Prelude: a remarkable performance

E.T.A. Hoffmann's short story ‘Ritter Gluck’, written and set in 1809, opens at a Berlin café where the narrator has sat down within earshot of a few mediocre musicians: ‘an out of tune harp, a pair of un-tuned violins, a short-winded flautist, and a practical-joking bassoonist’.Footnote ² They torture an aria and then a waltz while the narrator cringes at their terrible voice leading. A nearby stranger, delighted to find that the narrator is an Oktavenjäger (octave hunter) and music appreciator, strikes up a conversation. The narrator explains to his companion that he had some rudimentary education in piano and figured bass and had learned that ‘nothing creates such a bad effect’ as parallel octaves. ‘Really?’ the stranger responds, and then convinces the motley quintet to perform the overture to Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide (1774). As the musicians play, the stranger enters a trance:

Hoffmann's description of the performance casts it as magical sonic metamorphosis of the quintet from wonky chamber ensemble to full orchestra. In a proto-cinematic fashion, we might hear a new, imaginary orchestral soundtrack impinging on the diegesis. The description continues:

From the perspective of instrumental timbre, this is an especially fascinating passage. Hoffmann's literary staging of this scene mirrors the remarkable performance: just as the narrator hears cellos and basses that are not there, the reader is likewise invited to imagine the original overture. For those of us familiar with this overture, it could conjure either a hazy memory of the piece or a vivid recollection of this passage, perhaps even triggering a mental replay of a favourite recording. For those unfamiliar, a more fictive sonic experience emerges, whereby we make our own decisions – in varying detail – about what storms, thunder, softly pulsing tones and mustiness might sound like. We might note that the imagined version of the overture is more instrumentally colourful than the sonic reality faced by the two protagonists, inverting the usual association of music's formal properties with ideality and timbral elements with sensuous immediacy. Even from the silence of the printed page, Hoffmann's passage points to the capaciousness of timbre. It demonstrates how talk of sound can so easily blend the invocation of specific details with generalisations, the real with the imaginary. In what follows, I think about what forms the study of timbre has taken and what it might become, while simultaneously following a few threads from Hoffmann's story backwards into the eighteenth century, with hopes of finding some of timbre's future lingering around its origins.

The discipline of timbre

I described timbre as capacious, but perhaps I should have said ‘greedy’. No longer that shy secondary parameter languishing on the margins of scholarly research, timbre has assumed a comfortable place in musical studies. In its voracity, it encompasses explorations of individual instruments, the analyses of specific works, and the soundworlds of particular composers and whole genres. Under the banner of timbre, one can study issues of notation, recording technology, the politics of identity, questions of cognition and perception, philosophies of listening and the history of acoustics.Footnote ⁵

While this represents major disciplinary development – maybe even an emblem of twenty-first-century musicology – one must be careful not to exaggerate the newness of such work: thinkers ranging from Theodor Adorno to Carol Krumhansl have long recognised the beguiling nature of timbre.Footnote ⁶ What we are now facing is an acceleration and expansion of timbre-focused scholarship. With conferences and the publication of books, edited volumes and special issues devoted to timbre, it is no surprise that scholars have begun to speak of timbre studies as an emerging, discrete subfield.Footnote ⁷ But what are the most important characteristics of this subfield? A cursory review of the scholarship that one might file under this subheading is not bound by musical genre, limited by geography or time period, or unified by vocabulary, let alone by methodology. Indeed, one could argue that the concept of ‘timbre studies’ recapitulates the thorniness of its subject. In Cornelia Fales's seminal essay, ‘The Paradox of Timbre’, she observed that ‘not only does timbre carry the most information about a source and its location … but of all parameters of music, it also carries the most information about the environment through which the sound has travelled.’Footnote ⁸ Timbre is simultaneously discrete and diffuse. To name timbre is at once to point towards particular, and formerly neglected, features of musical works, but it can also subsume all aspects of sounding and listening. At times it seems that timbre is not a subfield but the totality – and maybe the future – of music studies.

Emerging from all this wide-ranging scholarship is a collection of commonly invoked beliefs about and attitudes towards timbre. An incomplete portion of this list goes something like this:

• ◦ Timbre is understudied/neglected.

• ◦ Timbre is poorly understood.

• ◦ Timbre is hard to define.

• ◦ Timbre is defined negatively/badly.

• ◦ Timbre lacks a systematic vocabulary/evades description/our language perpetually falls short of capturing timbre.

• ◦ Timbre lacks a theory: there are no rules of timbre.Footnote ⁹

These persistent difficulties define the scope of timbre studies, laying out a programme for future scholarship: timbre needs attention, theory and better vocabulary.Footnote ¹⁰ But this list, even as it might be seen to inaugurate the field, already demands reconsideration. Music studies are surely reaching the point at which scholars can stop bemoaning the lack of attention to timbre. This is not to say that our timbral work is done, but rather that it is time to formulate a new challenge: while understudied, work on timbre needed little justification beyond its claim to shed light, at long last, on something neglected. As the literature grows increasingly robust, so does the burden to consider the larger goals of such work. After all, timbre is ubiquitous and inevitable: an analyst would surely find timbre when confronting music.

With the recognition that there is now a substantial body of scholarship on timbre, something else becomes apparent: for all of the bemoaning the lack of a systemic vocabulary or rigorous theorisation, scholars still manage to talk a lot about it, and productively too. It seems that the challenges timbre poses are often a boon: it frequently demands specificity, scientific precision and inventive analysis. It seemingly resists abstraction and begs for critical reflection. Much of this critical tussling seems to promise an encounter with music's fundamental material reality. It is this tantalising possibility that has led Nina Eidsheim and Isabella van Elferen almost inexorably towards sound as vibration, towards a sonic ‘ground zero’.Footnote ¹¹ Eidsheim has suggested that to approach sound as vibration is to ‘let go of the safety net of assumed certainty that is offered by reliance on musical parameters and concepts’.Footnote ¹² In other words, timbre promises a place seemingly free from the ideological baggage that clings to more traditional forms of music theory.Footnote ¹³ This freefall is exhilarating: in forcing analysts to forego or revise the field's traditional analytical techniques, timbre unsettles networks of disciplinary assumptions and predilections that have served to bolster some musics and people and exclude others. It is hardly a coincidence that talk of timbre often accompanies turns to questions of race and performing bodies, as well as musics outside the Western art music canon.Footnote ¹⁴ Far from being undertheorised, the very concept of timbre itself attracts an endless range of theorisation and deconstruction, with repeated attempts at definition and redefinition.

