Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/51

 The first difficulty is a literary matter. Among the "books" which Grétry set to music, a large number are full of artless ineptitudes which would have to be removed. We have in Paris more than one man of letters endowed with sufficient tact and lightness of touch to carry out this enterprise with success. The words of the sung text ought to be religiously respected, but as they have a very general sense and are applicable to very various situations, it would be possible without inconsistency to touch up in many places the detail of the spoken dialogue and even the plots.

A second difficulty, this time a musical one, lies in the disproportion between the small orchestra of less than twenty five players for which Grétry wrote and the dimensions of our modern theatres. You may say it is very easy to double the number of musicians. It is not easy, for that cannot be done without reshaping the orchestration, a delicate task which requires the hand of a very clever master. Some eighty years ago Adolphe Adam, the celebrated composer of "If I were King" undertook it in the case of Richard Coeur de Lion and utterly spoilt that admirable score by introducing trombones, and accompanying with a tremolo the refrain of "A burning fever," and twenty other pretty tricks of that sort. The same Adam similarly ill-treated Monsigny's Deserter. To-day a just appreciation of style is found far more generally among our musicians than in Adam's time, and the required expert could assuredly be found.

But there is another solution which would get over the difficulty by giving the works of Grétry in a small hall. This was tried about ten years ago by the Théatre de Monsieur (Rue des Mathurins) of ephemeral