But we are not concerned here with the history of music, only with the intimate history of musicians.  Piccinni’s domestic life was so beautiful, that it makes it all the more pitiable that he should have been dragged willy-nilly into a contest for which he had neither inclination nor ability.  Piccinni fell in love with a pupil, like him an Italian, Vicenza Sibilla.  When he was twenty-eight he married her.  His biographer Ginguene says:  “She joined to the charms of her sex, a most beautiful and touching voice.  All that happy disposition, assiduous study under so good a master could accomplish, especially when teacher and pupil loved each other passionately, and were equally impassioned for the art, which one taught, and the other learned, it is all that which you must imagine, to get an idea of the talent of Mme. Piccinni.  He did not wish her to go on the stage, where everything promised her the greatest success and the most brilliant fortune; but at home almost every evening, at the private concerts, or, as the Italians say, in all the ‘academies’ where one is glad to be invited, she sang only her husband’s music.  She rendered it with the true spirit of the master; and I have it from him, that he never heard his works, especially his ’Cara Cecchina’ sung with such perfect art, and what would put it above art, so much soul, and expression, as by his wife.”

In 1773 Piccinni found himself suddenly deprived of the fickle support of the Roman public.  Worst of all, it was his own pupil and protege, Anfossi, who supplanted him.  The tender-hearted Piccinni, like Palestrina, was so overcome with this humiliation, that he fell ill, and kept his bed for several months.  Two years later, the Prince of Brunswick’s younger brother went to Naples to visit him, and there he happened upon a domestic scene which gives us a pretty notion of Piccinni’s home life.

“He surprised Piccinni in the midst of his family, and was amazed at the tableau.  Piccinni was rocking the cradle of his youngest child, born that same year; another of his children tugged at his coat to make him tip over the cradle; the mother revelling in the spectacle.  She fled in dismay at seeing the stranger, who stood at the door, enjoying the scene himself.  The young prince made himself known, begged pardon for his indiscretion, and said with feeling, ’I am charmed to see that so great a man has so much simplicity, and that the author of “The Good Daughter” [one of his most successful operas] can be so good a father.’”

The next year, 1776, Piccinni was called to Paris as an unwilling conscript in the musical revolution, which was raging no less fiercely than the American Revolution of the same time.  It was a bitter December day when Piccinni arrived in Paris with his wife, and his eldest daughter, aged eighteen.  “Devoted to his art, foreign to all intrigue, to all ambition, to the morals, tastes, customs, and language of the country, Piccinni lived in his family circle, and devoted himself quietly to his work, in oblivion of the efforts that the Gluckists made to thwart the success, and even to prevent the representation, of his work.  It must be said that Gluck himself stooped to be the instigator of these intrigues.”