(From Birmingham)
THE BIRMINGHAM STUDIO AUGMENTED
ORCHESTRA
(Leader, FRANK CANTELL )
Conducted by JOSEPH LEWIS
ALTHOUGH Gretry was a Belgian, there is nothing inappropriate in the inclusion of some of his music in a programme devoted to France ; he is accepted as belonging to the French school. The son of a violinist, he began his musical career as a choir-boy, but it was the stage rather than the church which interested him for the greater part of his life. As a young man ho spent some time in Rome, and had an operetta of his own successfully produced there. But he was determined to make his name in French opéra comique, and set out for Paris. Meeting Voltaire in Geneva,.he asked him to provide an opera comique libretto, a task which Voltaire declined, no doubt wisely. Voltaire, however, encouraged him to push on to Paris, and after some trials and disappointments there, he gradually won his way to a foremost place among composers for the stage. The list of his operas and smaller dramatic works is a very long one, and though they are slight in structure and conception, they are full of the most pleasing melody, and their popularity is quite easy to understand.
It was said of him by Mehul that what he wrote was very clever, but it was not music,' and another critic alleged that his harmonies were so thin that ' you could drive a coach-and-four between the first fiddle and the bass.' None the less, he excelled in simple and straightforward subjects, both in pathetic and in comic directions, and many of his characters have a real sense of being drawn from life. Witty and good-humoured, he had a host of friends, and was accorded many honours; in 1785 a street in Paris was named after him, and he was a privy councillor of his native city, Liege. There is a huge statue of him there, not, according to those who knew him personally, a good likeness of him.