Thinking about timbre often involves reflection on what it means to talk about timbre, just as this essay is doing right now. But while much work on timbre embraces timbre's all-embracingness, engaging in an addictive, reiterative teasing out of timbre's nuances, other scholars have tried to do away with timbre entirely.Footnote ¹⁵ Michel Chion found the term unsatisfactory: for him, timbre is an inadequate, catch-all term that merely ‘allows us to identify a sound as emanating from a specific instrument’.Footnote ¹⁶ He argued that the typical description of sound as being divided into ‘pitch, intensity, duration, and timbre’ is comparable to describing a person ‘by height, weight, age, and general physiognomy (including his or her particular characteristics)’.Footnote ¹⁷ To speak of timbre is to speak of conventions: Chion asked, ‘What does the expression “a trombone's timbre” mean when one strikes the instrument rather than blowing through it?’Footnote ¹⁸ For Chion, the way forward was to cease using the term as a referent to sound sources and instead to focus on ‘sonic materials, morphological criteria, acoustic forms, textures, and profiles’, that is, to speak with precision about all the things that are gathered, higgledy-piggledy, under the umbrella of ‘timbre’.Footnote ¹⁹ For Chion, timbre falls short of itself: it fails to capture the rich reality of sound. Such dismissals have a century-long history. In his 1885 translation of Helmholtz's Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen, Alexander Ellis refused to use the term timbre, declaring it – in all of its etymological sloppiness – ‘not worth preserving’.Footnote ²⁰ But timbre is obstinate, and has survived these attacks.

Another approach has been to retain the word but refine and narrow its use, as Kai Siedenburg and Stephen McAdams have recently advocated.Footnote ²¹ They argue that we should recognise that timbre is a perceptual attribute and should not be merged with ‘sound events’. Like Chion, they emphasise the meaninglessness of talking about the timbre of an instrument: what does it mean, they ask, to speak of ‘the timbre of a bassoon’ when there is in fact ‘no single timbre that fully characterizes’ it?Footnote ²² Again, such arguments have historical precursors: the Romantic philosopher Wilhelm Wackenroder, in an essay on tone, critiqued the numerous eighteenth-century analogies made between tones and colours. In particular he took aim at the notion that single tones could be paired with different hues to create a kind of visual ‘colour music’. Instead, he pushed for a different way of thinking about the relationship between sound and colour: ‘each individual tone of a particular instrument is like the nuance of a colour’.Footnote ²³ Anticipating Siedenburg and McAdams – but without invoking the term ‘timbre’ – Wackenroder argued that each tone of an instrument had its own specific qualities.

But Wackenroder continued: ‘and just as each colour has a main colour, so too each instrument has only one, completely characteristic tone that it best expresses’.Footnote ²⁴ In other words, he recognised both the fine-grained individuality of single tones and the coarser commonality of a particular instrument's gambit. Beyond the conventional, Wackenroder drew on what we might call the cumulative imaginary of timbre, that is, the collective memory of particular sounds and shared ideas about sonic character. This might resonate with Van Elferen's notion of the ‘paradox 0’ of timbre: namely, that it is both real and ideal, a ‘material sound source’ and an ‘immaterial percept’.Footnote ²⁵ In this gap, Van Elferen finds a host of ontological difficulties: in her words, timbre is ‘ever-present but ever-evolving, frustratingly opaque and fascinatingly excessive … Timbre does not just entangle and invert the relations between index and icon, but it also implicates listening subjectivities in the entwinement of its ongoing sonic and sensory becoming.’Footnote ²⁶ Timbre leads Van Elferen to the precipice of the Burkean sublime. As elegant as her analysis is, it risks missing two seemingly mundane points. Wackenroder's expansive conception of tone colour resists any material/immaterial binary. Rather, in his formulation, timbre exists along a spectrum of specificity: from that of a timbre of a single tone, to the timbre of a particular instrument, to that of a species of instrument, and finally to the timbre of instrument families. This is to say, one might discover ‘an unknowable void’ between timbre's reality and ideality, but one could also find a socially conditioned process of generalisation.Footnote ²⁷ And these timbral generalisations are ubiquitous, meaningful, and fuel the broader discourse about music, from orchestration treatises to romantic fiction.

Second, there is an important historical point that neither Chion's nor Van Elferen's analyses take into account: generalisability and conventionality are the preconditions of the modern concept of timbre. That is to say, the very concept of timbre first entered musical discourse as a way to talk about sound in general, distinct from the specific sonic experience of a particular and singular performance. When Rousseau defined timbre in the Encyclopédie, he drew on this power of generality, describing timbre as sound's ‘harshness or softness, its dullness or brightness. Soft sounds, like those of a flute, ordinarily have little harshness; bright sounds are often harsh, like those of the vielle or the oboe.’Footnote ²⁸ Though it is easy to decry ‘inadequate’ and imprecise language when discussing timbre, the ability to communicate about timbre in loose and evocative ways is one source of its power. Timbre enters discourse as a name for the immediacies of sonic experience, and the very process of naming it allows us to speak, perhaps paradoxically, in generalities about those immediacies.

The future of timbre studies would surely do well to preserve the complexity of the very term ‘timbre’: its messiness cannot be rationalised away. And if part of the thrill of turning to timbre has been its liberatory potential – its ability to wrest scholarly attention away from the traditional analytical methods and their disciplining powers – then we should recognise that the eagerness to be careful and precise about what timbre might mean is itself also a disciplining move.

