Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music

Extract from a Response by the Underlaborer to His Frontman Concerning a Piece from Gluck’s “Orfeo”

Extract from a Response by the Underlaborer to His Frontman Concerning a Piece from Gluck’s “Orfeo” 1 As for the enharmonic passage in Gluck’s Orfeo which you tell me you have so much diYculty sounding out and even listening to, I know very well the reason for this: it is that you can do nothing without me and that, when deprived of my assistance you will never be anything but an ignoramus in any genre whatsoever. At least you sense the beauty of this passage, and that is already something; but you are ignorant of what produces it; I am going to teach you. It is that this great Musician has known how to derive from the same passage, and, what is more, from the same chord, the two most contrary eVects in all their force: the ravishing sweetness of Orpheus’s song and the rending stridor2 of the cry of the Furies. What means has he chosen for this? A very simple means, as those which produce great eVects always are. If you had mediated more carefully upon the article enharmonic, which I once dictated to you, you would have understood that this remarkable cause must be sought not simply in the nature of intervals and in the succession of chords, but in the ideas which they arouse, and whose greater or lesser relations, so little known to Musicians, are nevertheless, without their suspecting it, the source of all the expressions that they Wnd solely by instinct.3 The piece in question is in mi-Xat major, and something worthy of being noted is that this admirable piece is, as far as I can recall it, entirely in the same key, or at least so little modulated that the idea of the principal key is not eVaced for a moment. Furthermore, no longer having this piece before my eyes and recalling it only imperfectly, I can speak of it only with uncertainty. To begin with, this nò by the furies, struck and reiterated each time as their entire response, is one of the most sublime inventions in this genre that I know of, and if it is perhaps owing to the Poet,4 it must be admitted that the Musician has seized upon the manner of appropriating it. I have heard it said that at the performance of this Opera no one could stop shaking each time this terrifying nò was repeated, even though it was sung only 506 in unison or at the octave, and without departing in its harmony from the perfect chord until the passage in question. But, at the moment when one least expects it, this dominant, made sharp, forms a frightful screeching which the ear and the heart cannot bear, while at the same instant Orpheus ’s song redoubles in sweetness and in charm; and what is most astonishing is that in ending this short passage, one Wnds oneself in the same key by which one just entered it, almost without being able to comprehend how we have been able to be transported so far and brought back so close with so much power and speed. You will have diYculty believing that all this magic is worked by a tacit passage from the major mode to the minor, and by the sudden return to the major. You will easily convince yourself of this on the Harpsichord. At the moment when the Bass, which sounds the dominant with its chord, is to play do-Xat, you change not the key but the mode and pass into a mi-Xat minor third: for not only does this do, which is the sixth note of the key, take the Xat that belongs to the minor Mode, but the preceding chord, which keeps close to the fundamental, becomes for it that of the diminished seventh on re-natural, and the diminished seventh on the re naturally calls for the perfect minor chord of mi-Xat. Orpheus’s song, furie, larve, belonging equally to the major and to the minor, remains the same in them both; but on the words ombre sdegnose it suddenly establishes the minor Mode. It is probably due to not having soon enough grasped the idea of the Mode that you have had diYculty justly sounding out this passage from its beginning; but it returns by concluding in the major; the great eVect of this passage comes from this new transition at the end of the word sdegnose; and you will realize that...