Gluck, CHRISTOPH WILLIBALD, RITTER VON, the reformer of opera, and the first great name among modern opera writers, was born 2d July 1714, at Weidenwang, a small village of Bavaria, 24 miles N. of Ingolstadt. His mother, like those of Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert, seems to have been a cook; his father had been one of those German free-lances who sold their military service to the highest bidder during the troublous times of the Marlborough campaigns, and now, tired of fighting, had taken service under various princelets in the capacity of forester. Gluck had given no indication that music was to be anything more to him than a favourite recreation, until at Prague University he found himself forced to supplement a very scanty allowance by teaching music; and at the age of twenty-two the call of art had become so imperative that he decided to try his fortune among the musicians of Vienna. There the good offices of his patron Prince Lobkowitz, and the friendship he contracted with Count Melzi, another noble amateur, were of great service to him. He was introduced to the best society and placed for four years under the famous Sammartini (or San-Martini), the predecessor of Haydn, and a composer of great energy and originality. In 1741 he received a commission for his first opera, Artaserce (in one act), and six others followed in the succeeding four years. The growing fame of the young composer travelled as far as England, and in 1745 Lord Middlesex, the enthusiastic operatic entrepreneur, invited him to London, when a new opera, La Caduta de' Giganti, was performed. Handel, an autocrat at that time in London, pronounced the stranger's music 'de-testable,' and declared 'he knows no more about counterpoint than my cook.' Gluck's London visit must be called the turning-point in his career. His study of Handel's work revealed to him some unsuspected capabilities of music in illustrating the text; and the complete failure of Piramo ed Tisbe, a miserable pasticcio, or collection of shreds and patches from various sources, and dignified by the name of opera, turned his thoughts to the consideration of truths which, however unsuited or antagonistic to the demands of popular taste and usual practice, lie deep down at the foundation of all dramatic art. A visit to Paris gave him an opportunity of hearing the excellent 'recitative' writing of Rameau, and thus inspired him anew for his great mission; and when in 1746 he left London for Vienna by Hamburg and Dresden, noting doubtless in these great opera schools more to avoid and more to strive after, we may say that his first period of work was completed.
The next opera he contributed to the Vienna stage shows signs of the direction in which his ideal was tending, and some of the music in Telemaco (produced in Rome, 1750) and La Clemenza de Tito (Naples, 1751) he afterwards considered good enough to be incorporated in Armide and Iphigénie; but the transition period—during which in 1755 or 1756 the pope made him a 'knight of the Golden Spur'—has not much of interest to offer. The light and frivolous Metastasio held as it were a monopoly in Vienna as librettist, and his plots were more suited to the kindred genius of Hasse than to that of the serious reformer. Gluck turned to Calzabigi, imperial councillor and well-known literary amateur, and in 1762, after much ruthless digging among the rubbish of Italian opera to provide a firm foundation, he succeeded triumphantly in laying the corner-stone of the modern music drama in Orfeo, with the notable title, 'Dramma per Musica.' Constant collaboration with the librettist was of great assistance to both in the production of a coherent organic whole. This work was followed in 1766 by Aleeste, with a simple pathetic plot, and even more severely classical than its predecessor in libretto and treatment. The letter of dedication to the Duke of Tuscany, which was printed as a preface, at once explains his theories and proclaims the careful and logical thought which led him to adopt them.
The standard of ideal opera was still further advanced in Paride ed Elena (1769), the last work written for Vienna before he entered on his brilliant career in Paris. The popularity of the dauphiness, who as Marie Antoinette had been his pupil in Vienna, was of great assistance to Gluck in his attempt to establish himself on the then premier opera stage of Europe. His first work there, Iphigénie en Aulide, on Racine's play, proved an enormous success, and Orphée, an adaptation of his earlier Orfeo, stirred the utmost enthusiasm among the rapidly increasing number of his supporters. The French version of Aleeste, though received coldly at first, became quite as popular. Gluck was at the summit of his success when the storm broke—the famous Gluck and Piccini war began. An eye to business more probably than the usual charge of jealousy seems to have been the motive for inviting the well-known Italian composer Piccini to Paris and pitting him directly against Gluck. Musical Paris was immediately and sharply divided into Gluckists and Piccinists. The comparative failure of Gluck's Echo et Narcisse (September 1779), and the superior ability of the literary men in the ranks of the Piccinists, long made it impossible to say towards which side victory inclined, until the continued success of the earlier Iphigénie en Tauride (produced in May 1779) finally decided it in Gluck's favour. Piccini's opera of the same name, a much inferior work, proved a very effective weapon in the hands of the Gluckists. The conqueror retired from Paris full of honour and comparatively wealthy. Two strokes of paralysis warned him against undertaking any more active work; and a third severer shock in 1786 was the forerunner of death, which in the following year (November 15, 1787) ended an exceptionally long, vigorous, and successful career.
As Gluck's energies were, with one or two unimportant exceptions (Odes and Songs by Klopstock, a 'De profundis,' and a 'Dominus noster'), directed exclusively to the composition of operas, excerpts from which, even when complete enough in themselves for effective quotation, must necessarily labour under the disadvantage of being separated from the context, the excellence of his work is little known in England and America, and its importance is almost invariably overlooked or underestimated. His gift of melody was not so full, rich, and spontaneous as that of other composers of the first rank, but the care he exercised to leave no means unemployed by which he could illustrate every turn of expression in the words makes no small amends.
Ample testimony is borne to his genius for orchestration by numerous passages in Berlioz's standard Treatise on Instrumentation, where, among sixty-four examples of remarkable effects, no less than seventeen are from the works of Gluck. These and other excellences made his work capable of performing a mission the importance of which cannot be too highly stated or too often insisted on. He found the opera an emasculated creation, paying attention only to roundness and sensuous beauty of form, neglecting ethic, dramatic, and poetic principles as much as natural manliness. He left it with a lofty ideal of a time when the libretto should be as serious and noble in purpose as the music; when the musician's first and only effort should be to clothe and illustrate the words; when even the necessity of action might be subordinated to the development of character, and feelings be painted rather than deeds. He also inspired the succession of great men who followed him on the stage of Paris, and who worked along his line until Wagner, a deep student of Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber, applied his genius to the improvement of Gluck's ideal, and called it the Music Drama. See his Life in French by Desnoiresterres (1872); in German, by Schmid (1854), Marx (1863), and Reissmann (1882); E. Newman, Gluck and the Opera (1896); and the article OPERA.