Christoph Willibald Gluck

Christoph Willibald Gluck was born on 2 July 1714 at Erasbach in the Upper Palatinate, Bavaria. His father was a forester who later entered the service of Bohemian princes, and the family settled there. He wanted his son to follow him, but Christoph was passionate about music. Around 1731 he ran away from home to Prague, where he earned his living singing in churches and playing the cello, perhaps while attending university courses.

Around 1736 he was in Vienna in the service of Prince Lobkowitz, then went to Italy with Prince Melzi. In Milan he studied with Giovanni Battista Sammartini, a master of the emerging symphony. In 1741 he premiered his first opera, Artaserse, to a libretto by Metastasio, the great poet of opera seria. Success was immediate, and in the following years Gluck composed a series of operas for Italian theatres.

In 1745 he went to London, where he met Handel. Handel is said to have remarked, with a touch of contempt, that his cook knew more counterpoint than Gluck. In London Gluck also gave an astonishing concert on a “glass harmonica” made of water-filled glasses that he made sing by rubbing their rims. He then travelled with an itinerant Italian opera company through Germany, Denmark and Bohemia.

In 1750 he married Maria Anna Bergin, daughter of a wealthy Viennese merchant, which gave him financial security. He settled in Vienna and in 1754 became Kapellmeister at the imperial court. Under the influence of Count Giacomo Durazzo, director of the theatres, he composed comic operas on French libretti and the ballet-pantomime Don Juan (1761), whose final scene, with its Dance of the Furies, is of unprecedented dramatic violence.

In 1762, with the librettist Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, he premiered Orfeo ed Euridice in Vienna. This was the start of his “reform” of opera: Gluck wanted to rid opera seria of the excesses of virtuoso singers, endless da capo arias and convoluted plots. He sought simple, noble, natural music serving the drama. In the preface to Alceste (1767) he set out his principles: music must serve poetry, the overture must announce the action, and nothing must interrupt the emotion. Orpheus’s aria “Che farò senza Euridice” became famous throughout Europe.

Gluck had been music teacher to the young Archduchess Marie Antoinette in Vienna. As dauphine and then Queen of France, she invited him to Paris, where in 1774 he staged Iphigénie en Aulide and then French versions of Orphée and Alceste. His operas sparked a new quarrel between “Gluckists” and “Piccinnists”, supporters of the Italian composer Niccolò Piccinni. In 1779 Iphigénie en Tauride, of overwhelming tragic intensity, was a triumph that secured Gluck’s victory.

That same year the failure of his last opera, Écho et Narcisse, and a first stroke persuaded him to leave Paris. He retired to Vienna, where he received the homage of Mozart and the new generation. He died in Vienna on 15 November 1787 after another stroke. His reform deeply influenced Mozart, Berlioz, who revered him, and Wagner. Gluck restored to opera the power of theatre and emotion.