BRUCE ALAN BROWN (1—5, 7–11, 13,, JULIAN RUSHTON (6, 12)

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In the 29-volume second edition. Grove Music Online /General Editor – Stanley Sadie. Oxford University Press. 2001.

Gluck, Christoph Willibald, Ritter von

(b Erasbach, Upper Palatinate, 2 July 1714; d Vienna, 15 Nov 1787). Bohemian composer. He was long in Habsburg service in Vienna. More successfully than any of his contemporaries, he translated the widespread agitation for reform of opera and theatrical dance on the part of European intellectuals into actual works for the stage, first in pantomime ballets and Italian serious operas for Vienna and then in operas of various sorts for Paris. His long experience in setting Metastasian drammi per musica and his work in Vienna as music director of the Burgtheater (court theatre) were not without utility in these more innovative efforts.

1. Ancestry, early life and training.

2. Itinerant ‘maestro di cappella’.

3. Vienna, 1752–60.

4. Collaboration with Calzabigi.

5. New directions.

6. Paris, 1774–9.

7. Final years in Vienna.

8. Early Italian operas.

9. ‘Opéras comiques’.

10. Ballets.

11. Italian reform operas.

12. Paris operas.

13. Other works.

WORKS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gluck, Christoph Willibald Ritter von

1. Ancestry, early life and training.

Gluck's earliest traceable ancestor is his great-grandfather, ‘Simon Gluckh von Rockenzahn’; (i.e. from Rokycany), as he is called in the marriage-contract (1672) of his son, Johann (or Hans) Adam (b c1649; d 1722). The surname Gluck (variously spelt Gluckh, Klugh, Kluch, etc.) probably derives from the Czech word kluk (boy). By 1675 Hans Adam was serving as gamekeeper to Prince Ferdinand August von Lobkowitz, who held vast tracts of land in Bohemia as well as the county of Schörnstein-Neustadt in the Upper Palatinate. A document from 1683 refers to Hans Adam also as a ‘jocolator’, which title, Prod'homme speculated (D1948), might have indicated musical duties (Marmontel, he noted, later referred to the composer Gluck as ‘le jongleur de Bohême’).

Gluck's father Alexander Johannes (b Neustadt an der Waldnaab, 28 Oct 1683), one of four sons of Hans Adam who were all foresters or gamekeepers, served under Prince Philipp Hyazinth von Lobkowitz in the War of the Spanish Succession, thereafter settling in or around Erasbach, Upper Palatinate. There he married Maria Walburga (surname unknown) about 1711; four sons and two daughters from their union survived, of whom Christoph was the eldest. The future composer was baptized on 4 July 1714 at Weidenwang, a parish that then also included Erasbach; no place of birth is given in the baptismal register. Christoph Fleischman(n) stood as godfather. In 1717, following the transfer of the Upper Palatinate to Bavaria, Gluck's father moved back into imperial territory, taking a position as forester to Grand Duchess Anna Maria of Tuscany in Reichstadt (Liberec), northern Bohemia; five years later he accepted a similar post under Count Philipp Joseph von Kinsky at Oberkreibitz (Chřibská), near Děčín. In 1727 he returned to the service of the Lobkowitz family at Schloss Eisenberg (Jezeři, near Chomutov). According to the memoirs of a later fellow lodger in Paris, the painter J.C. von Mannlich (C1934) it was as a schoolboy in Bohemia that the young Gluck received his first musical instruction (including individual lessons from the schoolmaster), learning to play several instruments and singing in the church choir. This much is plausible, in view of the country's fame as a breeding-ground for musicians (though Mannlich's account may itself have been influenced by Burney's recently published description of musical life in Bohemia; see BurneyGN). Mannlich's further claim that Gluck took up the jew's harp after his father confiscated his other instruments is possibly an embellishment, though one consistent with the composer's later public performances on exotic instruments. A brief childhood escape to Vienna, reported by both Mannlich and Schmid (D1854) (the latter relying on informants from Gluck's family), during which Gluck supposedly played or sang for his supper and lodging, is more likely to have had Prague as its goal (if it took place at all) and to have been related to activities during his university studies there (cf Heartz, E1988). In another late but essentially first-hand account, Gluck's disciple Salieri told his biographer Mosel (C1827) that the elder composer's ‘native tongue was Czech’ and that even later in life he ‘expressed himself in German only with effort, and still more so in French and Italian’. Writing before Gluck's arrival in Paris, the music theorist Laurent Garcin (Traité du mélo-drame, Paris, 1772, 114–16) listed Gluck among several composers of comic operas in Czech (although no such works by him have come to light).

