Christoph Willibald Gluck - Biography
Christopher Willibald Gluck the first great German Opera composer was born on July 2nd 1714 in Berching Germany and died in Vienna on November 15th 1787. Gluck came from a humble background his father was a forester in the service of the elector Max Emanuel of Bavaria. At an early age Gluck and his family moved to Bohemia where he grew up in the estate his father was managing. Gluck had no special musical gifts as a youth but received a good education for a boy of modest means due to his father’s position and Bohemia offered musical instruction as part of the curriculum. In 1732 he went to Prague to complete his education that by now consisted of intensive musical training. He eked out a living performing on the violin at taverns and singing at church services. After further musical instruction he went to Vienna in 1736 where he performed in the chamber orchestra of the Bohemian Prince Lobkowitz. The key event of his early adulthood was his traveling in Italy as part of a retinue of one Prince Melzi and it was during this period that he studied with the distinguished composer Sammartini and where he became acquainted with the Italian vocal style. After four years of study he composed his first opera Arteserse which was produced in Milan in 1741. In the next few years he wrote eight more operas all in a formulistic Italian style and that haven’t really survived into our age.
Gluck traveled to London in 1745 to compose operas for the Haymarket Theatre that was associated with the august George F. Handel. Gluck stopped off in Paris where he met the great composer Rameau. The two operas he produced for London were La Caduta dei Gigante and a pastiche Artemene. Handel doesn’t seem to have been impressed he told an acquaintance in his German accent that “Dis Gluck knows less counterpoint then mein cook”. He stayed in London for two years and then became a conductor of a travelling Italian company that toured Germany.During the period he composed a wedding cantata for the Saxon court Le Nozze d’Ercole and the opera seria Semiramide Ricconosciuta for Vienna. For the next few years he composed a series of operas that include Ezio, Issipile,Antigono and Il Re Pastore they all have excellent music but are hampered again by formulistic librettos set in classic Roman and Greek times (some of these Operas though have been recently revived and recorded).
Gluck married the Viennese Marianna Pergin and stationed his career there for the next few years. Viennesse taste during these years swung from Italian to French Opera Gluck obliged by writing French Opera. His first work that was a masterpiece was the Italian Orfeo et Euridice produced in 1762 while this too has a classical text the story of the god of music rescuing his beloved from the furies of hell has an enormously potent effect. This Italian version has a contralto hero and an elaborate ballet; twelve years later he adapted it for the French stage and the lead role was now sung by a tenor. Gluck from this period on changed from a pragmatic opera composer to a revolutionary in musical theater whose theories were to have a profound effect on the work of Berlioz and Wagner. The basis of his creed was that the music was always to support the poetry of the text and nothing should be ornamental or superfluous. His next masterpiece was to be the opera Alceste in 1767.Amongst the other works from the Viennese period were Il Trionfo di Ciela and Paride ed Elena.
Gluck was convinced by a French diplomat in Vienna to move his career to Paris then the ultimate place for a composer. His first opera there was Iphegenie en Aulide of 1774 based on the play of Racine. Gluck’s position in Paris was to be hard fought because he was to be involved in a critical war with the press supporters of an Italian composer Niccola Piccinni who wrote decorative works of surface entertainment rather than in the noble serious style of Gluck. This critical war was carried on with great venom on both sides though neither composer seemed to have instigated it. There was a musical duel where they both commissioned to write an opera based on Euripides; Iphegenie en Tauride. Gluck’s opera was to become his final operatic masterpiece Piccinni was not able complete an opera on the text Gluck was to write his final opera Echo et Narcisse which wasn’t up to the level of his last operas. Gluck in his late sixties started to have a series of strokes which left him an invalid he returned to Vienna for his last years and died there in 1787.
Gluck is one of those unusual cases where musical historians view him as one of the most important of composers but except for the popular Orfeo his works are not that generally well known by the musical public. Part of the problem with these works as we have alluded to is that nearly all of them are based on plots from classic Roman and Greek literature which were at one time familiar to everyone who had an education, but now may seem cold and remote. Gluck also from the mid nineteenth century had to deal with the well intentioned but distorted re-orchestrating and re arranging of his most familiar operas by Berlioz and Wagner and the conductor Mottl who wanted to update for modern taste. In the last few decades we have had his operas restored in authentic performances led by John Elliot Gardiner and Marc Minkowski that respect Gluck’s intentions.