GLUCK, CHRISTOPH WILLIBALD operatic composer, German by birth, French by his place in art, was born at Weidenwang, near Neumarkt, in the upper Palati nate, on July 2, 1714. His father was gamekeeper to Prince Lobkowitz; and from his 12th to his 18th year he received a good general education, including music lessons, at the Jesuit school of Kommatan, near Prince Lobkowitz's estate in Bo hemia. At the age of 18 he went to Prague, where he studied under Czernohorsky, and maintained himself by hand-to-mouth musical jobs, sometimes at village fairs and dances. Prince Lob kowitz introduced him to the best families of the Austrian no bility; and when in 1736 he proceeded to Vienna he was hos pitably received at his protector's palace. Here he met Prince Melzi, an ardent lover of music, whom he accompanied to Milan, continuing his education under Giovanni Battista San Martini (or Sammartini), a great musical historian and contra puntist, whose al fresco style of chamber-music was an impor tant if unconscious step towards the dramatic orchestration of the future. Gluck soon becomes a fluent writer, producing nine operas at various Italian theatres between 1741 and 1745. Un important as they are in the light of his mature art, they were so well received that in 1745 he was invited to London to com pose for the Haymarket, where he produced La Caduta dei giganti and followed it by a revised version of an earlier opera. He also appeared in London as a performer on the musical glasses (see HARMONICA).
The poor success of his two operas, as well as that of a pasticcio entitled Piramo e Tisbe, shortened his London visit. But his stay in England was not without important consequences for his future. Gluck at this time was rather less than an ordi nary producer of Italian opera. Handel said that Gluck "knows no more counterpoint than my cook," which was probably true, seeing that that cook was an excellent bass singer who performed in many of Handel's own operas. Musical cookery demands more counterpoint than Gluck ever mastered ; and, if Gluck did not as yet see any connection between counterpoint and drama, he learnt much from the surprising discovery that arias which in their original setting had been much applauded lost all effect when adapted to new words in the pasticcio. Handel's criticism was by no means irrelevant. The use of counterpoint is inde pendent of contrapuntal display; its real and final cause is a certain depth of harmonic expression which Gluck attained only in his most inspired moments, and for want of which many of his subtle details are dangerously like oversights. And in later years his own mature view of the importance of harmony, which he upheld in long arguments with Gretry, who believed only in melody, shows that he knew that the dramatic expression of music must strike below the surface. At this early period he was simply producing operas on Handel's, or rather Hasse's lines without a sign of mastery. Yet the failure of his pasticcio is profoundly significant, since it shows that already the effect of his music depended upon its characteristic treatment of dramatic situations. This characterizing power was as yet only thus in directly evident, and the art of music needed all the new re sources of the rising sonata-forms (q.v.) before it could break through its architectural and decorative restraints and enter into dramatic regions at all.
The chamber music of Sammartini had already indicated to Gluck a style incompatible with the older art, and a short trip to Paris brought him into contact with the classic traditions and the declamatory style of the French opera—things which an in telligent prophet might have foreseen to be of immense impor tance to a pupil of Sammartini. Little change, however, is to be found in the works produced by Gluck with varying success during the 15 years after his return from England. His first opera written for Vienna, La Semiramide riconosciuta, is again a fashionable opera seria, and little more can be said of Tele macco, although 3o years later Gluck was able to use most of its overture and an energetic duet in one of his greatest works, Armide, and to adapt another number to the sublime purposes of a still greater work, I phigenie en Tauride.
Gluck settled permanently at Vienna in 1756, having two years previously been appointed court chapel-master, with a salary of 2,000 florins, by the empress Maria Theresa. He had already received the order of knighthood from the pope after the suc cess of two of his works in Rome. During the long interval from 1756 to 1762 Gluck seems to have been meditating his plans for the reform of the opera, producing little more than the ballet Don Giovanni and some French airs nouveaux with pianoforte. Several later pieces d'occasion, such as 11 Trino f o di Clelia (1763), are still written in the old manner. But already in 1762 Orfeo ed Euridice had revolutionized the whole art of music. Gluck had for the first time deserted Metastasio for Raniero Calzabigi, who, as Vernon Lee suggests, was in all probability the immediate cause of the formation of Gluck's new ideas. He was a hot-headed dramatic theorist with a violent dislike for Metastasio, who had hitherto dominated the whole sphere of operatic libretto. Calzabigi reduced the operatic scheme from a complicated plot designed for working in three arias in each act for each of seven expensive singers, to the simplest possible means of expressing and concentrating the obvious emotions aroused by a classical myth.