According to Moser (D1940), Gluck enrolled at the University of Prague in 1731 in the faculties of logic and mathematics, though Mahler (E1974) found that records of auditors for this period were missing. During this time Prague boasted a thriving musical life, including Italian opera in the theatre of Count Sporck. According to early biographers, Gluck participated in Italian oratorio performances in the Franziskanerkirche and worked as an organist in the Týn Church in the Old Town Square.

Gluck left the university without taking a degree, and is next found in Milan in 1737. By most accounts he first passed through the imperial capital, where he probably became a musician in the household of the Lobkowitz family. This first Viennese sojourn is more surmised, from the composer's later professions of gratitude towards his Bohemian patrons, than proved directly from contemporary evidence. Gluck's arrival in Vienna would almost certainly have preceded the death of his father's employer, which occurred near the end of 1734. In the Habsburg capital he would have been heard by various resident and foreign nobles, among them the Milanese Prince Antonio Maria Melzi, who engaged him for his own cappella. According to Croll (Grove6), Gluck's departure for Milan in Melzi's retinue probably followed the latter's wedding on 3 January 1737 to Countess Maria Renata von Harrach (a child bride 49 years his junior). Philipp Hyazinth Lobkowitz's brother Georg Christian, Gluck's presumed employer following the former's death, was appointed imperial governor of Lombardy in 1743 and may have helped bring about several early performances of Gluck's operas, both in Milan and back in Vienna.

Of Gluck's studies in Milan there is little direct testimony, other than Carpani's statement (C2/1823, p.64) that G.B. Sammartini was the source of Gluck's ‘practical knowledge of all the instruments’, Gluck having been ‘for several years his pupil’. Sammartini was only marginally an opera composer, his main employment being as maestro di cappella to an ever-growing number of churches and as a teacher at the Collegio de' Nobili; he was also the leading symphonic composer of the Milanese school. But even outside his formal studies, Gluck would have profited from exposure to operatic offerings at the Regio Ducal Teatro, a venue gaining in importance among Italian opera houses. It was during this period that intermezzi di ballo replaced sung comic intermezzos in that theatre, a development that may have helped prepare Gluck for his later work as a ballet composer in the Viennese Burgtheater.

Gluck's début as an opera composer was with a setting of Metastasio's Artaserse, as the first opera for Carnival 1742 (première on 26 December 1741) at the Regio Ducal Teatro. According to an anecdote in a ‘French manuscript’ published in 1792 by Reichardt (but possibly based on information supplied by Gluck himself, according to Howard, A1995), the public accepted the composer's novel manner in this first opera only when he added an aria in the superficial local style, as a contrast. Still, that Gluck was asked to compose four carnival operas for Milan in as many years (the others were Demofoonte, 6 January 1743; La Sofonisba, 18 January 1744; and Ippolito, 31 January 1745) must be attributed largely to success with the public (as is documented by newspaper accounts), though protection from the Habsburg government was probably also a factor. Gluck also benefited from association with the principal singers in these works, particularly Giovanni Carestini and Caterina Aschieri. Two arias in Gluck's Ippolito survive only in prints commemorating Aschieri's performance in that work. That singer also took the part of Dircea in performances of Gluck's Demofoonte at Reggio nell'Emilia several months after the Milan production, singing two additional arias; the opera was also given in Bologna (Carnival 1744) and Ferrara (Carnival 1745), without the composer being present.

Between carnival seasons Gluck produced operas in other northern Italian cities: Cleonice (Demetrio) for Venice (S Samuele, 2 May 1742); Il Tigrane, for Crema, near Milan (26 September 1743); Ipermestra, again for Venice (S Giovanni Grisostomo, 21 November 1744); and Poro (Alessandro nell'Indie) for Turin (26 December 1744). All but the second of these were on texts by Metastasio. It has been claimed that Gluck's music was used in two pasticcios during 1744: in an Arsace for Milan, based on G.B. Lampugnani's setting of three years earlier, and in La finta schiava, a Turkish-themed opera staged at the Teatro S Angelo in Venice in May, with music by Giacomo Maccari and others. Hortschansky (H1966, F1973) casts doubt on the attributions to Gluck of eight numbers in Arsace on the basis of evidence both circumstantial and philological, but judged the authenticity of his contributions to La finta schiava as more likely, given attributions to ‘Vinzi, Lampugnani e Cluck’ in the libretto of the 1746 production of the work by Angelo Mingotti's troupe.

Gluck, Christoph Willibald Ritter von