Christoph Willibald Gluck

• 1. Introduction

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  Christoph Willibald Gluck sat down to lunch with friends in Vienna on the 15th of November 1787, and within a few hours he was dead. He was 73 years old, and had spent decades shaking opera loose from its own bad habits. When he died, according to the musicologist H. C. Robbins Landon, the path was clear for Mozart. That is the measure of the space Gluck occupied. Born on the 2nd of July 1714 in a forester's village called Erasbach in the Upper Palatinate, Gluck grew up in a corner of the Holy Roman Empire where, as he later recalled, everyone was musical, peasants sang during High Mass, and schoolmasters gave private lessons to the children who showed the most promise. His father planned for him to take up the family trade of forestry. Instead, he would spend his life rewriting the rules of Italian and French opera, waging his most celebrated battle in Paris against a rival camp of Italian loyalists, and leaving behind a school of disciples who would carry his ideas through the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period. How a forester's son from Bohemia ended up setting the terms of debate for all of European opera is a story that begins with a childhood flight and ends with one of music history's most generous acts of recognition.

• 2. Forester's Son

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  Gluck's grandfather Hans Adam was a forester working for Prince Ferdinand August von Lobkowitz, and the family name itself is thought to derive from the Czech word for boy. The Lobkowitz connection would follow Gluck for years. His father Alexander, born in Neustadt an der Waldnaab on the 28th of October 1683, rose through the ranks of a forester's life that included a stint under arms during the War of Spanish Succession. Family tradition held that Alexander served as gunbearer to the great imperial general Eugene of Savoy.

  When the Treaty of Rastatt ended the War of Spanish Succession in 1714, the year of Gluck's birth, Erasbach passed under Bavarian control. Alexander had to reapply for his position and received no salary until after 1715, when he began earning 20 gulden. A citation for poor performance in 1716 foreshadowed more instability; he sold his house in August 1717 and left Erasbach to take a new post in Reichstadt, working for the wealthy Anna Maria Franziska of Saxe-Lauenburg. The family moved repeatedly through Christoph's childhood, from Böhmisch Kamnitz to Oberkreibitz and eventually to Eisenberg, where Alexander became head forester for Prince Philipp Hyazinth von Lobkowitz in 1727.

  Gluck's own account of his childhood, relayed to the Alsatian painter Johann Christian von Mannlich and published in Mannlich's memoirs in 1810, describes a world saturated with music. In every village, Gluck recalled, peasants played different instruments during High Mass. His schoolmaster singled him out and gave him private lessons at home. The art of forestry, Gluck admitted, was neglected. In 1727 or 1728, at the age of thirteen or fourteen, he left for Prague.

• 3. Prague and Milan

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  Prague in the late 1720s offered a flourishing musical life, including performances of Italian opera and oratorio. Gluck sang and played violin, cello, and organ at Týn Church. Scholars dispute whether he ever enrolled formally at the University of Prague: his German biographer Hans Joachim Moser claimed in 1940 to have found documents placing Gluck in a logic and mathematics course in 1731, but other biographers have been unable to locate those documents.

  Gluck left Prague without a degree and disappears from the historical record until 1737. He probably arrived in Vienna around 1734, employed by the Lobkowitz family at their palace in the Minoritenplatz. His father's old patron Philipp Hyazinth Lobkowitz died on the 21st of December 1734, and his successor Johann Georg Christian Lobkowicz is thought to have kept Gluck on until 1736. It was likely through the Lobkowitz network that Gluck met the Milanese nobleman Prince Antonio Maria Melzi, who brought him to Milan as an orchestral player.

  In Milan, Gluck studied with Giovanni Battista Sammartini, who, according to the music writer Giuseppe Carpani, taught him "practical knowledge of all the instruments". The relationship lasted several years. Gluck quickly attached himself to the Teatro Regio Ducale, where his first opera Artaserse received its premiere on the 26th of December 1741, dedicated to Otto Ferdinand von Abensberg und Traun and set to a text by the poet Metastasio. An anecdote survives that the Milan audience only accepted Gluck's style after he inserted an aria in the lighter local manner. He persisted anyway, composing an opera for each of the next four Milanese Carnivals, many of them featuring the celebrated castrato Giovanni Carestini, and writing additional works for Turin and Venice.

