Gluck, Christoph Willibald

Gluck, Christoph Willibald
later Ritter (knight) von Gluck

born July 2, 1714, Erasbach, Upper Palatinate, Bavaria
died Nov. 15, 1787, Vienna, Austria

German opera composer.

Son of a forester, he ran away to study music in Prague. He traveled widely, writing operas for various cities, before settling in 1750 in Vienna, where he would remain
except for an interlude in Paris (1773–79)
the rest of his life. In 1762, with the librettist Ranieri di Calzabigi (1714–95), he wrote his famous opera Orfeo ed Euridice, in which he borrowed aspects of French opera to achieve a simplified dramatic style that decisively broke with the static and calcified Italian style. His preface to Alceste (1767) laid out the musico-dramatic principles of his "reform opera"; the goal was "simplicity, truth and naturalness." In 1773 he moved to Paris, where his former pupil Marie-Antoinette was on the verge of becoming queen. There he won acclaim for Iphigénie en Aulide (1774), Armide (1777), and Iphigénie en Tauride (1779). His other operas (numbering more than 40 in all) include Paride ed Elena (1770) and Echo et Narcisse (1779). He also wrote five ballets, of which Don Juan (1761) was one of the first successful ballets d'action.

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▪ German composer
Introduction
 Ritter (knight) Von Gluck 
born July 2, 1714, Erasbach, near Berching, Upper Palatinate, Bavaria [Germany]
died Nov. 15, 1787, Vienna, Austria
 German classical composer, best known for his operas, including Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), Alceste (1767), Paride ed Elena (1770), Iphigénie en Aulide (1774), the French version of Orfeo (1774), and Iphigénie en Tauride (1779). He was knighted in 1756.

Early life
      Gluck's paternal forebears, mostly foresters, were of the border territory between the Upper Palatinate and Bohemia; nothing is known of his ancestors on his mother's side. His father, Alexander Gluck, had moved to Erasbach as a ranger in 1711–12; the family then moved to Reichstadt near Böhmisch-Leipa in Bohemia. Between 1722 and 1727 they lived near Böhmisch-Kamnitz and after this, until 1736, in Eisenberg (near Komotau), where Alexander Gluck held the post of master forester to Prince Philipp Hyazinth von Lobkowitz.

      Gluck, whose father probably intended for him to continue in the family employment of forestry, at an early age showed a strong inclination toward music. In order to escape from disagreements with his father, the young Gluck left home (probably about 1727) and, supporting himself by his music, made his way to Prague, where he played in several churches, began university work (1731), and continued his musical studies. He went to Vienna in the winter of 1735–36. There he was discovered by a Lombard nobleman who took him to Milan, where Gluck, apart from fulfilling his duties in the Melzi family chapel, spent four years studying composition with the Italian organist and composer Giovanni Battista Sammartini (Sammartini, Giovanni Battista), from whom he learned the new Italian style of instrumental music. Probably six trio sonatas, each consisting of two movements with a minuet as conclusion and printed in London in 1746, were the fruits of his studies with Sammartini in Milan. Besides the six “London” sonatas, Gluck probably composed further trio sonatas under Sammartini.

      On Dec. 26, 1741, in the Teatro Ducal in Milan, Gluck had his first great dramatic success with his first opera, Artaserse, to a libretto by P. Metastasio. Until 1745 there then followed an annual succession of operas for this theatre: Demofoonte (1742), Arsace (in collaboration with G.B. Lampugnani; 1743), Sofonisba (1744), and Ippolito (1745). In addition, Gluck wrote Cleonice (Demetrio) (1742) for Venice; Il Tigrane (1743) for Crema; and Poro (1744) for Turin. In these early works, of which mostly only fragments have survived, Gluck largely followed the existing Italian operatic fashion—melodic but never grand, charming without intensity. Occasional intensely passionate outbursts and the beginning of characterization, however, foreshadowed the great dramatic composer he was to become.

The middle years
      In 1745 Gluck, by then well known as an operatic composer, was invited to England at the instigation of Lord Middlesex, director of Italian opera at the Haymarket Theatre, London, in order to challenge Handel (Handel, George Frideric)'s solid hold on London opera goers. The plan at first failed when, because of the political chaos caused by the Stuart rising, all theatres in London were closed before Gluck arrived in England. When the situation became calmer, theatrical activities recommenced with a performance of Gluck's opera La caduta de' giganti on Jan. 17, 1746; the libretto, by A.F. Vanneschi, glorified the hero of the day, the Duke of Cumberland, after his victory at Culloden over the forces of Prince Charles Edward, the Stuart claimant to the British throne. This work, as well as Gluck's second London opera, Artamene, produced on March 14, 1746, consisted largely of music from his own earlier works, lack of time having forced him to this device. Neither opera met with success. On March 25, shortly after the production of Artamene, Handel and Gluck together gave a concert in the Haymarket Theatre consisting of works by Gluck and an organ concerto by Handel, played by the composer. Gluck had won Handel's interest despite the latter's later much-quoted criticism of Gluck's lack of contrapuntal ability (Handel said that Gluck “knows no more counterpoint than my cook”). Gluck himself, according to the Irish singer Michael Kelly, tried to emulate Handel, whom he described as the “divine master of our art.”

