The crowning work of this composer’s life was given to the world in 1785.  This was “Richard Coeur de Lion,” and it proved one of the great musical events of the period.  Paris was in ecstasies, and the judgment of succeeding generations has confirmed the contemporary verdict, as it is still a favorite opera in France and Germany.  The works afterward composed by Gretry showed decadence in power.  Singularly rich in fresh and sprightly ideas, he lacked depth and grandeur, and failed to suit the deeper and sounder taste which Cherubini and Mehul, great followers in the footsteps of Gluck, gratified by a series of noble masterpieces.  Gretry’s services to his art, however, by his production of comic operas full of lyric vivacity and sparkle, have never been forgotten nor underrated.  His bust was placed in the opera-house during his lifetime, and he was made a member of the French Academy of Fine Arts and Inspector of the Conservatory.  Gretry possessed qualities of heart which endeared him to all, and his death in 1813 was the occasion of a general outburst of lamentation.  Deputations from the theatres and the Conservatory accompanied his remains to the cemetery, where Mehul pronounced an eloquent eulogium.  In 1828 a nephew of Gretry caused the heart of him who was one of the glorious sons of Liege to be returned to his native city.

Gretry founded a school of musical composition in France which has since been cultivated with signal success, that of lyric comedy.  The efforts of Lulli and Rameau had been turned in another direction.  The former had done little more than set courtly pageants to music, though he had done this with great skill and tact, enriching them with a variety of concerted and orchestral pieces, and showing much fertility in the invention alike of pathetic and lively melodies.  Rameau followed in the footsteps of Lulli, but expanded and crystallized his ideas into a more scientific form.  He had indeed carried his love of form to a radical extreme.  Jean Jacques Rousseau, who extended his taste for nature and simplicity to music, blamed him severely as one who neglected genuine natural tune for far-fetched harmonies, on the ground that “music is a child of nature, and has a language of its own for expressing emotional transports, which can not be learned from thorough bass rules.”  Again Rousseau, in his forcible tract on French music, says of Rameau, from whose school Gretry’s music was such a significant departure: 

“One must confess that M. Rameau possesses very great talent, much fire and euphony, and a considerable knowledge of harmonious combinations and effects; one must also grant him the art of appropriating the ideas of others by changing their character, adorning and developing them, and turning them around in all manner of ways, On the other hand, he shows less facility in inventing new ones.  Altogether he has more skill than fertility, more knowledge than genius, or rather genius smothered by knowledge, but always