In Orfeo there are only three characters besides the chorus. The chorus itself has to play a different part in each scene; human mourners in the first act ; Furies in the first part of the second act, Elysian shades in the second part, and a rejoicing human crowd when, as in Monteverde's pioneer work of 15o years earlier, the pathos of the story becomes intolerable to the poet, the composer, and the audience, so that Eurydice has to be galvanized back into life and received with Orpheus and the thaumaturgic Amor by a triumphant chorus and a long series of ballets. For the rest, the pathos of the music is among the greater experiences of the art. Even in the first act, which is occupied, until the sudden entry of Eros (Amor), entirely with the chorus of mourners and the lament of Orpheus at Eurydice's tomb, there is no feeling of monotony, no lack of dramatic power, and no lapse from the highest activity of the composer's imagination. Nothing like it had been dreamt of before, and one of its most interesting features is that it is neither histrionic nor realistic. The echoes of Orpheus's cadences by a cor anglais behind the scene are sheer gratuitous poetry as far transcending real echoes as Shelley's skylark transcends a real bird. The central feature of Orfeo is, of course, his conquest of the Furies who would bar his way to Eurydice. Gluck lived to master more complex situations, but neither he nor anyone else ever achieved, even with Wagner's resources, a more perfect and touching piece of music-drama. From the cavernous reverberations of the first chords of the orchestra, interrupted by the approaching sounds of Orpheus's harp, to the last subdued assent of the vanquished Furies, the dramatic and musical power are of the highest order.
The Furies sing throughout in the rhythm i.
chi mai nel Erebo until they are reduced to interrupting Orpheus's gathering flow of melody by "No :—No," at first thunderous, then softer. For the later productions in Paris, Gluck had to rewrite the castrato alto part of Orpheus for a tenor, with transpositions ruinous to the key-system of the whole ; but this did not impair the wonderful power of Orpheus's declamation. The inspiration is fully maintained in the following Elysian scene, an even greater test of the composer's depth of feeling.
No surprise should be felt that Orpheus was followed by work of no importance. Even reformers of opera must live; and Gluck's five great reform-operas were enough to occupy him but not enough to support him for the remaining 25 years of his life. Besides, he constantly drew upon his inferior works for whole movements in his greatest. In 1767 Gluck and Calzabigi followed up Orfeo by a similar work on a larger scale. Gluck's dedication of the score to the grand-duke of Tuscany is the Magna Charta of opera. "I have tried," he wrote, "to reduce music to its real function, that of seconding poetry by intensi fying the expression of sentiments and the interest of situations without interrupting the action by needless ornament. I have accordingly taken care not to interrupt the singer in the heat of the dialogue, to wait for a tedious ritornel, nor do I allow him to stop on a sonorous vowel, in the middle of a phrase, in order to show the nimbleness of a beautiful voice in a long cadenza." Less obvious and far more important is his principle that the orchestral instruments shall be "combined in accordance with the passions represented," an epitome of the whole difference between symphonic (or dramatic) orchestration and the deco rative schemes of the continuo period. (See CHAMBER MUSIC and INSTRUMENTATION.) Vienna was no easy town to conquer by principles apparently so hostile to music for music's sake ; and neither Alceste nor Paris and Helena (I 769) was received as cordially as Gluck had hoped. He therefore eagerly accepted the chance of bringing his art into contact with the encyclopaedists and dramaturgists of Paris, where his enthusiastic admirer, the bailli Le Blanc du Roullet, attaché of the French embassy at Vienna, set in motion the project of an opera for the Paris stage. Racine's Iplaigenie en Aulide was the subject chosen. Obstacles, usual and unusual, were removed chiefly by the intervention of Gluck's former pupil, the dauphiness Marie Antoinette, and the opera was even tually performed at the Academie de Musique, on April 19, 1774.
