In spite of all, the day came for the presentation of Piccinni’s opera, “Roland,” and the family broke into tears when he went to the theatre.  He alone was calm in the midst of this desolation, reassured his wife, and departed with his friends.  He returned home in a triumph, which was perhaps greater than the work deserved, but certainly not greater than so good a man merited.

Piccinni was large-hearted enough to cherish no malice against either of his rivals, Sacchini or Gluck.  When Sacchini died, Piccinni delivered the funeral oration, and when, a year later, Gluck died in Vienna, Piccinni made a vain effort to organise a fitting memorial festival.

He remained upon the field of battle, and the victory for the time must be granted him, in spite of certain defeats.  Then the French Revolution broke out, and he lost his favour with the public, and the friendship of the aristocracy became a danger to his very life.  He went to Naples, where he found some success, and was well received by the court.  But everything seemed now to conspire against him.  The Republicans of Paris had driven him to Italy, into the arms of the aristocracy there; whereupon, in 1792, his daughter married a French Republican.  This brought him into such disgrace with the Italian court that he did not dare leave his house, and fell into neglect and poverty.

In 1798 he made his way back to Paris, and there his reunited family gave little operas, sung by his wife and daughters.  Here “one heard with pleasure always new airs taken from his Italian operas, sung by Mme. Piccinni, with a voice that age had rendered more grave and less light, without making it less beautiful or touching, and with a method as wise as it was learned, and well opposed to these pretentious displays, these eternal embroideries which disfigure Italian song to-day, and which Piccinni never admitted into his school, but which he always detested.”  So says Ginguene of the theories of Piccinni, which are not, as we see, so opposed to the theories of Gluck as we are sometimes urged to believe.  In the course of time Napoleon took up Piccinni, but he was too old to revive under this new favour, and Ginguene has this last picture of him: 

“It was in this state that he had the courage to give a concert at his home.  The small number of amateurs who gathered there will long remember the impression of that which one may call the last song of the swan.  They were profoundly moved to hear Mme. Piccinni sing with due expression the beautiful air from ‘Zendia,’ Lasciami, o ciel pietoso! composed in all the vigour of youth, by this illustrious man, now old and unfortunate.  He accompanied it now with a languishing hand, but with eyes relighted by this beautiful production of his genius.  They will not forget the admirable ‘Sommeil d’Atys,’ nor the trio from ’Iphigenia in Aulis’ executed, as it had been in Naples, by the mother and the two daughters, grouped behind a husband and father who seemed, in accompanying them, to be reborn in the touching accord of those voices, so tender and so dear, and to feel again some spark of that fire which had animated him when he produced those sublime works.”