13. Other works.

Like Wagner, Gluck wrote few works that were not intended for theatrical performance, and the few he did write have remained little known. As Viennese theatrical and church music were, for the most part, organized separately, Gluck had little occasion to compose sacred works, except for the Lenten concerts in the Burgtheater during the time when he was its music director; those pieces attributed to him in Gumpenhuber's chronicle are now lost. A number of concert symphonies and arias, some of uncertain attribution, do survive; these probably date from the period of his service in the household of Prince Hildburghausen, for the most part. The symphonies, which have yet to be studied systematically, mostly adhere to the archetype of the Italian operatic overture in terms of style, scoring and three-movement form. A C major symphony, listed by Wotquenne (A1904) as no.1, carries programmatic titles for each movement, and its opening ‘Tempête’ is closely related to the sinfonia from Gluck's ballet Le naufrage of 1759. Although relatively conservative in terms of the application of sonata principle (as, indeed, are most of Gluck's dramatic works), these symphonies exhibit attractive and imaginative figurations and textures, offering corroboration of Dittersdorf's claim (C1801) that Gluck was ‘… a man born for the orchestra’. Some of Gluck's trio sonatas from the 1740s show a style more orchestral than chamber-orientated, and they may have been conceived for performances with more than one instrument per part, at least as an option.

Several of the individual Italian arias attributed to Gluck are on texts by Metastasio that he did not set in their entirety, and were thus probably for concert use; some carry the names of singers with whom he was associated early in his career. The French airs published or circulating under his name during the 1770s and after probably represent attempts by less talented musicians to profit from his renown. Of Gluck's shorter vocal works, it was the settings of odes by Klopstock that earned him the most respect from his contemporaries, in part because they were available in print. These works, in which (unsurprisingly) operatic techniques are employed with some frequency, were imitated by several lied composers of the generation before Schubert, notably Reichardt.