Christoph Gluck

German composer

• Born: July 2, 1714
• Birthplace: Erasbach, Upper Palatinate, Bavaria (now in Germany)
• Died: November 15, 1787
• Place of death: Vienna, Austria

Gluck established a new style of opera that marked the end of the Baroque and the beginning of the classical era in music. Many of his stage works represent a turning point in the balance between counterpoint and homophony, between vocal display and musical drama.

Early Life

Christoph Gluck (KRIHS-tahf GLOOK) was the son of a forester and huntsman, a profession followed by several of his ancestors. The young Gluck’s early training remains a matter of conjecture, but he traveled to Prague in late adolescence and probably enrolled at the University of Prague, though he did not complete his studies there. In Prague, he studied music privately and obtained a position as church organist. He was also exposed to Prague’s vigorous musical life, which was dominated by Italian composers, operas, and oratorios.

Gluck then traveled to Milan, where he was engaged in the private orchestra of Prince Antonio Melzi and where he came under the influence of the Italian symphonist Giovanni Battista Sammartini—through association, if not through direct study. It was in Milan that Gluck composed his first opera, Artaserse (1741). This successful production was followed by seven more Italian operas in the next four years. In 1745, he visited London and produced two more operas there, works derived largely from his Milan scores. The composer’s later views on melody may have been born at this time: Gluck is said to have noticed that simplicity in composition exerted the greatest effect on English audiences, and he subsequently tried to write for the voice in a simpler, more natural manner.

Many of Gluck’s works during the following years were constructed with borrowings from his own earlier compositions, but Semiramide riconosciuta (1748) was performed with great success in Vienna and was recognized as a totally new work both in its musical materials and in the sense of musical drama that it projected. Gluck traveled to Hamburg and Copenhagen later that same year, establishing a widening reputation as an opera composer and conductor. In Copenhagen, he met the critic Johann Adolph Scheibe, who probably influenced Gluck to some degree in the question of the connection between an opera’s overture and the music of the opera proper, an idea later promoted by Gluck himself.

In 1750, Gluck married the daughter of a wealthy Viennese merchant. This marriage brought him both a dowry and connections at the Viennese court that ensured his financial independence, a consideration important for any composer contemplating new ventures.

Life’s Work

In 1752, Gluck was appointed Konzertmeister in the household of the imperial field marshal in Vienna, a position giving him a secure base of operations in the very heart of the Austrian Empire. In the ensuing years, he produced a number of operas that won the favor of the royal family, and his growing reputation led to a commission for an opera to be presented during the 1756 carnival season in Rome. Through the influence of one of his Roman patrons, Gluck was awarded the papal title cavalier of the golden spur. Upon his return to Vienna, an appointment to adapt several French opéras comiques for the stage brought him into contact with a good troupe of French actors. His first original opéra comique, La Fausse Esclave (1758), was a success noted for its coordination of music and drama. Around 1760, Gluck was introduced to the Italian author and dramatist Ranieri Calzabigi; their first collaboration, the ballet-pantomime Don Juan: Ou, Le Festin de Pierre (1761), was unusually well received.

Don Juan was followed by Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), a major success that marked a turning point in the history of opera and formed the cornerstone of Gluck’s lasting fame as an opera composer. It is probable that some of the traditions of vocal display to which singers and audiences were accustomed endured in early performances of this work, yet the score avoided the then-entrenched pattern of alternating recitative and aria. The work’s comparatively uncluttered vocal lines allowed the audience to develop a sense of dramatic projection of the text. The orchestra, moreover, supported the dramatic events onstage, and chorus and ballet were incorporated into the score in a masterful way.

Gluck continued to work at adapting French opéras comiques for the Viennese stage, traveling frequently between Paris and Vienna. He collaborated once again with Calzabigi for Alceste (1767), a second reform opera in the spirit of Orfeo ed Euridice. In the preface to the published score of Alceste, Gluck set forth his musical goals in matters of opera: Music, he said, should follow the poem, not be overburdened with ornaments. The tripartite aria should not interfere with the sense of the plot, the overture should be in keeping with the action that follows, and all should be executed with the goal of achieving a beautiful simplicity. Gluck later acknowledged that Calzabigi was responsible for many of these ideas. It is also clear that similar thoughts were widespread among the literati of the time. Yet, to the composer’s lasting credit, it was the unusually expressive quality of the music in both Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste that established them as milestones in the history of opera.

Gluck continued his operatic activity in Vienna; his third reform opera, Paride ed Elena (1770), was less successful than its predecessors, and possibly as a result, it represented Gluck’s last joint venture with Calzabigi. In spite of the personal fortune achieved with the aid of his wife’s dowry, Gluck, always noted for a degree of parsimony, felt driven to exert extra effort to recover his losses on some theatrical investments in Vienna. The operatic scene in Paris seemed to offer the most ready profits, and he spent most of the next decade in travels between Vienna and the French capital. Iphigénie en Aulide and a French version of Orfeo ed Euridice, both produced in Paris in 1774, show a continued development of his sense for music and drama.

