Le diable à quatre (opera)

This article is about the 1759 Gluck opera. For other operas with similar titles, see Le diable à quatre (disambiguation).

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.)

Roles

Role	Voice type	Premiere Cast, (Conductor:)
The Marquise	soprano
The Marquis	tenor
Margot	soprano
Jacques, a cobbler, Margot's husband	baritone
An astrologer	tenor

Synopsis

The story concerns an ill-natured Marquise. An astrologer, to whom she had refused shelter at her chateau, transforms her into the wife of a surly cobbler named Jacques and transforms the cobbler's sweet-natured wife into the Marquise. After the Marquise learns her lesson, the astrologer reverses the spell.^[7]