German composer, "reformer" of Italian opera, and one of the great masters of the classical period of music.
Background
His father was a forester, and the family originated in that part of the old Bohemia which formed the Lobkowitz family estates. He went to school at Kamnitz and Albersdorf and possibly spent the years from 13 to 18 at the Jesuit College in Komotau (Chomutov). In 1732 he went to Prague, where he may have studied at the university but certainly supported himself by singing in church choirs, and by playing the violin and violoncello. He is also believed to have had lessons with Bohuslav EernohorskyCernohorsky (1684-1742).
Career
In 1736 Gluck went to Vienna as chamber musician in the Lobkowitz household, but in the following year he was engaged by Prince Melzi, whom he followed to Milan. There he studied for three years with the great chamber-music composer Giovanni Battista Sammartini (1698-1775), producing his first opera at the end of 1741. Thereafter Gluck led the life of a successful Italian composer, writing operas and pasticcios. In 1745 he accompanied his first master, Prince Lobkowitz, to London, traveling through Paris, where he heard and admired the music of the master of French opera, Jean Philippe Rameau (1683-1764). In London, Gluck met Handel and Thomas Arne; produced two pasticcios including La Caduta dei Giganti, a topical piece bearing on the failure of the recent Jacobite rebellion; gave a concert on the musical glasses, which were then regarded as a serious instrument; and published a set of six trio-sonatas. In the latter part of 1746 he appeared in Hamburg as musical director of Pietro Mingotti's Italian opera company, and until 1750 his life was bound up with this troupe, for whom he produced or wrote works. He married in September 1750 and settled in Vienna.
None of Gluck's operas had as yet shown his full musical potentialities, but his name was becoming known. In 1752 the San Carlo Opera commissioned an opera based on the poet Metastasio's book La Clemenza di Tito. Gluck conducted this work himself, causing considerable interest and jealousy among Neapolitan musicians and winning the approval of the noted composer and teacher, Francesco Durante. On his return to Vienna he was engaged as musical director by Prince Hildburghausen, in whose service he remained from 1753 to 1760. In 1757 Pope Benedict XIV conferred a knighthood upon the composer, who thereafter styled himself "Ritter von Gluck."
During these years Gluck came into close contact with the group surrounding the newly appointed intendant of the Viennese theaters, Count Durazzo, and worked much for the court as well as for his master, receiving a court appointment as early as 1754. After 1758 he spent much time adapting or rewriting the French opérasoperas comiques (L'lle de Merlin, La Fausse Esclave, Le Cadi dupé,dupe, etc.) communicated to the Viennese court by the Austrian ambassador in Paris. Count Durazzo was a man of ideas, a poet, and an enemy of the old static, highly formalized opera connected with Metastasio, who had written many of its librettos. A desire to "reform" opera in the interests of reason and dramatic truth had been common in North Italy for at least a generation and was particularly strong wherever, as at the court of Parma, French influence was dominant. Durazzo was a Genoese; Gluck had spent his formative years in Milan; it only needed two other artists of Italian birth and international experience--the poet Ranieri Calzabigi and the dancer Gasparo Angiolini--to form a group gifted, strong-minded, and influential enough to put the new ideas into practice. The first example of their collaboration was the ballet Don Juan (1761), and it was followed by the operas Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) and Alceste (1767), Gluck's first two masterpieces.
In a preface to the score of Alceste Gluck set out his principles: the subordination of musical beauty to dramatic truth, the avoidance of inorganic ornament and vocal display, and the integration of the overture into the dramatic scheme. Since these were in fact the principles already existing in French opera, and since an Austrain princess (Marie Antoinette, a former singing pupil of Gluck's) had recently married the heir to the French throne, it was not surprising that Gluck was soon invited to compose a series of works for the Paris Opéra.Opera. The first, IphigénieIphigenie en Aulide, was given under Gluck's direction at the OpéraOpera in 1774, and was the occasion of a journalistic war waged during the next five years between the champions of French and Italian music. During this period Gluck produced two new major works in Paris--Armide (1777) and IphigénieIphigenie en Tauride (1779)--as well as new French versions of Orfeo and Alceste. His opponents attempted to set up the Italian composer NiccolòNiccolo Piccinni (1772-1800) as a rival, but although a greatly talented composer, Piccinni possessed none of Gluck's force or originality.
Gluck belonged wholly to his age, and his mature masterpieces are the epitome of that 18th-century classicism which was being superseded even in his lifetime by the ideals and emotions of the young romantic movement. His best works survive today on the margin of the operatic repertory, thanks to their noble simplicity and dramatic force.