weeping explosively, so that people in the audience were gazing at her. I’ve had a heap of letters of thanks for the trouble I’ve taken with Gluck’s score…Ingres isn’t the only member of the Institut who makes a habit of coming to the performances of Alceste; most of the painters and sculptors have a feeling for antiquity, a feeling for beauty undeformed by sorrow." 
LITERATURE:Hopkinson 44A(k); RISM G 2641; Selected Letters of Berlioz, ed. Hugh Macdonald, translated by Roger Nichols (London, 1995), no.464, p.450.
PROVENANCE:Hector Berlioz; Eugène Manson; Otto Haas.