What is required, however, is more than welcoming timbral messiness and exercising disciplinary caution: to embrace timbre's history must also mean taking seriously the ways in which timbre has been brushed aside, considered secondary, and even irrelevant. This means moving beyond the almost gleeful unmasking and rediscovery that permeates a study such as my own work, The Orchestral Revolution. In that book, timbre lurked everywhere: in the birth of aesthetic discourse about music, in the orchestra, in the ears of Joseph Haydn's London audiences.Footnote ²⁹ Timbre appeared to be waiting patiently to be re-discovered, to be revealed in all its splendour. But what if timbre was doing just fine in the shadows? What if, in fact, that shadowy position bestows it with particular abilities?

To think about timbre in a historically nuanced way is to confront its occasional absence as a directly nameable concept. In what follows, I think about the timbral lessons offered by Gluck in the eighteenth century, exploring the ways in which his audiences had to learn new audile techniques to understand the relationship between the sung drama and the instrumental accompaniment of his operas. But neither Gluck nor his critics invoked the term ‘timbre’ (or anything similar) and indeed, would likely have been puzzled by any attempt to isolate timbre as a distinct parameter.

The birth of orchestral listening

Let's return to Hoffmann and ‘Ritter Gluck’. The story, one of Hoffmann's earliest, helped establish his writing career. In early 1809, he had sent it to Johann Friedrich Rochlitz, then editor of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, claiming it to be ‘based on a real occurrence in Berlin’ and hoping that it might be considered for publication.Footnote ³⁰ Eric Schneemann has tied the story's composition to performances of Gluck's music in German translation in 1808 (Orfeo ed Euridice) and 1809 (Iphigénie en Aulide) in French-occupied Berlin.Footnote ³¹ The brief tale has many of the hallmarks of Hoffmann's style: it is at once a fantastical story and a critique of musical culture, replete with scintillating descriptions of actual music making. After the two protagonists listen to the magical performance of Gluck's overture, they continue to talk about musical life until the stranger suddenly leaves, overwhelmed by his own descriptions of his hallucinatory musical experiences. Several months pass and the narrator once again encounters the stranger, who takes him to his richly appointed apartment and performs the overture to Gluck's Armide from a blank score. The performance is exquisite:

Afterwards the narrator, transfixed and trembling, asks who this magnificent stranger is; after changing into lavish court dress, he solemnly gives his impossible reply: ‘Ich bin der Ritter Gluck!’Footnote ³³

The combination of the story's brevity and its baffling plot calls out for scholarly intervention. Unsurprisingly, ‘Ritter Gluck’ has been analysed and interpreted to wildly different ends:Footnote ³⁴ Hoffmann's Gluck has been seen as a madman, a crazed ghost, a sign of excess, a manifestation of Hoffmann's own compositional anxieties and a reincarnation of Rameau's nephew.Footnote ³⁵ Certainly the question of madness is hard to escape: after hearing that the narrator had given up composing music after a few feeble attempts, the stranger chides him and launches into a lengthy, rambling description of the allure of melody and the intoxication of music. ‘Many are those who dream away the dream of this dream-world – dissolving into dreams’, the stranger proclaims, continuing:

The stranger's poetic declarations share the same synaesthetic blending of music, landscape, nature and fiery light that characterises the climactic moments in many of Hoffmann's stories. We might turn to the final appearance of the mysterious Professor X at the end of ‘Automata’: ‘in every direction crystal tones came scintillating out of the dark bushes and trees, and, streaming through the air like flame, united in a wondrous concert, penetrating the inmost heart’.Footnote ³⁷ Or the moment in ‘The Golden Pot’ when the student Anselmus peers into a strange gemstone:

Such passages helped to shape the soundscape of the romantic imagination, teetering on the precipice between exalted inspiration and a chasm of insanity.Footnote ³⁹

And yet, for all the romantic inventiveness of ‘Ritter Gluck’, perhaps the most striking aspect of the story is neither the fantastical imagery nor the mad ravings, but rather its cogent realism. Indeed, a reader familiar with eighteenth-century portraiture might have guessed the stranger's identity long before the uncanny revelation that concludes the story: his appearance during the café performance – gazing upwards, left hand spread on imaginary keys, right hand raised – mirrors the famous portrait of Gluck painted by Joseph Duplessis in 1775, depicting Gluck in a moment of inspiration at his clavichord (Figure 1). Friedrich Reichardt, Hoffmann's friend and teacher, and a great supporter of Gluck, owned a copy of this portrait, which he had requested after he visited Gluck at his country house in Perchtoldsdorf. The stranger's performance from an empty score – which has an unsettling effect in the story – likewise echoes accounts of Gluck performing music from memory. Famously, Charles Burney visited Gluck in 1772, where Gluck good-humouredly performed large chunks of Alceste, Paride ed Elena and Iphigénie en Aulide. Burney reported:

Figure 1.

Portrait of Gluck, by Joseph-Sifrède Duplessis (1775). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, (© KHM-Museumsverband).

Even more compelling is Reichardt's own description of his visit to Gluck, which he published four years after Hoffmann's story, also in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. His account, written in the third person, describes being entertained by Gluck at the keyboard; it echoes Hoffmann's scene, right down to the verbal imitations of instruments:

Given the similarities in their descriptions and given that Hoffmann must have seen Reichardt's copy of the portrait, it seems impossible that Reichardt had not described this evening to Hoffmann. (Of course, it is equally possible that Reichardt's own narration of the event was also coloured by Hoffmann's rendering of Gluck in his story.) Indeed, this realism supports a more sober interpretation of the story: Ricarda Schmidt's sensitive analysis of the tale stresses the ways in which Hoffmann engaged with the musical criticism of his time. In particular, she argues that the initial exchange between the narrator and Gluck – the exchange about parallel octaves – was a reference to Johann Nikolaus Forkel's feisty criticisms of Gluck's music that had circulated since the late 1770s.Footnote ⁴² Forkel had published a withering critique of Gluck in his Musikalische-kritische Bibliothek in 1778, as part of a larger review of Friedrich Justus Riedel's 1775 Ueber die Musik des Ritters Christoph von Gluck. Riedel's publication included both the earliest known biography of Gluck, as well as translations of some of the prolific French-language writing growing out of the so-called wars of the Gluckists and the Piccinnists.Footnote ⁴³