      After he left England (possibly in 1746) Gluck came into contact with two travelling opera companies, one of which, on June 29, 1747, performed his opera-serenade Le nozze d'Ercole e d'Ebe at Pillnitz Castle, near Dresden, on the occasion of the double wedding between the electoral families of Bavaria and Saxony. By early 1748 at the latest, Gluck was back in Vienna, at work on Pietro Metastasio's Semiramide riconosciuta, with which, on May 14, 1748, the Burgtheater was inaugurated. It proved a brilliant success for the composer, although Metastasio privately termed its music “insupportably barbaric.” At that time Gluck met his future wife, Marianne Pergin, the 16-year-old daughter of a rich merchant; in the same year, as conductor of the P. and A. Mingotti Travelling Opera company, he travelled via Hamburg to Copenhagen, where he composed the opera-serenade La contesa dei Numi in celebration of the birth of the heir to the Danish throne; the work in some respects foreshadows his later reform operas. During the following two winters Gluck was in Prague, where he wrote Ezio (1750) and Issipile (1751–52). On Sept. 15, 1750, he married Marianne in the Church of St. Ulrich in Vienna. Their marriage, which produced no children, was reportedly harmonious—and no doubt his wife's connections were to Gluck's advantage. Gluck later adopted his niece, Marianne. Before the young couple set up a permanent home in Vienna in the winter of 1752–53, Gluck took his wife to Naples for the summer of 1752, where he composed music for Metastasio's drama La clemenza di Tito after having rejected the text of Arsace, which he had already once set to music.

      In Vienna, Gluck soon found a patron in the imperial field marshal Prince Joseph Friedrich von Sachsen-Hildburghausen, who engaged him first as Konzertmeister of his orchestra and later as Kapellmeister. Gluck gave successful performances of his symphonies and arias at weekly concerts in the Prince's palace and made a particular impression with his opera-serenade Le Cinesi, which was performed on Sept. 24, 1754, in the presence of the Emperor and Empress at a magnificent celebration at Schlosshof Castle. This success may well have contributed to the decision of the director of the court theatre to entrust the provision of the “theatrical and academic music” for the imperial court to Gluck. On May 5, 1755, Gluck's opera-serenade La danza was performed at the imperial Castle of Laxenburg, near Vienna, and on December 8 of the same year followed L'innocenza giustificata. The following year (1756) Vienna saw Il repastore, while the first performance of the opera Antigono was given during a visit to Rome. In Rome Gluck was created Knight of the Golden Spur, and after his return to Vienna he set to work to provide music for a number of French vaudeville comedies imported from Paris. Tircis et Doristée (1756) may have been a first attempt at this genre. In these Parisian comedies the dialogue was spoken or sung in the manner of street songs, so-called timbres. After 1758 Gluck proceeded more independently and composed for such works as La Fausse Esclave, L'Île de Merlin (1758), La Cythère assiégée (1759), Le Diable à quatre, L'Arbre enchanté (1759), L'Ivrogne corrigé (1760), and Le Cadi dupé (1761), which contained, in addition to the overture, a steadily increasing number of new songs in place of the stock vaudeville tunes. In La Rencontre imprévue, first performed in Vienna on Jan. 7, 1764, no vaudeville elements remain at all, with the result that the work is a perfect example of opéra comique (opéra-comique). Gluck gave the scores of Le Cadi dupé and La Rencontre imprévue particular charm by using “oriental” instrumental effects. In many of the arias, tuneful melody and programmatic writing foreshadow later developments in Gluck's operatic style: in, for instance, the first examples of complex scene development in L'Île de Merlin and L'Ivrogne corrigé.

The late works
      In February 1761 Ranieri Calzabigi (Calzabigi, Ranieri), a friend of the adventurer Giovanni Giacomo Casanova, visited Vienna. His libretto for Orfeo ed Euridice, partly based on the theories and practices of such literary men as D. Diderot, F.M. von Grimm, Rousseau, and Voltaire, was enthusiastically greeted by Gluck's friends, who immediately brought the two together. On Oct. 17, 1761, the dramatic ballet Le Festin de pierre (Don Juan), was presented, based on a scenario by Gasparo Angiolini; Gluck later composed the music for two additional dance dramas by Angiolini, Semiramide and Iphigénie (both 1765). More significantly, during this period Gluck wrote the three Italian “reform operas” with Calzabigi, Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), Alceste (1767), and Paride ed Elena (1770).

