While Orestes sings in the opera, “My heart is calm,” the orchestra continues to paint the agitation of his thoughts.  During the rehearsal the musician failed to understand the exigency and ceased playing.  The composer cried out, in a rage:  “Don’t you see he is lying?  Go on, go on; he as just killed his mother.”  On one occasion, when he was praising Rameau’s chorus of “Castor and Pollux,” an admirer of his flattered him with the remark, “But what a difference between this chorus and that of your ’Iphigenie’!” “Yet it is very well done,” said Gluck; “one is only a religious ceremony, the other is a real funeral.”  He was wont to say that in composing he always tried to forget he was a musician.

Gluck, however, a few months subsequent to this, was so much humiliated at the non-success of “Echo and Narcissus,” that he left Paris in bitter irritation, in spite of Marie Antoinette’s pleadings that he should remain at the French capital.

The composer was now advanced in years, and had become impatient and fretful.  He left Paris for Vienna in 1780, having amassed considerable property.  There, as an old, broken-down man, he listened to the young Mozart’s new symphonies and operas, and applauded them with great zeal; for Gluck, though fiery and haughty in the extreme, was singularly generous in recognizing the merits of others.

This was exhibited in Paris in his treatment of Mehul, the Belgian composer, then a youth of sixteen, who had just arrived in the gay city.  It was on the eve of the first representation of “Iphigenia in Tauris,” when the operatic battle was agitating the public.  With all the ardor of a novice and a devotee, the young musical student immediately threw himself into the affray, and by the aid of a friend he succeeded in gaining admittance to the theatre for the final rehearsal of Gluck’s opera.  This so enchanted him that he resolved to be present at the public performance.  But, unluckily for the resolve, he had no money, and no prospect of obtaining any; so, with a determination and a love for art which deserve to be remembered, he decided to hide himself in one of the boxes and there to wait for the time of representation.

“At the end of the rehearsal,” writes George Hogarth in his “Memoirs of the Drama,” “he was discovered in his place of concealment by the servants of the theatre, who proceeded to turn him out very roughly.  Gluck, who had not left the house, heard the noise, came to the spot, and found the young man, whose spirit was roused, resisting the indignity with which he was treated.  Mehul, finding in whose presence he was, was ready to sink with confusion; but, in answer to Gluck’s questions, he told him that he was a young musical student from the country, whose anxiety to be present at the performance of the opera had led him into the commission of an impropriety.  Gluck, as may be supposed, was delighted with a piece of enthusiasm so flattering to himself, and not only gave his young admirer a ticket of admission, but desired his acquaintance.”  From this artistic contretemps, then, arose a friendship alike creditable to the goodness and generosity of Gluck, as it was to the sincerity and high order of Mehul’s musical talent.