German studies scholar Francien Markx has delved even more deeply into the story's realism.Footnote ⁴⁴ She notes, for example, that the opening setting of ‘Ritter Gluck’ – the Berlin café with the bawdy musicians – takes direct aim at Forkel's biting remark that Gluck's music ‘resembl[ed] the musical style of our tavern-virtuosos’, a style that was at once ‘simple enough, but at the same time quite disgusting’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Markx's reading focuses on the distinction between Forkel's insistence on ‘compliance with “objective” compositional rules’ and a form of emotional evaluation that originated in the listener's heart. Forkel, in her reading, ignored the meaning of the music in favour of a pedantic obsession with compositional correctness.Footnote ⁴⁶ But Forkel and Hoffmann are divided by more than their different tastes or their understanding of compositional rules. Forkel's criticisms and Hoffmann's fictionalised rebuttal highlight different ways of listening, ways that go beyond opposing rational and emotional approaches to music, and hinge on the basic perception of musical sound, especially orchestral sound. Hoffmann's story is a belated contribution to eighteenth-century debates about Gluck and the role of the orchestra in his operas. To delve into these debates with an ear to the orchestra is to begin to understand how certain forms of what we might call ‘orchestral listening’ came into being.

What is ‘orchestral listening’? I mean a form of listening that understands the orchestra as, among other things, providing essential information about the staged drama. We could also call this timbral listening avant la lettre, even though the notion of ‘timbral listening’ is one not often invoked in analyses of eighteenth-century European music. Indeed, it is all too easy to imagine that timbral listening emerges only elsewhere: in the music of Tuva, in popular musics, in urban soundscapes, in late twentieth-century art music, or in contemporary ASMR, and that the term implies a kind of listening entirely different from the listening demanded by Enlightenment-era art music.Footnote ⁴⁷ But there are many ways of attending to timbre, and some of those ways have become so naturalised as to no longer register as timbral listening. I argue that Gluckian orchestral listening is one such listening practice.Footnote ⁴⁸

Orchestral listening was what Forkel emphatically did not do. This does not mean that Forkel ignored Gluck's instrumentation. Rather, Forkel was explicitly unimpressed with Gluck's handling of his instruments, which he illustrated with special attention to the overture to Iphigénie en Aulide. The unison (Example 1) that had cried out so majestically for Hoffmann's narrator was too insignificant a moment for Forkel to warrant such grand sonic treatment:

Example 1.

Overture to Iphigénie en Aulide, bb. 19–24.

Forkel did not actually accuse Gluck of breaking the rules of voice leading: rather, his criticism had much more to do with the appropriateness of the grand unison. Unlike later criticisms of orchestration that focused more explicitly on questions of noise or instrumental abuse (that is, misusing the characters of instruments), this was not Forkel's primary concern. Rather, he listened for worthy ‘musical thoughts’ that could then be made important and highlighted through their instrumental treatment. In other words, for Forkel, the splendour and significance must lie somewhere in the music that is independent of the orchestra; orchestral sound itself does not produce its own dramatic logic. Forkel's emphasis on the importance of abstract musical logic here is not surprising, and indeed echoes his arguments about J. S. Bach's lessons in structure and counterpoint he learned from arranging Vivaldi's concertos.Footnote ⁵⁰

Within Hoffmann's story, by contrast, the truest form of the music involves the full orchestra: the little café ensemble that performs cannot offer more than a ‘pale sketch’ and its sounds are to be understood as striving for full orchestral power. As noted above, for Hoffmann, the idealisation of music does not imply a separation or abstraction from the specificities of the instruments that produce it, but rather demands the imaginative restoration of the original orchestration.

Hoffmann's story points to the ways in which the orchestra was not simply an integral part of the basic identity of Gluck's music, but also performed an essential dramatic role. The overture to Iphigénie en Aulide, with its atmosphere of ‘painful, gnawing heart-sorrow’, has long been celebrated for foreshadowing the drama to follow. But this dramatic role goes deeper and Gluck's music requires that we not only attend to instrumental colour, but also connect the sounds of the orchestra to the singing characters’ inner emotional worlds. This is hardly unusual to us today: from Wagnerian music dramas to contemporary film, orchestral accompaniments often serve as sonic subtexts, providing additional layers of information about the characters we see.

In many ways, I am on familiar ground in opera studies: a number of scholars have attended to the changing role of the orchestra in Enlightenment-era operas. David Charlton has written on the ‘envoicing’ of instruments on the Parisian stage, which allowed, in his words, ‘the metaphorical attribution of human qualities to the orchestra’.Footnote ⁵¹ James Johnson has traced the emergence of new, emotionally charged listening habits – closely tied to the music of Gluck – whereby ‘orchestral harmonies’ were heard as ‘legitimately expressive’.Footnote ⁵² And Gary Tomlinson has argued that the formation of new operatic subjectivities in this period made possible the ‘new representational power’ of the orchestra.Footnote ⁵³

My argument is not that Gluck singlehandedly revolutionised operatic accompaniment: he is but one protagonist in a story that fills the eighteenth century. But attending closely not only to the enthusiasms but also to the criticisms induced by Gluck's music lays bare something of the process of how the orchestra became a dramatic tool. For many of Gluck's contemporaries, hearing the power of the orchestra as an expressive tool for the revelation of internal emotional states was neither obvious nor straightforward. Rather, orchestral listening was a skill that was learned – and sometimes resisted.