      The foreword to Alceste, signed but perhaps not wholly authored by the composer, stands as a manifesto of operatic reform, aiming for “simplicity, truth and naturalness” in plot, language, and musical declamation and form, specifically rejecting the elaborate conventions of Metastasian opera seria. In place of involved plots in the older manner, there was to be a simple, true, and natural action in the tradition of the classical drama; in place of courtly conventions, there was to be a purely human element. The chorus, again on the classical pattern, was to have equal importance with the main characters of the action, participating directly in the dramatic events. The function of the music was, in the words of the foreword to Alceste, “to serve poetry by means of expression and by following the situations of the story, without interrupting the action or stifling it with a useless superfluity of ornaments.” The recitativo secco (“unaccompanied recitative”) was banished (except in Alceste); the recitativo accompagnato, arioso, aria, chorus, and pantomime were welded together with declamatory style and expressive orchestral writing to form scenes and groups of scenes as parts of a great work of architecture. As Gluck himself confessed, the impulse toward opera reform came from Calzabigi. But it must also be recognized that Calzabigi proceeded largely from the ideas put forward after 1750 by the Parisian poetic and literary circles mentioned above, while important new musical features (e.g., the complex scene development and the powerfully simple text settings) were the contributions of Gluck's own genius.

      Besides the three Italian “reform operas,” which were not written as the result of a particular request, there appeared a series of commissioned works, partly after librettos by Metastasio: Il trionfo di Clelia (Bologna, 1763), the second version of Ezio of 1750 (Vienna, 1763) and, after a short visit to Paris in the spring of 1764, Il Parnaso confuso, Telemaco o sia L'isola di Circe, and the dance drama Semiramide, all written for the second marriage of the Holy Roman emperor Joseph II in 1765. The opera-serenade La corona, written in the same year, was not performed owing to court mourning for the death of the emperor Francis I. In Florence on Feb. 22, 1767, Gluck gave performances of his festival opera Il prologo, together with T. Traetta's Ifigenia in Tauride; La Vestale, a revised version of L'innocenza giustificata of 1755, followed in Vienna in 1768; and in Parma in 1769 he presented Le feste d'Apollo.

      On Aug. 1, 1772, the Paris Opéra was encouraged to stage Gluck's newly completed opera, Iphigénie en Aulide (the text, after Racine's tragedy, was by François-Louis Leblanc, bailli Du Roullet); and, as Gluck had undertaken to transform the genial Italian style to the more serious opera cultivated by French composers as well as to provide six more similar operas, he went to Paris in the autumn of 1773. The performances of Iphigénie on April 19, 1774, and of the French version of Orfeo in the summer of the same year met with tremendous success. In Vienna, Gluck was appointed official court composer, but he soon took leave to return to Paris, where the new version of L'Arbre enchanté in 1775 brought him little success, and the completely rewritten Cythère assiégée proved a failure. The French version of Alceste, which was produced during his third visit to Paris on April 23, 1776, also met with disapproval. Deeply distressed by this and the death of his niece, Marianne, Gluck left Paris in May 1776 and returned to Vienna.

      In Paris, Gluck left both friends and enemies, who began to form two opposing parties: his adherents, the Gluckists, under the leadership of the French writers and music critics François Arnaud and Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard, and his opponents, called Piccinnists (Piccinni, Niccolò) after the Italian composer N. Piccinni, who had been prevailed upon to come to Paris in the summer of 1776 to write opera in opposition to Gluck's style. The struggle, which reached its full fury in 1777, never drew either Gluck or Piccinni into active participation in the dispute. Gluck, in Vienna, had completed Armide but had destroyed his sketches for Roland on hearing that Piccinni was setting the same text for Paris. At the end of May 1777, Gluck returned to Paris.

      At the first performance of Armide on Sept. 23, 1777, the war of the theatres reached a climax, but soon after the performance of Piccinni's Roland on Jan. 27, 1778, the struggle abated again. Gluck retired to Vienna, and his last visit to Paris began at the end of 1778, where he arrived with his two latest completed dramatic works, Iphigénie en Tauride and Écho et Narcisse. The performance of Iphigénie on May 18, 1779, brought him his greatest success in Paris, but Écho (which was first performed on Sept. 24, 1779) met with little appreciation. Gluck, who had suffered a stroke during the rehearsals of Écho, left Paris for the last time at the beginning of October 1779.

