5. New directions.

Even before his disastrous experience in the theatre administration, and the disappointing reception of Paride ed Elena, the generally less favourable conditions for the sort of Italian spectacles that he and Calzabigi had been creating led Gluck to start thinking in different directions. (No celebratory opera, whether from Gluck, Calzabigi or Metastasio, was commissioned for the wedding of Archduchess Marie Antoinette to the French dauphin in May 1770, the empress having decided instead on a banquet at Belvedere palace.) During his sojourn in Vienna in September 1772, Charles Burney heard of Gluck's detailed plan to compose a more dramatic setting of Dryden's St Cecilia's Day ode Alexander's Feast (see BurneyGN, i, 242–3), which he had recently heard in an Italian translation from Florence; had Gluck remained in Vienna, he might well have contributed to the oratorio productions of the nascent Tonkünstler-Societät. The increasing cultivation of German letters in Vienna, in preference to French and Italian, and the reform of the German stage (which he had so recently opposed, on pecuniary grounds) were probably factors in Gluck's decision around this time to set to music several texts by F.G. Klopstock. By 1769 the poet had heard reports of the composer performing several bardic choruses from his tragedy Hermannsschlacht (first published in 1767) – though Gluck apparently never notated them, and over the next few years he set several of Klopstock's secular odes. Four of the latter appeared in almanachs before the entire set of seven was published in 1785. (One further ode, ‘An den Tod’, was notated by J.F. Reichardt in 1783 from the composer's performance of it and published in 1792. In a letter of August 1773 Gluck told Klopstock that he was sending him eight songs on his poetry, although the two in ‘bardic’ style were possibly duplicate settings.) While constituting only a minor part of Gluck's output, these works exerted a powerful influence on the developing German lied, in part on account of the esteem in which they were held by leading literary figures, including Klopstock himself (who met Gluck in 1774 while the composer was en route to Paris, and later visited him at his suburban residence in St Marx).

Provocation for another change of direction came from François Louis Gand Leblanc du Roullet, a nobleman from Normandy temporarily employed at the French embassy in Vienna, who (probably in 1771) submitted a text to Gluck: an operatic adaptation of Racine's Iphigénie. The history of this work belongs almost as much to Vienna as to Paris, since it apparently already existed in full (at least in a preliminary state) by the time of Burney's visit to Vienna in September 1772, a year before Gluck's departure for the French capital. Burney (BurneyGN, i, 265) reported that

though he had not as yet committed a note of it to paper, [it] was so well digested in his head, and his retention is so wonderful, that he sang it nearly from the beginning to the end, with as much readiness as if he had had a fair score before him.

(The truth of this claim cannot be tested, as Gluck's autograph score does not survive.) Nor can Calzabigi entirely be excluded from the story of the genesis of the opera. Praise for Racine's tragedy runs like a refrain through his critical writings, from the ‘Dissertazione’ in his Metastasio edition onwards, and he can be presumed to have shared his opinion of the piece with Gluck. Calzabigi himself was competent at writing French prose, as he had proved in the ballet programme(s) he had helped to draft, but as a non-native he was not qualified to versify a full libretto in that language. The tale of Iphigenia's sacrifice was in any case ripe for operatic setting in the new manner, having been recommended by both Denis Diderot (‘Entretiens sur Le fils naturel’, 1757) and Francesco Algarotti, the latter even going so far as to include a prose libretto in his Saggio sopra l'opera in musica (1755).

An ample view of Gluck's domestic life around this time is provided by Burney, who encountered him three times during his stay in Vienna. Warned that the composer was ‘as formidable a character as Handel used to be: a very dragon, of whom all are in fear’, at his first meeting he found him to be in good humour, and extraordinarily willing to perform from and discuss his own works. Gluck was ‘much pitted with the small-pox, and very course in figure and look’, but lived elegantly in a large house with garden in the Rennweg, not far from the Belvedere. He first accompanied his 13-year-old niece in scenes from Alceste, and then in airs by other composers, notably Traetta, after which Gluck

was prevailed upon to sing himself; and, with as little voice as possible … with the richness of accompaniment, the energy and vehemence of his manner in the Allegros, and his judicious expression in the slow movements, he so well compensated for the want of voice that it was a defect which was soon entirely forgotten. (see BurneyGN, i, 264–5)

On this occasion, and at a later dinner at the residence of the British ambassador, Lord Stormont, Gluck was at ease among a company that included several members of the high aristocracy: some patrons from the days of Durazzo's leadership of the theatres (e.g. Juan Carlos de Braganza), and others, such as Countess Maria Wilhelmine Thun, who were later to be among Mozart's strongest supporters. On taking leave of Gluck several days later, Burney found him ‘like a true great genius … still in bed’ (BurneyGN, i, 343); Gluck's wife explained ‘that he usually wrote all night, and lay in bed late to recruit’.

Gluck, Christoph Willibald Ritter von