Gluck's instrumental mindset

In Gluck's reception, from the eighteenth century and onward, we find an illusory schism between Gluck the operatic reformer and Gluck the orchestral innovator. Gluck's masterful treatment of the orchestra – and of instruments more generally – is something that has been noted and often celebrated since the eighteenth century. Stories about instruments have long played an important role in his biography. Indeed, there is a striking tendency towards what we might call ‘pan-instrumentalism’ in accounts of Gluck. That is, rather than stressing Gluck's virtuosity on one or two instruments, writers emphasise Gluck's knowledge and mastery of a wide range of instruments, even unusual ones. (These stories of Gluck echo other tales of multi-handed instrumental proficiency that was characteristic of Bohemia.Footnote ⁵⁴) Carpani, in Le Haydine, tells of Sammartini's ‘practical knowledge of all of the instruments’, which Gluck learned when he studied with Sammartini in Milan.Footnote ⁵⁵ When in London in 1746, Gluck gave concerts on ‘twenty-six drinking glasses’, an instrument that was advertised as being ‘of his own invention’ and upon which he could perform ‘whatever may be done on a violin or harpsichord’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The painter Johann Christian von Mannlich recorded a number of instrumental-focused stories of Gluck, which Gluck reportedly narrated to him when they met in Paris in 1774. For example, he recounts one of Gluck's earliest musical excursions, in which the young composer set out for Vienna with a small amount of money and a Jew's harp. Gluck, the story goes, made his way through the countryside, playing tunes in exchange for bread, cheese and eggs, which he then exchanged for accommodation; using this musically driven micro-economy, he blissfully made his way to Vienna.Footnote ⁵⁷ (The story is confusing and ultimately improbable: for starters, it is thought that Gluck first set out for Prague, not Vienna.Footnote ⁵⁸) Mannlich later describes the rehearsals for Iphigénie en Aulide, during which Gluck ‘ran about like one possessed, from one end of the orchestra to the other’. This frantic engagement with the orchestra terrified the musicians but also turned comical: ‘Gluck was downstage, in the thick of things, listening to each instrument, when the basses made a mistake. He turned his head so rapidly in their direction that his old round wig could not follow the swift movement; it froze and fell to the ground.’Footnote ⁵⁹ Mannlich's Gluck is as fiery and possessed by orchestral sound as the Gluck of Hoffmann's imagination. In 1766, a well-known article in the Wienerisches Diarium – likely by Dittersdorf – described Gluck as ‘a man truly created for the orchestra’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Starting in the late eighteenth century, writers on music often invoked Gluck and his treatment of the orchestra when criticising newer composers: Gluck's operas served as models of orchestral elegance to be emulated; they stood in contrast to newer operas that overused wind instruments and special sonic effects. The composer Johann Wessely, for example, published a lengthy article in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung bemoaning the misguided approaches to instrumental writing that he saw proliferating in contemporary composition:

Hoffmann himself would make similar arguments about the undeniable power of the orchestra and its need for proper deployment. In the more sober realm of straightforward music criticism, his language even began to echo Forkel's:

Praise of Gluck's orchestra continued through the nineteenth century. Berlioz's orchestration treatise (1844) is peppered with examples drawn from Gluck's scores: he turned to Gluck's operas to illuminate tremolos, uses of mutes, grace notes, the power of the viola and the oboe, and effective uses of the piccolo and even the cymbal. ‘Sublime’ is often Berlioz's adjective of choice.

Gluck also played a central role in Berlioz's short story ‘Euphonia’, which was set in the year 2344 and described events in the eponymous musically organised German town and inspired, in part, by Berlioz's 1843 visit to the Leipzig Conservatory and his experience of its novel pedagogical programmes.Footnote ⁶³ The great annual event in Euphonia is the Gluck Festival, which involved performances of his operas and culminated in the crowning of Gluck's statue. Though descriptions of fantastical twenty-fourth-century instrumentation involving hundreds of impeccably trained musicians are peppered throughout the story, Berlioz does not invoke Gluck's music for its spectacular orchestration or instrumental effects. Rather, it represents elegance and restraint. Part of the action of the story centres on a talented singer, Nadira, who arrives in the city to beg for a special place in the Gluck Festival; she is initially turned down because of her overly ornamented singing style (‘Madam … in the Gluck Festival, florid singing is not allowed’)Footnote ⁶⁴. After hearing a performance of Gluck's Alceste – a favourite work of Berlioz – Nadira is moved to tear off the gems adorning her hair, trample them, and sing Alceste's celebrated aria ‘Ah, divinités implacables!’ Ornamentation – both physical and musical – gives way to natural, passionate and beautiful expression. It is at once a performance of the noble power of simplicity, which Nadira has finally understood, and a call for forgiveness for her previous offences of musical excess. Indeed, we might imagine Gluck as one of those implacable gods to whom Nadira directs her prayer: she calls for the death of her own excess.

Lingering on this story risks perpetuating an overemphasis on Berlioz's reception and perception of Gluck that Mark Everist has recently sought to correct.Footnote ⁶⁵ But I dwell on ‘Euphonia’ here because, when contrasted with Berlioz's orchestration treatise, it highlights two sides of Gluck and his legacy that have grown farther and farther apart in accounts of the composer: Gluck the celebrated orchestral revolutionary, who (tastefully) expanded the role of the orchestra in opera, and Gluck the operatic reformer, who banished artifice from opera and restored the importance of the poetry, making drama more natural, closer to human speech, unfettered by unnecessary machines (this paradoxical blending of expansion and restraint is the essence of the imaginary city of ‘Euphonia’, with its massive musical forces that nevertheless perform with the utmost taste). Here, I would like to look more closely at the delicate relationship between revolution and reform.Footnote ⁶⁶

The familiar story of reform

Nadira's trampling of her jewellery harkens back to the language with which Gluck and Calzabigi described their operatic reforms. For them, reform involved a return to simplicity, reduction and putting things into their proper place. In the celebrated preface to Alceste, Gluck and Calzabigi stated their intention to ‘restrict music to its true office of serving Poetry for expression and for situations of the story without interrupting the Action or cooling it down with useless, superfluous ornaments’. Gone are ‘tedious [orchestral] ritornell[i]’, pauses on ‘favourable vowels’ for the purpose of showing off vocal nimbleness, and unnecessary repetitions designed for the singer ‘to show that he can capriciously vary a passage in many Guises’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Gluck and Calzabigi discipline both singer and accompaniment.

