1714–1787 · Baroque
Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–1787) was an eighteenth-century Austrian composer who wrote mainly operas. He changed Italian opera seria and French lyric tragedy, and his ideas set the direction for the whole later development of opera. Among his operas that have never left the stage are Orfeo ed Euridice and Iphigénie en Tauride.
Little is known about Gluck's first years, and much of what early biographers reported was later called into question. He was born in 1714 in Bavaria, into the family of the forester and hunter Alexander Johann Gluck and his wife Maria Walburga. His parents had him baptised in the church of Saint Willibald, but the composer never used that name afterwards and called himself Christoph or Christophorus.
His father came from a line of foresters and did not want his eldest son to become a musician. From childhood the boy was drawn to music and, it seems, received the home musical education usual in those parts: in 1717 the family moved to Bohemia. Later he left home and found himself in Prague, where he earned his living by making music. Gluck played the violin and the cello, sang quite well and sometimes performed for peasants and craftsmen in the countryside around the city.
In the middle of the 30s of the eighteenth century Gluck found himself in Vienna, in the house of the Lobkowitz princes, where he worked as a musician. An Italian nobleman, Melzi, then invited him to his private orchestra, and by the end of that decade Gluck was in Milan.
In Italy, the homeland of opera, Gluck came to know the work of the leading masters of the genre. He studied composition with Giovanni Sammartini, who wrote more symphonic than operatic music. Under his guidance, as S. Rytsarev writes, Gluck mastered a confident homophonic style that was already firmly established in Italian opera, while in Vienna the polyphonic tradition still held on.
In December 1741 Gluck's first opera, Artaserse, to a libretto by Pietro Metastasio, was premiered in Milan. It still shows clear imitation of Sammartini, but the opera was a success and brought commissions from various Italian cities. Over the next four years came Demetrio, Poro, Demofoonte, Ipermestra and other opere serie that were just as successful.
In January 1745 the opera Ipolito was staged in Milan; Gluck dedicated it to Prince Georg Christian Lobkowitz, then governor of the Duchy of Milan. In the autumn of that year he travelled to England in the retinue of the young Prince Ferdinand Philipp Lobkowitz.
In London Gluck was invited to be the resident composer of the Middlesex opera, and in 1746 his La caduta de' giganti and the more successful Artamene were given there. In England he met Handel, who, given the tastes of the public at the time, preferred to write oratorios. Gluck later left the English capital.
Gluck then became second conductor of the Italian opera troupe of the Mingotti brothers and for several years toured the continent with it. He later moved to the troupe of Giovanni Locatelli for the post of Kapellmeister. In 1750, in Prague, Gluck married: his wife was Maria Anna Bergin, a Viennese merchant's daughter of eighteen.
At the end of 1752 Gluck settled in Vienna and became Kapellmeister of the orchestra of Prince Joseph of Saxe-Hildburghausen. He directed its weekly concerts, known as academies, in which he performed both other composers' music and his own. Contemporaries regarded him as an outstanding opera conductor who also understood ballet. In 1754, on the proposal of Count Durazzo, who managed the Viennese theatres, Gluck was appointed conductor and composer of the Court Opera.
Here too he wrote Italian operas in the Italian manner: the Viennese could not imagine any other kind. To Metastasio's libretti, Le cinesi, La danza and L'innocenza giustificata appeared in 1754–1755. In 1755 a commission came from Rome for an opera for the carnival. Women were forbidden to appear on the Roman stage, and the Romans were especially fond of castrati: in the opera seria Antigono only the title role went to a tenor, while all the others, male and female, were written for castrati.
The opera was staged on 9 February 1756 and was generally liked. Pope Benedict XIV awarded the composer the Order of the Golden Spur and thereby raised him to knighthood, so that Gluck could now write the noble "von" before his surname.
Gluck gradually grew disillusioned with traditional opera seria, in which the beauty of singing became an end in itself. He turned to French comic opera, with works such as L'isle de Merlin, La fausse esclave, L'ivrogne corrigé and Le cadi dupé, and to ballet. In 1761, together with the choreographer Gasparo Angiolini, he created the ballet-pantomime Don Juan after Molière's play. It was a true choreographic drama, and in it Gluck first gave shape to his aim of turning the operatic stage into a dramatic one.
In his search Gluck relied on Count Durazzo, who ran the opera, and on the poet Ranieri de' Calzabigi, author of the libretto of Don Juan. Their next joint work was the opera Orfeo ed Euridice, first staged in Vienna on 5 October 1762. Calzabigi turned the ancient Greek myth into an antique drama, as the taste of the time required.
The opera seria of those years was bound by fixed rules. It relied on the "theory of the affections": every feeling, such as sorrow, joy or anger, had set means of expression, and there was no room for individual emotion. In the first half of the eighteenth century a great many operas were written, but they lived only briefly on the stage, on average for three to five performances. Gluck wanted to give opera back the drama and passions of real people and to make words and music equal partners. Drama, not star singers, was to be the centre of a performance, and he wanted to do away with the dry recitative that interrupted the action.
In 1767, together with Calzabigi, Gluck created the heroic opera Alceste, first shown in Vienna on 26 December. He dedicated it to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, the future Emperor Leopold II. For the time, subordinating music to the poetic text was revolutionary: episodes were joined into large scenes with a single dramatic development, the overture was tied to the action, and the role of the chorus and orchestra grew. Neither Alceste nor the third reform opera to a libretto by Calzabigi, Paride ed Elena (1770), won support from the Viennese or the Italian public.
Among Gluck's duties as a court composer was teaching music to the young Archduchess Marie Antoinette. In April 1770 she became the wife of the heir to the French throne and invited Gluck to Paris. But other circumstances influenced the composer's decision to move his work to France far more.
