“Do you not think I remember my sister, Marie Antoinette?” queried the somewhat ill-favored queen.  Piccini, embarrassed but truthful, replied:  “Your majesty, there maybe a family likeness, but no resemblance.”  A fatality attended him even to Venice.  In 1792 he was mobbed and his house burned, because the populace regarded him as a republican, for he had a French son-in-law.  Some partial musical successes, however, consoled him, though they flattered his amour propre more than they benefited his purse.  On his return to Naples he was subjected to a species of imprisonment during four years, for royal displeasure in those days did not confine itself merely to lack of court favor.  Reduced to great poverty, the composer who had been the favorite of the rich and great for so many years knew often the actual pangs of hunger, and eked out his subsistence by writing conventual psalms, as payment for the broken food doled out by the monks.

At last he was released, and the tenor, David, sent him funds to pay his journey to Paris.  Napoleon, the first consul, received him cordially in the Luxembourg palace.

“Sit down,” said he to Piccini, who remained standing, “a man of your greatness stands in no one’s presence.”  His reception in Paris was, in fact, an ovation.  The manager of the opera gave him a pension of twenty-four hundred francs, a government pension was also accorded, and he was appointed sixth inspector at the Conservatory.  But the benefits of this pale gleam of wintry sunshine did not long remain.  He died at Passy in the year 1800, and was followed to the grave by a great throng of those who loved his beautiful music and admired his gentle life.

In the present day Gluck appears to have vanquished Piccini, because occasionally an opera of the former is performed, while Piccini’s works are only known to the musical antiquarian.  But even the marble temples of Gluck are moss-grown and neglected, and that great man is known to the present day rather as one whose influence profoundly colored and changed the philosophy of opera, than through any immediate acquaintance with his productions.  The connoisseurs of the eighteenth century found Piccini’s melodies charming, but the works that endure as masterpieces are not those which contain the greatest number of beauties, but those of which the form is the most perfect.  Gluck had larger conceptions and more powerful genius than his Italian rival, but the latter’s sweet spring of melody gave him the highest place which had so far been attained in the Italian operatic school.

“Piccini,” says M. Genguene, his biographer, “was under the middle size, but well made, with considerable dignity of carriage.  His countenance was very agreeable.  His mind was acute, enlarged, and cultivated.  Latin and Italian literature was familiar to him when he went to France, and afterward he became almost as well acquainted with French literature.  He spoke and wrote Italian with great purity, but among his countrymen he preferred the Neapolitan dialect, which he considered the most expressive, the most difficult and the most figurative of all languages.  He used it principally in narration, with a gayety, a truth, and a pantomimic expression after the manner of his country, which delighted all his friends, and made his stories intelligible even to those who knew Italian but slightly.”