of the blessed are discovered disporting themselves after their kind.  Orpheus appears, lost in wonder at the magical beauty of all around him.  Here again is a remarkable instance of Gluck’s pictorial power.  Simple as are the means he employs, the effect is extraordinary.  The murmuring of streams, the singing of birds, and the placid beauty of the landscape are depicted with a touch which, if light, is infallibly sure.  Then follows the famous scene in which Orpheus, forbidden to look at the face of his beloved, tries to find her by touch and instinct among the crowd of happy spirits who pass him by.  At last she approaches, and he clasps her in his arms, while a chorus of perfect beauty bids him farewell as he leads her in triumph to the world above.  The third act shows the two wandering in a cavern on their way to the light of day.  Eurydice is grieved that her husband should never look into her eyes, and her faith is growing cold.  After a scene in which passionate beauty goes side by side with strange relapses into conventionality, Orpheus gives way to her prayers and reproaches, and turns to embrace her.  In a moment she sinks back lifeless, and he pours forth his despair in the immortal strains of ‘Che faro senza Euridice.’  Eros then appears, and tells him that the gods have had pity upon his sorrow.  He transports him to the Temple of Love, where Eurydice, restored to life, is awaiting him, and the opera ends with conventional rejoicings.

Beautiful as ‘Orfeo’ is—­and the best proof of its enduring beauty is that, after nearly a hundred and fifty years of change and development, it has lost none of its power to charm—­we must not be blind to the fact 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.