Gluck settled permanently at Vienna in 1756, having two years previously been appointed court chapel-master, with a salary of 2000 florins, by the empress Maria Theresa. He had already received the order of knighthood from the pope in consequence of the successful production of two of his works in Rome. During the long interval from 1756 to 1762 Gluck seems to have matured his plans for the reform of the opera; and, barring a ballet named Don Giovanni, and some airs nouveaux to French words with pianoforte accompaniment, no compositions of any importance have to be recorded. Several later pièces d’occasion, such as Il Trionfo di Clelia (1763), are still written in the old manner, though already in 1762 Orfeo ed Euridice shows that the composer had entered upon a new career. 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, as he was a hot-headed dramatic theorist with a violent dislike for Metastasio, who had hitherto dominated the whole sphere of operatic libretto.
Quite apart from its significance in the history of dramatic music, Orpheus is a work which, by its intrinsic beauty, commands the highest admiration. Orpheus’s air, Che faro, is known to every one; but still finer is the great scena in which the poet’s song softens even the ombre sdegnose of Tartarus. The ascending passion of the entries of the solo (Deh! placatevi; Mille pene; Men tiranne), interrupted by the harsh but gradually softening exclamations of the Furies, is of the highest dramatic effect. 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. It is in this power of musically realizing a character—a power all but unknown in the serious opera of his day—that Gluck’s genius as a dramatic composer is chiefly shown. After a short relapse into his earlier manner, Gluck followed up his Orpheus by a second classical music-drama (1767) named Alceste. In his dedication of the score to the grand-duke of Tuscany, he fully expressed his aims, as well as the reasons for his total breach with the old traditions. “I shall try,” he wrote, “to reduce music to its real function, that of seconding poetry by intensifying 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.” 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. He therefore eagerly accepted the chance of finding a home for his art in the centre of intellectual and more especially dramatic life, Paris. Such a chance was opened to him through the bailli Le Blanc du Roullet, attaché of the French embassy at Vienna, and a musical amateur who entered into Gluck’s ideas with enthusiasm. A classic opera for the Paris stage was accordingly projected, and the friends fixed upon Racine’s Iphigénie en Aulide. After some difficulties, overcome chiefly by the intervention of Gluck’s former pupil the dauphiness Marie Antoinette, the opera was at last accepted and performed at the Académie de Musique, on the 19th of April 1774.
The great importance of the new work was at once perceived by the musical amateurs of the French capital, and a hot controversy on the merits of Iphigénie ensued, in which some of the leading literary men of France took part. Amongst the opponents of Gluck were not only the admirers of Italian vocalization and sweetness, but also the adherents of the earlier French school, who refused to see in the new composer the legitimate successor of Lulli and Rameau. Marmontel, Laharpe and D’Alembert were his opponents, the Abbé Arnaud and others his enthusiastic friends. Rousseau took a peculiar position in the struggle. In his early writings he is a violent partisan of Italian music, but when Gluck himself appeared as the French champion Rousseau acknowledged the great composer’s genius; although he did not always understand it, as for example when he suggested that in Alceste, “Divinités du Styx,” perhaps the most majestic of all Gluck’s arias, ought to have been set as a rondo. Nevertheless in a letter to Dr Burney, written shortly before his death, Rousseau gives a close and appreciative analysis of Alceste, the first Italian version of which Gluck had submitted to him for suggestions; and when, on the first performance of the piece not being received favourably by the Parisian audience, the composer exclaimed, “Alceste est tombée,” Rousseau is said to have comforted him with the flattering bon mot, “Oui, mais elle est tombée du ciel.” The contest received a still more personal character 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). As a dramatic controversy it suggests a parallel with the Wagnerian and anti-Wagnerian warfare of a later age; but there is no such radical difference between Gluck’s and Piccinni’s musical methods as the comparison would suggest. Gluck was by far the better musician, but his deficiencies in musical technique were of a kind which contemporaries could perceive as easily as they could perceive Piccinni’s. Both composers were remarkable inventors of melody, and both had the gift of making incorrect music sound agreeable. Gluck’s indisputable dramatic power might be plausibly dismissed as irrelevant by upholders of music for music’s sake, even if Piccinni himself had not chosen, as he did, to assimilate every feature in Gluck’s style that he could understand. The rivalry between the two composers was soon developed into a quarrel by the skilful engineering of Gluck’s enemies. In 1777 Piccinni was given a libretto by Marmontel 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 an attempt to show his command of a lighter style by furbishing up some earlier works at the instigation of Marie Antoinette, inspired Gluck to produce his Armide, which appeared four months before Piccinni’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 éprouver une voluptueuse sensation,” it was extremely annoying for him to be told by Laharpe that he had made Armide a sorceress 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 venomous sarcasm and its tremendous value as an advertisement for its recipient.
Gluck’s next work was Iphigénie 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 acknowledged Gluck’s superiority. Gluck’s next work was Écho et Narcisse, the comparative failure of which greatly disappointed him; and during the composition of another opera, Les Danaïdes, 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 his declining health. He died on the 15th of November 1787. (F. H.; D. F. T.)
The great interest of the dramatic aspect of Gluck’s reforms is apt to overshadow his merit as a musician, and yet in some ways to idealize it. One is tempted to regard him as condoning for technical musical deficiencies by sheer dramatic power, whereas unprejudiced study of his work shows that where his dramatic power asserts itself there is no lack of musical technique. Indeed only a great musician could so reform opera as to give it scope for dramatic power at all. Where Gluck differs from the greatest musicians is in his absolute dependence on literature for his inspiration. 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
