But the rest!  Renaud was a raw boy, and his shaven chin brought out in sharp relief enormous black moustaches with long waxed ends.  He had a voice, to be sure, but no style, and no understanding of the work he was trying to interpret.

Hidradot is an old sorcerer tempered in the fires of Hell.  He enters, saying: 

    “I see hard by Death that threatens me,
    And already old age, that has chilled my blood,
    Is on me, bowing me beneath a crushing burden.”

Imagine my surprise at seeing come on the stage a magnificent specimen of manhood, with a curled black beard, in all the glory of his youth and vigor superbly arrayed in a red cloak trimmed with gold!

The stage setting was also extraordinary.  In the second act Renaud went to sleep at the back of the stage, forcing Armide to speak the whole of the beautiful scene which follows, one of the most important in the part, at a distance from the footlights and with her back to the audience.

As for the orchestra, sometimes it followed Gluck’s text and sometimes it borrowed bits of orchestration which Meyerbeer had written for the Opera at Berlin.  This orchestration is interesting, and I know it well for I have had it in hand.  It is only fair to say that Gluck, from some inexplicable caprice, did not give the same care to the instrumentation of Armide that he did to Orphee, Alcesti, and the Iphigenies.  The trombones do not appear at all and the drums and flutes only at rare intervals.  Re-orchestration is not absolutely necessary and Meyerbeer’s is no more reprehensible than those with which Mozart enriched Handel’s Messe and La Fete d’Alexandre.  What was inadmissible was not deciding frankly for one version or the other.  It was like a badly patched coat which shows the old cloth in one place and the new in another.

Afterwards I saw Armide treated in another way.

Did you ever happen to cherish the memory of a delightful and picturesque city, where everything made a harmonious whole, where the beautiful walks were arched over by old trees—­and later come back to it to find it embellished, the trees cut down, the walks replaced by enormous buildings which dwarfed into insignificance the ancient marvels which gave the city its charm?

This was the case with me when I saw Armide again in a city which I shall not name.  The opera had been judged superannuated and had been “improved.”  A young composer had written a new score in which he inserted here and there such bits of Gluck as he thought worthy of being preserved.  A costly and magnificently imbecile luxuriousness set off the whole piece.  I may be pardoned the cruel adjective when I say that in the scene of Hate, so deeply inspired, and which takes place in a sort of cave, they relegated the chorus to the wings to make a place for dragons, fantastic birds beating their wings, and other deviltries.  This, of course, deprived the chorus of all its power and distinction.