      Gluck's great French “reform operas” are more strongly governed by the principle of contrast than are the Italian works; the declamatory style of the vocal line is more marked than in the Viennese operas, and the power and orchestral colour are more intense. The works are constructed in shorter sections, which frequently follow each other without a break, and the spacious conception of the scenes is partly sacrificed in order to achieve a greater degree of dramatic and psychological flexibility.

      Gluck spent the last eight years of his life in Vienna and in Perchtoldsdorf nearby, in the care of his wife, continuing to work tirelessly. His attention turned again to F.G. Klopstock's Hermannsschlacht, which had occupied him as early as 1770. Only a few years before his death he published his Klopstocks Oden und Lieder (seven numbers), which must have been written c. 1770. Also in these years he revised Écho et Narcisse and, together with a Viennese poet, J.B. von Alxinger, produced a German version of Iphigénie en Tauride, first performed in Vienna on Oct. 23, 1781, on the occasion of the visit by the Russian grand duke Pavel Petrovich, later Emperor Paul I. At this time the paths of the aging Gluck again crossed those of Mozart, as had already occurred once in Paris; they met on several occasions, but no close personal relationship developed between them. In 1781 Gluck suffered a second stroke, which partly paralyzed him, and his physical powers began to decline. On Nov. 15, 1787, Gluck had a further stroke, from which he died. Two days later he was buried in the central cemetery in Vienna amid general mourning.

Assessment
      During Gluck's lifetime, and in the perceptions of the next generation, he was seen to play a central role in the forging of a new operatic style. Thus, E.T.A. Hoffmann ranked him among the Romantics. Many, however, starting with Handel (as noted above), have found his technique severely flawed and credit his central achievements principally to his adventurous collaborators, Angiolini and Calzabigi. Perhaps, as has been suggested, his musical failings served the needs of these and other reform sensibilities (including his own) better than a more accomplished technique might have. Despite the unevenness of his work, there are countless moments in Gluck that rank among the most powerful and affecting in all of opera, e.g., "Che farò senza Euridice" in Orfeo and "O malheureuse Iphigénie" in Iphigénie en Tauride. Although he had no great successors (for he was soon overshadowed by Mozart, who pursued a much different path), his historical position is assured through his efforts to overturn the outmoded conventions of opera seria without destroying the genre itself and through the model his reform movement would provide later operatic reformers.

Gerhard Croll Ed.

Additional Reading

Catalog and bibliography
Alfred Wotquenne, Thematisches Verzeichnis der Werke von Chr. W.v. Gluck, 1714–1787 (1904); and Ergänzungen und Nachträge, ed. by Josef Liebeskind (1911); C.W. Hopkinson, A Bibliography of the Printed Works of C.W. von Gluck, 1714–1787, 2nd rev. ed. (1967); Stephan Wortsmann, Die deutsche Gluck-Literatur (1914); A.A. Abert, “Gluck, Christoph Willibald,” in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 5, col. 376–380 (1956; Collected Correspondence and Papers, 1962–63).

Editions
Sämtliche Werke (1951–); Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Bayern, vol. 14/2, Le nozze d'Ercole e d'Ebe, ed. by Hermann Abert (1914); Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich: vol. 21/44a, Orfeo ed Euridice, ed. by Hermann Abert (1914); vol. 30/60, Le festin de pierre (Don Juan), ed. by Robert Haas (1923); and vol. 44/82, L'innocenza giustificata, ed. by Alfred Einstein (1937); Iphigénie en Aulide, Orphée et Euridice, Alceste, Armide, Iphigénie en Tauride, Echo et Narcisse, ed. by F. Pelletan et al. (since 1873); The Collected Correspondence and Papers of Christoph W. Gluck, ed. by Hedwig and E.H. Mueller von Asow (1962), review with corrections and additions by Klaus Hortschansky in Die Musikforschung, 17:469–471 (1965).

Biographies and studies
Anton Schmid, Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck (1854), the first comprehensive biography (in German); Martin Cooper, Gluck (1935), a biographical study based on modern research; Alfred Einstein, Gluck: Sein Leben, seine Werke (1936), Gluck seen as the reformer of Italian opera and French opera in Paris; Rudolf Gerber, Christoph Willibald Gluck, 2nd ed. (1950), an authentic and comprehensive work (in German); Anna A. Abert, Christoph Willibald Gluck (1959), a popular, reliable account (in German); Patricia Howard, Gluck and the Birth of Modern Opera (1963), and Gluck: An Eighteenth-Century Portrait in Letters and Documents (1995); Daniel Heartz, “From Garrick to Gluck: The Reform of Theatre and Opera in the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, pp. 111–127 (1968); Gerhard Croll, “Gluckforschung und Gluck-Gesamtausgabe,” in Musik und Verlag: Karl Vötterle zum 65. Geburtstag am 12 April 1968, pp. 192–196 (1968).

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