• 4. London, Travel, and Marriage

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  In 1745, Lord Middlesex invited Gluck to become house composer at London's King's Theatre. The timing was badly wrong. The Jacobite Rebellion had thrown London into panic, and the King's Theatre was closed for most of that year. Six trio sonatas were among the immediate results of a frustrating season.

  The longer benefit was exposure. Gluck encountered the music of Handel, whom he later named as a major influence on his style, and watched the naturalistic acting of the theatrical reformer David Garrick. On the 25th of March 1746, shortly after the production of Artamene, Handel and Gluck gave a joint concert at the Haymarket Theatre, with Handel himself playing an organ concerto. Handel's private verdict, reported by the music historian Charles Burney, was less than flattering: Handel reportedly said that Gluck "knows no more of contrapunto, as my cook, Waltz". On the 14th of April that year, Gluck played on a glassharmonica at Hickford's Rooms in Brewer Street, Soho.

  The years 1747 and 1748 brought two prestigious commissions. Gluck composed Le nozze d'Ercole e d'Ebe for a royal double wedding at Pillnitz that united the ruling families of Bavaria and Saxony. That success brought him to Vienna's attention; he was chosen ahead of Johann Adolph Hasse to set Metastasio's La Semiramide riconosciuta to celebrate Maria Theresa's birthday. Vittoria Tesi sang the title role. The opera was performed 27 times to great acclaim, yet Metastasio, the court poet, called it "archvandalian music", and Gluck did not remain long.

  On the 15th of September 1750, during a stay in Prague, Gluck married Maria Anna Bergin, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Viennese merchant. The following year, 1752, brought a commission to set Metastasio's La clemenza di Tito for the name-day celebrations of King Charles VII of Naples. Performed on the 4th of November at the Teatro di San Carlo, the production featured the world-famous castrato Caffarelli in the role of Sextus. For Caffarelli, Gluck composed the famously difficult aria "Se mai senti spirarti sul volto", which drew both admiration and hostility. The Neapolitan composer Francesco Durante praised it as something his colleagues should have been proud to have conceived, while simultaneously declining to say whether it followed accepted rules.

• 5. The Reform of Opera

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  Gluck's diagnosis of opera was direct: both of its major Italian forms had gone wrong. Opera seria had become a showcase for vocal acrobatics, its content fossilized, its singers so florid that audiences could no longer recognize the original melody. Opera buffa had worn out its jokes and reduced its characters to stereotypes. Gluck wanted to pull opera back to human drama, making words and music equally important rather than treating the music as mere decoration for star singers.

  Francesco Algarotti's Essay on the Opera, published in 1755, gave these instincts an intellectual foundation. In Vienna, Gluck found allies who shared his ambitions: Count Giacomo Durazzo, the head of the court theatre; the librettist Ranieri de' Calzabigi, who wanted to dismantle the dominance of Metastasian conventions; the choreographer Gasparo Angiolini; and the castrato Gaetano Guadagni, renowned for unorthodox acting and singing.

  On the 5th of October 1762, Orfeo ed Euridice received its first performance, with dances by Angiolini and Guadagni in the title role. The production cut dry secco recitative, the kind accompanied only by continuo, which had long been breaking up operatic action. Gluck and Calzabigi followed with Alceste in 1767 and Paride ed Elena in 1770, dedicated to João Carlos de Bragança, Duke de Lafões, an expert in music and mythology. Calzabigi wrote a preface to Alceste, signed by Gluck, that codified the reforms: no da capo arias, no vocal improvisation, no long melismas, syllabic text setting for intelligibility, an overture linked by theme or mood to the action that followed.

  On the 2nd of September 1771, the music historian Charles Burney visited Gluck at his home in Sankt Marx and found his reforming preface important enough to quote at length. Gluck's own formulation was precise: he intended music's role, when joined to poetry, to resemble "that of colouring in a correct and well disposed design, where the lights and shades only seem to animate the figures, without altering the out-line". When Burney returned on the 11th of September to say goodbye, Gluck was still in bed; he habitually worked through the night.