When talking about Gluck's operatic reforms, we often hold up Orfeo's celebrated entrance – his three plaintive cries of Euridice! – as encapsulating the essence of the simplicity and directness that Gluck and Calzabigi prized. Orfeo does not express his grief about the loss of his wife by singing an aria that describes his inner tempests; rather, his exclamations are the very manifestation of barely articulate grief (Example 2). As Taruskin elegantly put it, ‘It is hard to conceive of anything more elemental, more drastically “reduced to essentials”.’Footnote ⁶⁸ And yet, the scene is hardly simple, natural or ‘reduced’, for how many of us have grieved to the accompaniment of a four-part chorus, a pair of cornettos, three trombones, three strings and continuo (Example 3)? As Taruskin goes on to note, the power of Orfeo's exclamations stems as much from their directness as it does from the awe and drama of the larger musical context: the sorrowful orchestra and chorus create a mass of sound in which these bare, exposed tones can assume meaning.

Example 2.

Gluck, Orfeo ed Euridice, Act I scene 1, bb. 24–6: simplicity at its most powerful.

Example 3.

Gluck, Orfeo ed Euridice, Act I scene 1, bb. 18–26: the full picture.

The preface to Alceste is not, of course, the only statement from this period on the relationship between music and staged drama. The rise of pantomime ballet (ballet d'action) in Vienna, driven by the choreographer Franz Hilverding (1710–68) and his student Gasparo Angiolini (1731–1803) shared many of the dramatic goals of reform opera. Ballet, Angiolini argued, had ‘degenerated’ into an art of ‘performing entrechat and leaps, of jumping or running in time to the music’. In short, it was nothing less than ‘wretched buffoonery’.Footnote ⁶⁹ In place of this purely physical display devoid of emotional content, ballet d'action emphasised drama; its roots, Angiolini argued, went back to ancient Greece and Rome. These principles undergirded Angiolini and Gluck's highly influential and best-known ballet, Don Juan, ou Le festin de Pierre, which premiered in Vienna in October 1761 at the Burgtheater. This work is most often invoked for its later influence on Don Juan-themed operas: the ballet's reimagining of Don Juan as a tragic – rather than a slapstick – character set the stage for Mozart and Da Ponte's dramma giocoso, as well as a host of other Don Juan operas in the 1770s and 1780s.Footnote ⁷⁰ Towards the very end of the accompanying programme, Angiolini described Gluck's role in the ballet:

In their 1765 collaboration Semiramis, Angiolini again concluded his programme by turning to the roles of music and Gluck. ‘If I succeed’, he wrote, ‘I must share the honour of success with him.’ Music, he argued, was the poetry of Pantomime ballet, and ballet could no sooner do without music than an actor could do without words: ‘we place the steps, the gestures, the attitudes, the expressions of the roles we play on the music that is heard in the orchestra’.Footnote ⁷²

Though ballet d'action and reform opera largely share the same dramatic goals, the role of music in each appears oppositional: in opera, it is reduced, cut down to size, to make way for the sung drama; in ballet, music is the essential vehicle that takes on the role of the voice and lends coherence to the whole.Footnote ⁷³ This difference is largely one of rhetoric. The ideal of natural and direct operatic expression that Gluck and Calzabigi articulate is achieved precisely by having the accompaniment assume a larger, indeed essential, role in shaping the expressive content. But the rhetorical difference also points to particular ways of listening.

Hearing orchestral worlds

Listeners in Gluck's time commented on the essential role of orchestral accompaniment in his operas. The novelist and jurist Joseph von Sonnenfels – most often invoked in musicological contexts as a patron of Mozart – published extensively on the Viennese stage and moral and national issues surrounding it. When he heard Alceste, he wrote rapturously about the work: it was full of a kind of Germanic masculine power that had real moral power, far superior to Italian opera, which had ‘music only for the ear, not for the heart’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Listening to the opera, von Sonnenfels found himself ‘in the land of miracles’:Footnote ⁷⁵

This is quite a radical reaction to have to Alceste: Sonnenfels locates the power of Alceste not just in the reformed singing style and its beautiful simplicity – of which he approves – but also in the power of the chorus and especially in the accompaniment. That the words should seem ‘almost unnecessary’ seemingly runs counter to the basic principles of Gluck and Calzabigi's reforms. And yet, it underscores what we saw in Orfeo's sorrowful cries: it is crucial for Gluck that the orchestra take on, in Sonnenfels words, ‘the essential part of the expression’. The simplicity and directness of operatic reform required a concomitant expansion of the role of the orchestra.Footnote ⁷⁷

Hearing this form of distributed passion did not necessarily come naturally but was a skill that was learned and which happened through a process of transition. Here we return to the issues with which Forkel grappled: the frictions created by this style has not always been visible in narratives of the changing landscape of operatic accompaniment. In both Tomlinson and Johnson's accounts, this shift to more emotionally charged accompaniment happens more or less seamlessly. Late eighteenth-century accounts suggest this listening required practice.

Discussions around Gluck's orchestra began in the context of his ‘reform’ operas in Vienna, but a similar discourse continued in the Parisian reception of Gluck's music during the 1770s, as audiences grappled with Gluck's operas. François Arnaud – once described as a ‘violent Gluckist’ – published regularly on Gluck's music, often drawing attention to his use of the orchestra.Footnote ⁷⁸ In his ‘Lettre de M. l'Abbé Arnaud à Madame D'Augny’ of 1774, written after the premiere of Iphigénie en Aulide:

This is, of course, the very same passage that had vexed Forkel and delighted Hoffmann. Given that it was challenging, perhaps we can read Arnaud's letter as genuinely seeking to show D'Augny how to listen to the Gluckian orchestra. He goes on to describe Agamemnon's pained entrance:

This pedagogical imperative is even more apparent in Arnaud's later, well-known essay, ‘La soirée perdue à l'Opéra’, in which he placed himself at a performance of Gluck's Alceste, defending Gluck's works against those who pestered him and prevented him from attending to the drama.

Arnaud offers a glimpse of the practice required to learn to hear the orchestra properly and to connect the sounds of the orchestra to the inner world of the singing body.

