that it is a strange combination of strength and weakness. Strickly
speaking, Gluck was by no means a first-rate musician, and in 1762 he
had not mastered his new gospel of sincerity and truth so fully as to
disguise the poverty of his technical equipment. Much of the orchestral
part of the work is weak and thin. Berlioz even went so far as to
describe the overture as _une niaiserie incroyable_, and the vocal part
sometimes shows the influence of the empty formulas from which Gluck was
trying to escape. Throughout the opera there are unmistakable traces of
Rameau's influence, indeed it is plain that Gluck frankly took Rameau's
'Castor et Pollux' as his model when he sat down to compose 'Orfeo.' The
plot of the earlier work, the rescue of Pollux by Castor from the
infernal regions, has of course much in common with that of 'Orfeo' and
it is obvious that Gluck took many hints from Rameau's musical treatment
of the various scenes which the two works have in common.

In spite, however, of occasional weaknesses, 'Orfeo' is a work of
consummate loveliness. Compared to the tortured complexity of our modern
operas, it stands in its dignified simplicity like the Parthenon beside
the bewildering beauty of a Gothic cathedral; and its truth and grandeur
are perhaps the more conspicuous because allied to one of those classic
stories which even in Gluck's time had become almost synonymous with
emptiness and formality.

Five years elapsed between the production of 'Orfeo' and of Gluck's next
great opera, 'Alceste'; but that these years were not wasted is proved
by the great advance which is perceptible in the score of the later
work. The libretto of 'Alceste' is in many ways superior to that of
'Orfeo,' and Gluck's share of the work shows an incontestable
improvement upon anything he had yet done. His touch is firmer, and he
rarely shows that inclination to drop back into the old conventional