In 1777, Gluck was once again in Paris, where he was drawn into a controversy between his own supporters and those favoring the older Italian opera as it was represented in the works of Niccolò Piccinni. It was proposed that both composers should set the story of Roland, by Philippe Quinault, but Gluck, upon learning that Piccinni was already at work on that libretto, withdrew and put forth instead his setting of Quinault’s Armide (1777). This work was performed four months before Piccinni’s Roland; while it did little to affirm the superiority of one style over another in the opinion of the factious Parisian public, Armide did establish a distinction between the style of Gluck’s operas and the traditional opéra seria. On his next sojourn in Paris, Gluck had his single greatest success with another setting of a classic tragedy, Iphigénie en Tauride (1779). His musical depiction of characters and the suggestion, by the orchestra, of character traits and ideas not directly present on stage were qualities later expanded by nineteenth century opera composers, particularly Richard Wagner.

Gluck’s last years in Vienna were marked by continuing composition and several efforts to revive some of his earlier works for the Paris stage, despite a series of debilitating strokes. He was in contact with the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, an aspiring composer for the stage whose natural gifts far surpassed Gluck’s, but who still must have assimilated much from the many rehearsals of the German version of Iphigénie en Tauride he attended. A few days before his death, Gluck gave to Antonio Salieri, his supposed successor, a De profundis, which Salieri conducted at the composer’s funeral on November 17, 1787. Gluck’s tombstone reflected something of the esteem he enjoyed in the eyes of his contemporaries; he was described as “An upright German man, a devout Christian, a faithful husband . . . great master of the noble art of music.”

Significance

Christoph Gluck, with the possible exception of Claudio Monteverdi, may be described as the earliest composer of opera to maintain a place in the functioning repertory. He effectively wrought significant and lasting changes in what was a widespread yet decadent art form. For all his influence, though, his work represents a synthesis at least as much as an innovation: Many of his ideas had been expressed by others before he gave them musical shape and substance. However, Gluck’s reform operas of the 1760’s realized the ideals of the eighteenth century Enlightenment in matters of naturalness, balance, and clarity, and he continued this development in varying degrees in the works that followed.

In specifically musical matters, Gluck achieved in the opera a new balance between music and drama; he avoided the vocal display and stereotyped librettos that had made opera into a notorious spectacle. His orchestral arrangements contributed to the dramatic presentation of his works through careful use of instrumental timbre and thematic interplay with the vocal parts, and his overtures became integral parts of his scores rather than mere dispensable introductions. These changes in style mark Gluck as one of the major creative figures who established the principles that underlay musical classicism in the late eighteenth century.

Bibliography

Brown, Bruce Alan. Gluck and the French Theater in Vienna. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Recounts Gluck’s involvement with Vienna’s first French theater, founded in 1752. Describes theatrical life in Vienna and the influence of the French musical theater on Orfeo ed Euridice and other Gluck operas.

Cooper, Martin. Gluck. New York: Oxford University Press, 1935. An extended monograph by a recognized authority on Gluck and his music. Contemporary events are chronologically presented to illustrate the composer’s activities as a response to the milieu of the musical theater in which he worked. Most valuable is the closing chapter examining Gluck’s position in the history of music.

Einstein, Alfred. Gluck. Translated by Eric Blom. London: J. M. Dent, 1936. Reprint. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972. Although somewhat dated in its style, this remains a standard and comprehensive English-language monograph on Gluck. Supplemented by useful appendices, including a catalog of works, a list of persons with whom Gluck worked, a bibliography, and an excerpt from Gluck’s correspondence.

Grout, Donald Jay, and Hermine Weigel Williams. A Short History of Opera. 4th ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. A concise, direct approach to the complete scope of opera, with a significant portion devoted to Gluck, his works, and his influence. One of the most accessible and current sources available.

Howard, Patricia. Gluck: An Eighteenth Century Portrait in Letters and Documents. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Gluck’s life and work is explored through the letters he wrote and received and through other documents, translated into English from German, French, and Italian.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Gluck and the Birth of Modern Opera. London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1963. A stylistic study cast in a historical perspective that treats Gluck and his works, particularly his reform operas, as part of the second (modern) stage of opera following its beginning in the early seventeenth century.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. C. W. von Gluck: “Orfeo.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Essays by various authors addressing the first and most famous of Gluck’s reform operas. The essays can be grouped into the historical, the analytical, and those examining the impact of critical writing about this particular work. Select bibliography and discography, the latter all too often omitted in critical studies of major musical works.

Ratner, Leonard G. Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style. New York: Schirmer Books, 1980. Within a comprehensive examination of musical style in the eighteenth century, Gluck and his operatic achievements are presented as the principal manifestation of a “high style” in musical theater specifically and in the later years of the classical era in general. Comparisons between settings by Gluck and others of the same plot, Iphigénie en Tauride, serve to illustrate the specific stylistic differences between Gluck and his contemporaries.

Wellesz, Egon, and Frederick Sternfeld, eds. The Age of Enlightenment. Vol. 7 in The New Oxford History of Music. London: Oxford University Press, 1973. Gluck’s Italian and French operas are addressed separately; the discussion of Gluck’s work in Paris is particularly valuable, because he is presented clearly as a musical iconoclast facing an aristocratic, autocratic society rather than a prophet of later operatic venues for a middle-class public. Perhaps the best discussion available of his French operas.