There is surely no more paradigmatic example of the new power of the orchestra than Orestes's aria ‘Le calme rentre dans mon coeur’, from the second act of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride (1779). Here, famously, Orestes sings of restored peace, while the orchestra mutters the truth of a deeper, subconscious unsettledness over past murder: Orestes is revealed to be an unreliable narrator (Example 4). The conflicted messaging has been a source of hermeneutic delight since the eighteenth century. Arnaud, writing anonymously in 1779, praised how the ‘violas … paint the muffled and menacing voice of remorse, while the violins express a deep agitation, mixed with sighs and sobs’.Footnote ⁸² In 1821, Berlioz wrote in raptures to his sister Nanci about the power of the orchestra: ‘If you heard how it depicts every situation, especially when Orestes seems to be calm; well, the violins hold a note that suggests repose, very softly; but underneath you can hear the basses muttering like the remorse which, despite his apparent calm, is still to be heard in the parricide's heart.’Footnote ⁸³ Donald Grout claimed this was ‘perhaps the first occurrence in opera of this device of using the orchestra to reveal the inward truth of a situation’, while Tomlinson heard in this aria ‘one of the early intimations in opera of the advent of a new subjectivity’.Footnote ⁸⁴ There are anecdotes in which Gluck exasperatedly explains to a rehearsing orchestra or an inept listener that Orestes is lying – and such confusion seems perhaps plausible – but more striking is the ease with which many listeners understood the text–music relationships in this aria.Footnote ⁸⁵ The contradiction is not befuddling but clarifying: the aria makes clear the different roles of the voice and the orchestra. One is external, one is internal; each occupies their own domain.

Example 4.

Opening ten bars of Gluck ‘Le calme rentre dans mon coeur’, from Iphigénie en Tauride, Act II (1779).

But not all of Gluck's psychologically nuanced arias were so celebrated, or even recognised as such. ‘Io non chiedo, eterni Dei’ from the first act of Alceste produced confusion in the eighteenth century. Admetus, the king, is at death's door and the people of Thessaly are distraught, for both the king and their uncertain future; a plan is made to approach the oracle at the Temple of Apollo to bring gifts and to make a sacrifice. In Scene 2, Alceste emerges from the palace, equally troubled, to address the people and to offer her solidarity, with the hope that the vision of a grieving kingdom might placate the ‘wrath of the gods’. ‘Io non chiedo, eterni Dei’ invokes a wide range of emotions – a hope for divine pity, feelings of terror and maternal love. Gluck's setting of the aria emphasises this emotional range, through a kaleidoscope of rapidly changing textures: the aria begins with a plaintive oboe soaring over sweet, pizzicato violins, cellos, basses and pulsing violas, conjuring up an image of the total serenity that Alceste knows to be impossible; her hope for a ray of pity is accompanied by legato strings and bassoon, an altogether earthier orchestral texture. This gives way in turn to a more agitated texture with driving quavers in the strings before Alceste's children interrupt her to remind her of the gods’ mercifulness – accompanied by two cors anglais, bassoon and divisi violas – once again infusing everything with greater sweetness; the more agitated texture returns with Alceste's fears for her children. As Examples 5a and 5b show, each of these shifts involves changes to the orchestration, tempo and metre, and some of these sections are as short as eight bars. In the first seventy bars of this aria, there are five different textures and tempos.

Examples 5a and 5b.

Two example transitions from Gluck, ‘Io non chiedo, eterni Dei’, from Alceste, Act I (1767), bb. 88–99, 104–14.

This analysis is mundane: it is, after all, simply a description of the unfolding of textures and how they correspond to the text. This mundanity is partly an effect of the close correlation between the voice and the accompaniment. But it is as ‘psychological’ as Orestes's famed aria: the difference is that Alceste is telling a troubled truth, and the musical setting conforms to each nuance of the many emotions she experiences over the course of the aria. For listeners accustomed to hearing the orchestra sonify characters’ internal emotional states, it is straightforward to understand this aria as amplifying and dramatising Alceste's inner turmoil, so much so that explaining it seems nearly absurd.

Or maybe it is not absurd. In 1777, Rousseau reluctantly sketched out a critique of Alceste, at Gluck's insistence (‘M. Gluck so strongly pressed me that I could not refuse him this kindness, although as fatiguing for me as it is useless for him’Footnote ⁸⁶). Rousseau, though he did say a number of positive things, was overall quite critical, and his criticisms largely focused on two things: Gluck's use of the orchestra and the question of musical and dramatic coherence.Footnote ⁸⁷

In recitatives, Rousseau advocated for as unremarkable an accompaniment as possible at times:

Rousseau's strong call here for instrumental restraint might seem surprising: in his Dictionnaire de musique, Rousseau wrote warmly of the power of the récitatif obligé and the mutual support of the orchestra and singer. ‘The agitated actor, transported with a passion which does not allow him to go through his speech, is interrupted, breaks off, makes a stop, during which time the orchestra speaks for him. And these silences, thus filled, affect the audience infinitely more than if the actor himself spoke all that the music makes understood.’Footnote ⁸⁹ In the context of the recitative, Rousseau celebrated both the flexibility and the communicative power of the orchestra. But in his review of Alceste, Rousseau craved a more subdued orchestra, and he went on to point out additional moments where he believed it would have been better to have the orchestra provide a stable, unifying accompaniment that did not draw attention to itself.

Forkel too singled this aria out as exemplary of Gluck's faults. It wasn't all terrible for him: like Rousseau, he liked the beginning, but was also nonplussed by the constant changing of textures and tempos. He complained:

It is possible to hear the orchestra as a supple, real-time reflection of a character's changing emotional state only if one is entrained into a particular listening regime; otherwise, one might well hear accompaniment that is impatient and unfocused. Of course, there is a chance that maybe listeners today would still agree with Rousseau and Forkel and find this aria disjointed. To hear the ways in which ‘Io non chiedo’ is challenging is to recapture the experimental and risky nature of Gluck's ‘reformed’ operatic style.