A fight over opera was then under way in Paris, a continuation of old disputes between supporters of Italian and of French music. It divided even the royal family: Louis XVI preferred Italian opera, while his Austrian wife Marie Antoinette backed the national French one. The Encyclopedists were split too: D'Alembert was one of the leaders of the "Italian party", while Voltaire and Rousseau, together with many contributors to the Encyclopédie, stood for the French.
Gluck, a foreigner, quickly became the banner of the "French party". At the end of 1776 the Italian troupe in Paris came under the composer Niccolò Piccinni, brought in by Gluck's opponents, and the dispute turned into a struggle between "Gluckists" and "Piccinnists". Formally it was about styles, but in reality it was about what an operatic performance should be: a lavish show with pleasant music and singing, or something more.
Gluck's first Paris opera was Iphigénie en Aulide, to a libretto by François Le Blanc du Roullet after Racine's tragedy. Gluck's reform operas were then unknown in Paris: in August 1772 du Roullet, an attaché of the French embassy in Vienna, drew the public's attention to them in the Paris journal Mercure de France. Once Gluck turned to the Paris stage, du Roullet became his main librettist, and the paths of Gluck and Calzabigi parted. The premiere took place on 19 April 1774. Voltaire and Diderot saw in the opera the long-awaited renewal of French opera, while admirers of Italian music did not accept it.
The French version of Orfeo ed Euridice, shown on 2 August 1774, also stirred much argument. Marie Antoinette granted Gluck 20,000 livres for Iphigénie and the same for Orphée, and on 18 October 1774 Maria Theresa, in his absence, gave him the title of imperial and royal court composer with an annual salary of 2000 gulden. After thanking her for the honour, Gluck returned to France following a short stay in Vienna. At the beginning of 1775 a new version of his comic opera of 1759, L'arbre enchanté, was staged there, followed by a new version of Alceste.
Armide reached the stage of the Royal Academy of Music on 23 September 1777. For it Gluck took the libretto by F. Quinault, written for Lully's opera of the same name after Tasso's poem Jerusalem Delivered, and so, willingly or not, threw down a challenge to the traditionalists. The different "parties" apparently judged the opera so differently that two hundred years later some spoke of a huge success and others of a failure. On 18 May 1779 Iphigénie en Tauride, to a libretto by Guillard and du Roullet, was presented at the same theatre. Many still consider it the composer's finest creation, although Gluck himself named Armide as his favourite opera. Even Piccinni acknowledged that Gluck had brought about a revolution in music.
Historians of music regard the Paris period as the most significant in Gluck's work. The struggle between the "Gluckists" and the "Piccinnists" turned into a personal rivalry between the composers, although neither of them wanted it. When Gluck learned that Piccinni was writing an opera to the same libretto, Roland, he stopped work on his own Roland.
On 24 September 1779 Gluck's last opera, Echo et Narcisse, was premiered in Paris. It was a failure and ran for only 12 performances. In that same year, 1779, Gluck fell seriously ill and in the autumn returned to Vienna, which he never left again.
In Vienna he carried on with the odes and songs to poems by F. G. Klopstock, for voice and piano, begun back in 1773, and dreamed of a German national opera on Klopstock's subject of the battle of Arminius. These plans were not to be realised. In summer Gluck lived with his wife in Perchtoldsdorf, and in 1781 he published a German version of Iphigénie en Tauride.
Sensing that the end was near, around 1782 Gluck wrote a short work, De profundis, for four-part choir and orchestra to the text of Psalm 129. It was performed by Antonio Salieri, the composer's favourite pupil and follower. Gluck died in Vienna on 15 November 1787. He was first buried in the churchyard at Matzleinsdorf, and in 1890 his remains were moved to the Central Cemetery of Vienna.
Gluck was above all an opera composer, but the exact number of his operas is not established: some works have not survived, and he often reworked his own operas. The Musical Encyclopedia, for example, gives the figure of 107 but lists only 46 operas. Besides Don Juan, he created three more ballets with Angiolini: Alexandre and Semiramis (both 1765) and L'orphelin de la Chine, the latter two after tragedies by Voltaire.
Besides operas, Gluck wrote a number of orchestral works, symphonies or overtures (in the composer's youth the line between these genres was not drawn firmly), a flute concerto with orchestra in G major and six trio sonatas for two violins and basso continuo, written in the 40s of the eighteenth century. He also wrote odes and songs for voice and piano to poems by Klopstock, and around 1782 composed De profundis for choir and orchestra.
The main reform operas of Gluck, to libretti by Calzabigi, are Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), Alceste (1767) and Paride ed Elena (1770). For the Paris stage he wrote, among others, Iphigénie en Aulide, Armide and Iphigénie en Tauride. In Alceste the composer joined episodes into large scenes, tied the overture to the action and strengthened the role of the chorus and orchestra. The preface to that opera, which Gluck signed, sets out the principles of the reform: the words should be clear, and recitative and aria should not be divided by a rigid boundary.
Interest in Gluck's music came back in the middle of the twentieth century. Orfeo ed Euridice, Alceste and both Iphigénies, the one in Aulis and the one in Tauris, have been staged for many years and have been recorded many times. Symphonic excerpts from the operas are even more popular: they have long been heard in concerts as independent pieces. In 1987 the International Gluck Society was founded in Vienna to study and promote his work.
Gluck found many followers in various countries: besides Antonio Salieri, they included Cherubini, Spontini and Beethoven, and later Berlioz. In the music of Beethoven, Berlioz and Schubert his influence is sometimes visible outside opera as well. In the nineteenth century there was no major opera composer who did not feel the influence of his ideas to some degree. Another opera reformer, Richard Wagner, also turned to Gluck, and his ideas were not foreign to Russian opera culture either, from Glinka to Serov.