GLUCK, CHRISTOPH WILLIBALD (b. Erasbach, Germany, July 2, 1714; d. Vienna, November 15, 1787)
Until 1762, Gluck had been a composer of operas in the standard florid vocal style. His operas, like everyone elseΓÇÖs, were a start and stop parade of arias; but with glorious music that had brought him fame, fortune, influence and high position in the imperial Viennese court.
After 1762, he was leading an operatic revolution in which he was claiming that, ΓÇ£Opera is neither a play nor a musical form, but music drama.ΓÇ¥ He undertook to write music in which he resolved to, ΓÇ£Divest it of all those abuses introduced to it by the mistaken vanities of singers or the too great complaisance of composers which have so long disfigured Italian opera.ΓÇ¥
The revolution had begun the previous year, not with an opera but a ballet. In 1761 he collaborated for the first time with the librettist Raniera da Calzabigi on Don Juan, a ballet that was more of a dance drama, than the usual showcase of leaps and twirls. The result was both controversial and successful.
This soon led to further collaboration, the first fruit of which was Orpheus And Eurydice (1762). This opera may appear straightforward to us, but in the Vienna of its day, it aroused strife in musical circles not known again until the progress of WagnerΓÇÖs career almost a century later.
Perhaps it is because Gluck collaborated with Calzabigi on only one more work, Alceste (1767), that modern audiences are familiar with only two of the more than 40 operas he composed. CalzabigiΓÇÖs passion for story telling made a convert of Gluck, but his subsequent librettists could not translate a similar passion into the necessary words for the composer to set.
In 1772 he went to Paris to work on Iphigenia In Aulis with a libretto based on the poetry of Racine. The Paris musical establishment sneered. But, when Iphigenia opened two years later, Gluck enjoyed the greatest triumph of his career.
