Gluck spent the last eight years of his life in Vienna and in Perchtoldsdorf nearby, in the care of his wife, continuing to work tirelessly.
On Aug. 1, 1772, the Paris Opéra was encouraged to stage Gluck’s newly completed opera, Iphigénie en Aulide (the text, after Racine’s tragedy, was by François-Louis Leblanc, bailli Du Roullet); and, as Gluck had undertaken to transform the genial Italian style to the more serious opera cultivated by French composers as well as to provide six more similar operas, he went to Paris in the autumn of 1773. He was knighted in 1756. The use of counterpoint has very little necessary connection with contrapuntal display; its real and final cause is a certain depth of harmonic expression which Gluck attained only in his most dramatic moments, and for want of which he, even in his finest works, sometimes moved very lamely. Gluck also appeared in London as a performer on the musical glasses. Deeply distressed by this and the death of his niece, Marianne, Gluck left Paris in May 1776 and returned to Vienna. In 1762, Gluck wrote his Orfeo ed Euridice, heralding a new era in the history of opera. Its influence in Mozart's Idomeneo is obvious at a first glance. The Italian version is so different from the French that it cannot help us to restore this passage, in which Gluck's music now stops short just at the point where we realize the full height of his power. The French version of Alceste, which was produced during his third visit to Paris on April 23, 1776, also met with disapproval. He left Paris for Vienna, where he lived for several years in dignified leisure, disturbed only by his declining health.
His first opera written for Vienna, La Semiramide riconosciuta, is again an ordinary opera seria, and little more can be said of Telemacco, although thirty years later Gluck was able to use most of its overture and an energetic duet in one of his greatest works, Armide. But it indicates the musical reason of Gluck's failure, while Gluck himself learned the dramatic reason through his surprise at finding that arias which in their original setting had been much applauded lost all effect when adapted to new words in the pasticcio. It is a pity that the plan of the great Pelletan-Damcke critical édition de luxe of Gluck's French operas forbids the inclusion of his Italian Panide e Elena, his third opera to Calzabigi's libretto, which was never given in a French version; for there can be no question that, whatever he owed to France, the period of his greatest began with his collaboration with Calzabigi. When he was inspired there was no question that he was the first and greatest writer of dramatic music before Mozart.
But there is no question that Armide is a very great work, full of melody, color and dramatic point; and that Gluck has availed himself of every suggestion that his libretto afforded for orchestral and emotional effects of an entirely different type from any that he had attempted before.
Although their artistic value was small, they were so favorably received that in 1745 Gluck was invited to London to compose for the Haymarket. Such theories, and the stern consistency with which they were carried out, were little to the taste of the pleasure-loving Viennese; and the success of Alceste, as well as that of Paris and Helena, which followed two years later, was not such as Gluck had desired and expected.
The work as a whole is unequal, partly because there is a little 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 development of characters, as distinguished from the mere presentation of them as already fixed. In its original Italian version both scenes, that in Hades and that in Elysium, are indivisible wholes, and the division into single movements, though technically obvious, is aesthetically only a natural means of articulating the structure. Where his librettist failed him (as in his last complete work, Écho et Narcisse), he could hardly write tolerably good music; and, even in the finest works of his French period, the less emotional situations are sometimes set to music which has little interest except as a document in the history of the art. One of the great masters of 18th century opera, Gluck is known for his elegant synthesis of the French and Italian operatic traditions At this time the paths of the aging Gluck again crossed those of Mozart, as had already occurred once in Paris; they met on several occasions, but no close personal relationship developed between them.
His attention turned again to F.G. Klopstock’s Hermannsschlacht, which had occupied him as early as 1770.
Operatic composer, German by his nationality, French by his place in art, born at Weidenwang, near Neumarkt, in the upper Palatinate, on the 2nd of July 1714.
These melodies, moreover, as well as every declamatory passage assigned to Orpheus, are made subservient to the purposes of dramatic characterization; that is, they could not possibly be assigned to any other person in the drama, any more than Hamlet's monologue could be spoken by Polonius. The function of the music was, in the words of the foreword to Alceste, “to serve poetry by means of expression and by following the situations of the story, without interrupting the action or stifling it with a useless superfluity of ornaments.” The recitativo secco (“unaccompanied recitative”) was banished (except in Alceste); the recitativo accompagnato, arioso, aria, chorus, and pantomime were welded together with declamatory style and expressive orchestral writing to form scenes and groups of scenes as parts of a great work of architecture.
The ascending passion of the entries of the solo (Deh!
The unity of the scene in Hades extends, in the original version, even to the key-system. The critical temper of the London public fortunately averted this calamity. And it is hardly relevant to blame him for his inability to write erotic music.
In place of involved plots in the older manner, there was to be a simple, true, and natural action in the tradition of the classical drama; in place of courtly conventions, there was to be a purely human element.
Orpheus's air, Che faro, is known to everyone; but still finer is the great scena in which the poet's song softens even the ombre sdegnose of Tartarus. Moreover Gluck's genius was of too high an order for him to be less successful in portraying a sufficiently intense happiness than in portraying grief. Besides the three Italian “reform operas,” which were not written as the result of a particular request, there appeared a series of commissioned works, partly after librettos by Metastasio: Il trionfo di Clelia (Bologna, 1763), the second version of Ezio of 1750 (Vienna, 1763) and, after a short visit to Paris in the spring of 1764, Il Parnaso confuso, Telemaco o sia L’isola di Circe, and the dance drama Semiramide, all written for the second marriage of the Holy Roman emperor Joseph II in 1765. He belonged to the lower middle class, his father being gamekeeper to Prince Lobkowitz; but the boy's education was not neglected on that account. Gluck’s paternal This difficulty so accentuated itself in the French version that 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. He died on the 15th of November 1787. Born in the Upper Palatinate and raised in Bohemia, both part of the Holy Roman Empire, he gained prominence at the Habsburg court at Vienna. Read Full Biography. But his stay in England was not without important consequences for his subsequent career.
Nine of these works were produced at various Italian theaters between 1741 and 1745.
Viewed by conservatives as an attack on the French musical and literary traditions, Gluck's operas were targeted by a literary cabal, which decided to embrace Niccolò Piccinni, a respected composer of comic operas, as a standard-bearer.
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