And perhaps this is one reason Gluck has never been untouchable or completely above reproach. For all of Hoffmann's enthusiasm for Gluck, he would later reflect with some sardonic grimness on Gluck's desire – as reported by Reichardt – to construct a new wind instrument for his never-realised opera Die Hermannsschlacht. Hoffmann saw this as evidence of Gluck's potential descent into orchestral excess, had he lived longer (‘In view of this intention, his death was probably well timed’).Footnote ⁹² Berlioz made substantial changes to Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice when he presented it in 1859. And famously Wagner was disappointed with his first real encounter with Gluck in performance, when he attended a performance of Iphigénie en Tauride as a teenager. He expected dramatic fire, but instead spent the performance ‘waiting for an effect that never came’.Footnote ⁹³ For the nineteenth century, Gluck was an unfinished project, an ongoing experiment occasionally overshadowed by his own legacy.Footnote ⁹⁴

Looking away from the orchestra, or a final glance

I maintain that this is a story about timbre, even though I did not use the word timbre directly to talk about Gluck's music – and of course neither did the actors discussed here. But the timbral lessons offered by this moment in operatic history are multiple. One lesson is about the power of suppressing orchestral sound: Gluck's dramatic use of the orchestra is innovative, but remarkable less for the particular deployment of accompanimental forces than for what it reveals about the changing audile habits of the period. If there is a tension introduced by operatic reform between the ‘natural expression’ of the voice and text on the one hand, and the greater and more involved use of the orchestra as a dramatic vehicle on the other, it is resolved through listening practices, in learning to hear the orchestra as a subtext. This is to sublimate music into the words: music gives the illusion of being subservient to the words while simultaneously functioning as an expressive force that imbues the text with its dramatic meaning.Footnote ⁹⁵

This notion of a conceptually sublimated orchestra resonates with Brian Kane's arguments about the central importance of ‘musical phantasmagoria’ explored in Sound Unseen. For Kane, the modern practice of acousmatic listening has its roots in a series of customs – bodily techniques and architectural interventions – that directed the eyes away from the material source of sound. Romantic musical transcendence, he argues, is tied to various forms of technê.Footnote ⁹⁶ Gluckian orchestral listening pushes this argument beyond the visual: in discussions of Gluck's orchestra, its visibility or invisibility are never at stake or up for discussion. Listeners need not avert their eyes; instead, listeners must all become Orestes, lying to themselves and pretending not to hear the orchestra. Timbre's status as something to be overlooked, sublimated and even taken for granted is not a product of twentieth-century musicology, or even a victim of nineteenth-century idealism. It is not a shortcoming, but rather a source of its dramatic power and even an essential feature of its modernity.

Second, it is important to stress that this not merely a story about the orchestra or just about timbre. Indeed, in our last example from Alceste, we might argue that orchestral timbre is just one element here. Equally important to the perception that this aria was disjointed were the changing metres and tempos as much as the orchestration. But this inseparability is precisely the point: this is a story about text–music relationships, the power of melody, texture, the history of listening, developing notions of vocal subjectivities, and the broader politics of opera. Timbre is infused into this story, even as it is not named – or better yet, precisely because it cannot be named or clearly defined as a discrete parameter.

This returns me to my initial anxieties about timbre and discipline. I maintain that timbre studies would do well to resist itself; if it were to succeed in defining timbre and systematising its analysis, its subject would be radically impoverished. But there is a deeper and more important point: Gluck and Calzabigi's rhetoric of reform should itself be understood as a form of timbral discipline. Listening to orchestral accompaniment as subtext is to assign it to, and contain it in, a particular register. It might also appear that my anxieties are ultimately misplaced: timbre has undergone a constant process of disciplining from its very inception. Discipline made the idea of timbre possible in the first place. Its status as a potential parameter begins to emerge when Sonnenfels, Arnaud and others point to the orchestra, give it a dramatic role, and tell their readers how to listen to it.

This centrality of ‘timbral discipline’ – ultimately a shorthand for a host of listening and discursive practices – also points to the limits of what it could mean to understand timbre as a kind of musical ground zero or an escape from various ideological concerns. In this study, there is little purpose in reducing Gluckian orchestral practices to vibration or sonic energies. To do so would run roughshod over a complex and delicate network of relationships between people, institutions, instruments and performance practices – relationships that would no longer be visible at any atomistic level of analysis. Timbre will surely continue to invite virtuoso philosophical analysis and ontological critiques, but fundamentally, timbre is always social and always historically conditioned.

Above I said that Gluckian orchestral practice is not concerned with the actual visibility or invisibility of instruments in performance. But perhaps that wasn't entirely honest. I want to return to the portrait of Gluck at the clavichord that so captivated E. T. A. Hoffmann. It is easy to imagine why it made such an impression: Gluck's beatific pose invokes many Renaissance images of St Cecilia, in which she plays music while looking neither to her instrument, a score, nor a human audience, but upwards to heaven, such as in Raphael's celebrated altarpiece or Guido Reni's portrait (Figure 2). Lydia Goehr has written about Raphael's painting, and its many broken instruments strewn upon the ground: ‘To give music a proper place in the passage toward sainthood’, Goehr writes, ‘it must be converted as Cecilia is converted, rendered a medium suitable for transmitting only the pure and heavenly harmony.’Footnote ⁹⁷ Such images depict the very process of transcendence by showing that music is, in Goehr's words, ‘beyond its instruments’. Does Gluck also hear heavenly harmony in his portrait? The opening café scene in Hoffmann's story – the fantastical transformation of the scrappy quintet – offers a possible answer. Perhaps Gluck is listening to neither the clavichord nor angels; rather, he hears the sound of an orchestra. But he is not beyond his instruments; instead, Gluck is just arriving at the beginning of a new listening regime, one in which the orchestra is simultaneously present and absent, real and imagined.

Figure 2.

Left: Raphael, The Ecstasy of St Cecilia, between Saint Paul, John the Baptist, and Mary Magdalene (c. 1514–17), Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna (Inv. N. 577). Right: Guido Reni, Saint Cecilia (1606), Norton Simon Museum, F.1973.23.P.