Heated controversy immediately emphasized the importance of the new work, both in its musical and in its literary aspects. At first the upholders of French music were no more favourable to Gluck than the connoisseurs of Italian singing; they forgot that Lulli was no more a Frenchman than Gluck, and they could see only that Gluck was no Rameau. Marmontel, La Harpe and D'Alembert were his opponents, the Abbe Arnaud and others his enthusiastic friends. Rousseau had the sense to change his mind. Beginning as a violent partisan of Italian music, when Gluck himself asserted the merits and possibilities of French music, he acknowledged his genius, although he did not always understand it, as for example when he suggested that in Alceste, "Divinites du Styx," perhaps the most majestic of all Gluck's arias, ought to have been set as a rondo. But in a letter, written shortly before his death, to Dr. Burney, Rousseau gives a close and ap preciative analysis of Alceste, the first Italian version of which Gluck had submitted to him for suggestions; and when after the first performance of the French version the composer exclaimed, "Alceste est tombee," Rousseau replied, "Oui, mais elle est tombee du ciel." The contest turned to fresh issues when Piccinni, a celebrated and by no means incapable composer, came to Paris as the champion of the Italian party at the invitation of Madame du Barry, who held a rival court to that of the young princess (see OPERA). It is a mistake to see in the war of Gluckists and Piccin nists a foreshadowing of the Wagnerian controversy; the issues were merely those of cliques, and anybody who has the patience to read Piccinni's music will be amused at his pathetic attempts to copy Gluck in every point where public applause had justified the shocking risks Gluck was always taking. Gluck was by far the better musician, but contemporaries could see the weak nesses of his technique as easily as they could see the vaguely different weaknesses of Piccinni's. Gluck's gift of melody was sublime, and Piccinni's was by no means contemptible ; and both composers had the gift of making incorrect music sound agree able. Gluck's indisputable dramatic power did not concern up holders of music for music's sake, and was no ground of opposi tion to the Piccinnists as far as they could understand it. The rivalry between the two composers was soon skilfully engineered into a quarrel. In 1777 Piccinni was given a libretto by Marmon tel on the subject of Roland, to Gluck's intense disgust, as he had already begun an opera on that subject himself. This, and the failure of attempts in a lighter style furbished up from earlier works at the instigation of Marie Antoinette, inspired Gluck to produce his Armide, which appeared four months before Pic cinni's Roland was ready, and raised a storm of controversy, admiration and abuse. Gluck did not anticipate Wagner more clearly in his dramatic reforms than in his caustic temper; and, as in Gluck's own estimation, the difference between Armide and Alceste is that "l'un (Alceste) doit faire pleurer et l'autre faire eprouver une voluptueuse sensation," it was extremely annoying for him to be told by Laharpe that he had made Armide a sor ceress instead of an enchantress, and that her part was "une criaillerie monotone et fatiguante." He replied to Laharpe in a long public letter worthy of Wagner in its venom and its effect in immortalizing its recipient.
Gluck's next work was I phigenie en Tauride, the success of which finally disposed of Piccinni, who produced a work on the same subject at the same time and who is said to have acknowl edged Gluck's victory. It was followed by Echo et Narcisse, the comparative failure of which greatly disappointed Gluck; and during the composition of another opera, Les Danaides, an attack of apoplexy compelled him to give up work. He left Paris for Vienna, where he lived for several years in dignified leisure, disturbed only by failing health which ended in his death on Nov. 15, 17 87. Burney gives a charming account of a day with Gluck, whom he visited in the same week as he visited Metastasio.
The dramatic importance of Gluck's reforms is apt both to overshadow and to idealize his merit as a musician. Where Gluck differs from the greatest musicians is in his absolute dependence on literature for his inspiration. Where his librettist failed him (as often in his last complete work, Echo et Narcisse), he had no first-rate routine to lean upon; and, even in the finest works of his French period, the less emotional situations are sometimes set to music which has little but historic interest. A mere inability to set a bad text to good music might be a sign rather of good literary sense than of poor musicianship. But it points to a cer tain weakness as a musician that Gluck could not be inspired except by the more emotional features of his libretti. When he was inspired he was unquestionably the first and only essen tially dramatic composer before Mozart, except the miraculous and untimely born Purcell.
To begin with, he could invent sublime melodies ; and his power of producing great musical effects by the simplest means was nothing short of Handelian. Moreover, if Haydn is the father of modern orchestration, the writer of the preface to Alceste is its godfather. He was by no means the first to use the timbre of instruments with a sense of emotional effect, for Bach and Handel well knew how to give a whole aria or whole chorus an appropriate tone by means of a definite scheme of instrumentation. But it is just such definite schemes that im peded the progress of music-drama. Gluck did not treat instru ments as part of a decorative design, any more than he so treated musical forms. His instrumentation changes with every shade of feeling in the dramatic situation. Strings, oboes and flutes were an ordinary accompaniment for an aria; nor was there anything unusual in making the wind instruments play in unison with the strings for the first part of the aria, and writing a passage for one or more of them in the middle section. But it was an unheard-of thing to make this passage consist of isolated long appoggiaturas once every two bars in rising sequence on the first oboe, answered by deep pizzicato bass notes, while Aga memnon in despair cries: "J'entends retentir dans mon sein le cri plaintif de la nature." Gluck is a master of tragic irony and subconscious confession. When, for instance, in Iphigenie en Tauride, Orestes gasps "Le calme rentre dans mon coeur," the agi tated rhythms of the strings belie him. Again, the power of orchestral climax shown in the oracle scene in Alceste was a thing inconceivable in older music and on that plane of abso lute masterpieces that no later music can supersede. Its influence in Mozart's Idorneneo is obvious at a first glance.
