Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–1787) was a German-Austrian composer, a representative of Classicism in music. He was a composition student of Giovanni Battista Sammartini. In 1730-1740 he studied and worked in Czechia, Italy, England, Germany and Denmark. From 1752 he lived in Vienna, where he was the conductor and composer of the Court Opera. The meeting and subsequent work with Italian composer and poet Ranieri de Calzabigi paved the way to the realization of an operatic reform. The production in Vienna in the 1760s of “Orfeo ed Eurydice” and “Alceste” marked a new period of Gluck’s music and opened a new era in European musical theater.
In the1770s Gluck made several trips to Paris, where his operas “Orfeo ed Eurydice” and “Alceste” were performed in new versions, and also composed a number of reformatory operas – “Iphigenie en Aulide,” “Armide,” “Iphigenie en Tauride” and “Echo et Narcisse.” All of Gluck’s compositions (except for his opera “Echo et Narcisse”) enjoyed tremendous success. Nevertheless, Gluck’s activities in Paris caused the famous embittered “War between the Gluckists and the Piccinnists” (the latter being adherents to the more traditional Italian operatic style present in the music of Niccolò Piccinni).
The musical legacy of Gluck presents an example of committed reformatory activity in the domain of opera, the principles of which he formulated in the introduction to his score for “Alceste.” The composer’s operatic reform was based on the aesthetical principles of the period of the Enlightenment. His idea of the subservient role of music to the laws of drama exerted an influence on the development of musical theater in the 19th and 20th centuries.
His compositions include the reformatory operas, “Orfeo ed Eurydice,” “Alceste,” “Paride ed Elena,” “Ihigenie en Tauride,” “Echo et Narcisse;” works in the genre of opera seria (a genre developed among composers in Naples), including “Artaserse,” “Demofoonte” and “La clemenza di Tito;” comic operas, including “Le diable à quatre,” “Cythére assiégée” and “La rencontre imprévue;” ballets, including “Don Juan” and “Semiramide;” works for chamber ensemble; odes and songs.
