Gluck extended his care to the details of scenery, to marches and dances; everything was to be in accordance with and characteristic of the situation. Here he had been preceded by Jean George Noverre (1727-1810) who, in his "Lettres sur la Danse et sur les Ballets" in 1760, strove for a reformation in the ballet on the same principles which Gluck employed for the opera. He condemned stereotyped forms of set dances, and demanded a plot for the ballet; expression should be the task of the dancer, with nature for his model, and the ballet-master should be both poet and painter. The ballets which he produced upon these principles at Stuttgart until 1764, then at Vienna, and after 1776 at Paris, were finished productions of a very pure taste, and effected a complete revolution in the art of dancing. Gluck laid great stress upon recitative. He almost entirely abandoned the customary plain recitative, and used {FRENCH OPERA.} (22) accompanied recitative as most fitting for the dignified language of musical drama. Truth and power of expression are combined with a wealth of delicate and characteristic detail, and Gluck rarely falls into the error of destroying the impression of the whole by over-elaboration of detail; his nature was averse to all forms of triviality. But here again the one-sided application of Gluck's principle becomes a weakness. As, according to his view, music is to be subservient to the words, he follows with his strongly marked recitative every turn of the dialogue, rhetorical and inflated as it might be, so that he not only employs all the resources of his art on an unworthy object, but fritters away the interest, on which he makes claims at once too extensive and too rapidly succeeding one another. Musical representation works immediately upon the mind and the emotions, and can do this so much more strongly and vividly than verse, which, however forcibly declaimed, appeals primarily to the intellect and the imagination, that a painful incongruity occurs when music, with all her resources of accurate characterisation, follows step by step the words of the poet. It is therefore an error to suppose that the music must always yield to the words; "as in a correct and well-composed picture," adds Gluck, "the animation of the colouring and of well-disposed light and shade vivifies the forms without distorting the outlines." But the true painter does not colour or illumine the naked outline; he considers the form in its total effect as a piece of colouring, and it exists for him only in this totality, which it is his object to represent. The distinction between form and colour is only technically important, and does not affect artistic perception and production. In the same way the musician has something more to do with respect to the words of his text than to colour given outlines. The conceptions which the poet has formed, with the consciousness that they could only attain complete independence