Le_diable_à_quatre_(opera)
Le diable à quatre (opera)
Opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck
Le diable à quatre (The Devil to Pay) is an opéra comique in three acts by Christoph Willibald Gluck. The French-language libretto is by Michel-Jean Sedaine and Pierre Baurans, after a translation by Claude-Pierre Patu of the 1731 ballad opera by Charles Coffey entitled The Devil to Pay, or The Wives Metamorphos’d.[1] It was first performed at Laxenburg on May 28, 1759. The work was a popular success. Joseph Haydn used a melody from it, "Je n’aimais pas le tabac beaucoup (I didn’t like tobacco much)" in the first movement of his symphony Le soir.[2][3]
Klaus Hortschansky has noted that Le diable à quatre is one of Gluck's few stageworks where the composer neither used musical material from prior works nor recycled material from it into future works.[4] Bruce Brown has discussed Gluck's authorship of the music in detail,[5] and has also edited the work for the Gluck Sämtliche Werke.[6]
(The same libretto was set to music arranged by Andre Danican Philidor and Jean-Louis Laruette and first staged with the above title on 19 August 1756 in Paris.)