The capacity for broad melody always implies a true sense of form, whether that be developed by skill or not ; and Gluck's form is inspired not merely by melody but by a magnificent sense of free phrase-rhythm, worthy of the mature sonata-style of Mozart. And his power in persistent quantitative rhythms is Wagnerian. Hence he had plenty of resource for replacing by better things the civilization he destroyed. Moreover he, in con sultation with his librettist, achieved great skill in holding to gether entire scenes, or even entire acts, by dramatically ap posite repetitions of short arias and choruses. And thus in large portions of his finest works the music, in spite of frequent full closes, seems to move pari passu with the drama in a manner which for naturalness and continuity is surpassed only by the finales of Mozart and the entire operas of Wagner. This con tinuity is most impressive in both scenes of the second act of Orfeo. The damage done to the key-system of these perfectly unified scenes by the Parisian transposition of Orpheus's part is, as previously noted, dreadful, but easily remedied by transposing Orpheus's part back again ; and in a suitable compromise between the two versions Orfeo remains Gluck's most perfect and inspired work. The emotional power of the music is such that the ruin of the story by a happy ending is a real relief from tension ; it is like the gesture of Shakespeare's last works, where we know all about the tragic issues and may as well dismiss them with fairy-tales. Moreover, Gluck's genius was of that high order which is as great in happiness as in grief. He failed only in the business capacities of artistic technique ; and there is less busi ness in Orfeo than in any other music-drama. It was Gluck's first great inspiration, and his theories had not had time to be come doctrinaire, though Calzabigi was disposed to magnify his office.
Alceste contains Gluck's grandest music and is also very free from weak pages ; but in its original Italian version the third act had no adequate climax, a defect wholly inadmissible in Paris, where, after continual retouchings a part for Hercules was, in Gluck's absence, added by Gossec ; and three pages of Gluck's music, dealing with the supreme crisis where Alceste is rescued from Hades (either by Apollo or by Hercules) were no longer required in performance and have been lost. The Italian version cannot help us to restore this passage, in which Gluck's music now stops short just where we realize the full height of his power. The stiffness of Gossec's rhythm reveals the immense distance Gluck had traveiled from all contemporaries as well as from the old ways; and the comparison between the Italian and French Alceste measures the pace of Gluck's development be tween 1767 and 1775. It would have been far easier for Gluck to write a new opera if he had not been so justly attached to his second Italian masterpiece. So radical are the differences that in retranslating the French libretto into Italian for perform ance with the French music not one line of Calzabigi's original text can be retained.
In I phigenie en Aulide and I phigenie en Tauride, Gluck shows signs that the doctrinaire is beginning to gain on the spontaneous artist. This, at least, is the general impression left in a reflective memory, though one indignantly denies it on renewing acquaint ance with the works in performance. Gluck had not, in Orfeo, gone out of his way to avoid rondos, or we should have had no "Che faro senza Euridice." We read with a respectful smile his assurance to the bailli Le Blanc du Roullet that "you would not believe Armide to be by the same composer" as Alceste. But there is no question that Armide is a very great work, full of melody, colour and dramatic point ; and that Gluck has availed himself of every suggestion that his libretto afforded for orches tral and emotional effects of type almost entirely new to him. He has been absurdly blamed for his inability to write erotic music. The intention of the work is no more erotic than that of Tasso's Gierusalernrne liberata. Love is a baleful enchant ment, viewed through the eyes of crusading knights. Even so, the conflict of passions, where Armide summons the demons of Hate to exorcise love from her heart, and her courage fails her as soon as they begin, has never, even in Alceste, been treated with more dramatic musical power. The work as a whole is unequal, partly because Quinault's 9o-year-old poem had far too much action in it to suit Gluck's methods, but it shows, as does no other opera until Mozart's Don Giovanni, a sense of the develop ment of characters, as distinguished from the mere presentation of them as fixed types.
In 1 phigenie en Aulide and I phigenie en Tauride, the very subtlety of the finest features reveals a self-consciousness which, when inspiration is lacking, becomes mannerism. Moreover, in both cases the libretti, though skilfully derived from Racine and Corneille, are more complicated than those of Gluck's first mas terpieces; and where inspiration fails, the awkward technique has lost its earlier naivete. Still, these works are immortal, and their greatest passages are equal to anything in Alceste and Orfeo. Iphigenie en Tauride is indeed, as realized by Gluck, an amaz ingly spiritual work to find its way to the operatic stage and prove itself so effective there. We must agree with Gluck's contempo raries to call Echo et Narcisse a failure. As in Orfeo, the pathetic story is ruined by a violent happy ending, but here this artistic disaster takes place before the pathos has begun to move us. Prettiness was the highest possibility of the subject; and with Gluck beauty, without emotional impulses, was less than skin deep. The great Pelletan-Damcke edition de luxe of Gluck's French operas includes this work, gives only the French version of Orphee, and excludes Paride e Elena which was never given in Paris. A modern full score of Paride e Elena is a desideratum to complete the study of Gluck's work with Calzabigi, to whom he owed more than he owed to France. Perhaps this may be given in the miniature scores inaugurated in 1927 by that of Iphigenie en Tauride with an excellent preface and critical revision by H. Abert (Eulenburg). (D. F. T.)