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 only an artist of experience and assured standing, of strong intellectuality and genuine musical endowment, and of indomitable moral vigor, could have hoped alone and by one stroke, as it were, to accomplish this radical departure from the established traditions of the great Neapolitan school. Yet such an artist Gluck was, and his honor lies not so much in his theory as in his absolute success in bringing it to realization.

We have considerable evidence of Gluck's theoretic position about his work in the prefaces or dedications which he had friends prepare for Alceste (1769) and for Paride ed Elena (l770), and in his fairly numerous and extensive letters. He sought to reason out a definite system of æsthetic thought as applied to dramatic music. His views were remarkably similar to those of the Italian scholar Francesco Algarotti, whose essay on the opera was first published in 1755 and enlarged in 1763, and which, therefore, he might have seen (whether he had actually done so is unknown). But Gluck's theory and practice do not wholly correspond, showing that he was more of an artist than a philosopher. In particular, his musical instinct led him on to greater lyric exuberance and charm than his bare theory indicated, so that the result was not simply a slavish subordination of music to the 18th-century conception of the drama, but an organic union on equal terms of the drama and music, each conceived with artistic freedom. Hence his works have an enduring value.

154. Gluck's Immediate Contemporaries.—Here is an appropriate place to insert some account of several workers in the operatic field who were not closely identified either with Naples on the one hand or with Paris on the other. Gluck's reaction was primarily against the ideals of the Neapolitans, but it told equally against other groups, including those of his own Vienna and of Venice. With these representatives of northern Italy and Austria may well be included the few Germans who came into operatic prominence at this time. Some of these, with the Austrians, are the more notable because they had some share in the early attempts to create a Teutonic type of opera as over against the prevailing Italian type.

Giuseppe Sarti (d. 1802), born in 1729 at Faenza, studied under Martini at Bologna, and made his operatic début in 1752 with such success that almost at once a place was made for him at Copenhagen, where he became court-conductor and was honored for years. In 1775 he became involved in a case of bribery and was banished. After teaching at Venice, in 1779 he was made choirmaster at Milan, whence in 1784 he went to a similar post at St. Petersburg. Of his over 50 operas, the best were those written after his return from Denmark, such as Le gelosie villane (1776, Venice), Achille in Sciro (1781,