• 6. Paris and the Gluckists

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  Marie Antoinette had studied under Gluck in Vienna, learning harp, harpsichord, and flute. She sang at family evenings, and her brother Leopold II directed one of Gluck's compositions, Il Parnaso confuso, on the 24th of January 1765. When she married the future French King Louis XVI in 1770, she carried that loyalty to France. In the spring of 1774 she took Gluck under her formal patronage and introduced him to the Paris Opéra, helping him secure a contract for six stage works.

  Gluck prepared Iphigénie en Aulide with exacting standards. He insisted the chorus act as part of the drama rather than standing immobile while singing. He told the bass-baritone Henri Larrivée to change his ways and replaced the soprano Sophie Arnould. He was assisted by François-Joseph Gossec, director of the Concert Spirituel. The premiere on the 19th of April 1774 ignited a controversy that, in the words of observers, had not been seen in Paris since the old Querelle des Bouffons. Gluck's opponents arranged for the leading Italian composer Niccolò Piccinni to come to Paris to make the case for Neapolitan opera, and the city divided into warring camps of "Gluckists" and "Piccinnists". The composers themselves declined to take part in the polemics, but when Piccinni was asked to set the libretto Roland, on which Gluck was also working, Gluck destroyed everything he had written for it.

  Gluck wrote eight operas for the Parisian stage in all. Iphigénie en Tauride, which premiered in 1779, is often regarded as his finest work. That same year his Echo et Narcisse failed badly, running for only twelve performances. During the rehearsals in September 1779, Gluck fell dangerously ill. He left Paris within two weeks of the premiere in disgust and returned to Vienna, where he had already been appointed composer to the imperial court on the 18th of October 1774.

• 7. Salieri and Succession

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  Antonio Salieri had arrived in Vienna in 1767, the same year as Alceste, and Gluck became his mentor. Salieri later recorded in his memoirs, translated into German by Ignaz von Mosel, that Gluck's native tongue was Czech and that he expressed himself in German only with effort, and still more awkwardly in French and Italian. Gluck's own first biographer placed him in a German-speaking milieu, and the linguist controversy continued through the twentieth century, with German and French scholars dividing sharply over whether Salieri's assessment should be taken at face value.

  Gluck brought Salieri to Paris and handed him the libretto for Les Danaïdes, by François-Louis Gand Le Bland Du Roullet and Baron de Tschudi. The work was advertised as a collaboration between the two composers. After the overwhelming success of its premiere on the 26th of April 1784, Gluck revealed to the Journal de Paris that the opera was wholly Salieri's. It was a definitive act of endorsement, transferring the weight of his name to a younger composer at the peak of Parisian enthusiasm.

  In Vienna during his last years, Gluck suffered from melancholy and high blood pressure. On the 23rd of March 1783, he apparently attended a concert where Mozart played KV 455, variations on La Rencontre imprévue by Gluck. At a formal commemoration on the 8th of April 1788, Salieri conducted Gluck's De profundis alongside a Requiem by Niccolò Jommelli. Gluck was buried in the Matzleinsdorfer Friedhof; on the 29th of September 1890, his remains were moved to the Zentralfriedhof, where a tomb was erected bearing the original plaque.

• 8. Legacy and Influence

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  A fire in 1809 destroyed roughly half of Gluck's surviving work. What remained amounts to approximately 35 complete full-length operas, around a dozen shorter operas and operatic introductions, and numerous ballets and instrumental works. His reform ideas reached Mozart directly, most visibly in Idomeneo of 1781. In Paris, the school he built dominated the French stage through both the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, counting Sacchini, Cherubini, Méhul, and Spontini among its adherents alongside Salieri.

  Gluck wrote no operas in German, yet his thinking shaped the German tradition in lasting ways. Carl Maria von Weber and Richard Wagner both absorbed his approach; Wagner's concept of music drama, the idea that all elements of opera should serve the drama rather than the singer, echoed the principles Calzabigi had codified in the Alceste preface decades before.

  Gluck's greatest French champion was Hector Berlioz, who considered the epic Les Troyens the culmination of the Gluckian tradition. The critical chain from a reforming preface signed in Vienna in 1767, through eight Parisian operas, to Berlioz's grandest work in the following century, runs directly through the conviction Gluck expressed to Charles Burney: that music's proper role is colouring a well-disposed design, animating figures without altering the outline.