form was strongly marked.  His early Italian training had fixed in his mind the importance of pure melody.  From Germany he obtained his appreciation of harmony, and had made a deep study of the uses of the orchestra.  So we see this great reformer struggling on with many faltering steps toward that result which he afterward summed up in the following concise description:  “My purpose was to restrict music to its true office, that of ministering to the expression of poetry, without interrupting the action.”

In Calzabigi Gluck had met an author who fully appreciated his ideas, and had the talent of writing a libretto in accordance with them.  This coadjutor wrote all the librettos that belonged to Gluck’s greatest period.  He had produced his “Orpheus and Eurydice” and “Alceste” in Vienna with a fair amount of success; but his tastes drew him strongly to the French stage, where the art of acting and declamation was cultivated then, as it is now, to a height unknown in other parts of Europe.  So Ave find him gladly accepting an offer from the managers of the French Opera to migrate to the great city, in which were fermenting with much noisy fervor those new ideas in art, literature, politics, and society, which were turning the eyes of all Europe to the French capital.

The world’s history has hardly a more picturesque and striking spectacle, a period more fraught with the working of powerful forces, than that exhibited by French society in the latter part of Louis XV.’s reign.  We see a court rotten to the core with indulgence in every form of sensuality and vice, yet glittering with the veneer of a social polish which made it the admiration of the world.  A dissolute king was ruled by a succession of mistresses, and all the courtiers vied in emulating the vice and extravagance of their master.  Yet in this foul compost-heap art and literature nourished with a tropical luxuriance.  Voltaire was at the height of his splendid career, the most brilliant wit and philosopher of his age.  The lightnings of his mockery attacked with an incessant play the social, political, and religious shams of the period.  People of all classes, under the influence of his unsparing satire, were learning to see with clear eyes what an utterly artificial and polluted age they lived in, and the cement which bound society in a compact whole was fast melting under this powerful solvent.

Rousseau, with his romantic philosophy and eloquence, had planted his new ideas deep in the hearts of his contemporaries, weary with the artifice and the corruption of a time which had exhausted itself and had nothing to promise under the old social regime.  The ideals uplifted in the “Nouvelle Heloise” and the “Confessions” awakened men’s minds with a great rebound to the charms of Nature, simplicity, and a social order untrammeled by rules or conventions.  The eloquence with which these theories were propounded carried the French people by storm, and Rousseau was a demigod at whose shrine worshiped alike duchess and peasant.  The Encyclopedists stimulated the ferment by their literary enthusiasm, and the heartiness with which they cooperated with the whole current of revolutionary thought.