7. Final years in Vienna.

Despite his precarious health, and his recent disenchantment with Paris and its operatic public, after his return to Vienna in the autumn of 1779 Gluck still kept a foothold in the French capital, corresponding frequently with Kruthoffer, his agent there, about revisions to Echo et Narcisse and other matters. Through Kruthoffer, over the next few years, Gluck kept on good terms with numerous Parisian friends (including Giuseppe Pezzana, one of his collaborators on Le feste d’Apollo, then occupied with a new edition of Metastasio's works), and, encouraged at times by Kruthoffer, even toyed with the idea of a return visit. But he rejected most operatic texts that were offered him, whether from Paris or elsewhere. One project he evidently considered seriously was a Cora (possibly based on Marmontel) by Baron Wolfgang Heribert von Dalberg, who was then (1779) in the process of founding the Mannheim Nationaltheater; the libretto had been sent to Gluck by Count Seeau, opera intendant of the Bavarian court. On 8 June the composer wrote that he would discuss possible singers for the work when passing through Munich on his return trip to Vienna, but by January 1780 his interest had apparently cooled. In rejecting an ‘outline of a tragedy’ from Nicolas Gersin (a playwright better known for vaudeville farces), in a letter of 30 November 1779, Gluck cited his age and the disappointing reception of his last opera for Paris, adding ‘I have finished my career’. Nevertheless, he wrote to Klopstock of his continued intention to set the poet's Hermannsschlacht to music, as a last but not insignificant work.

In June 1780 the Mémoires secrets reported on a planned trip by Gluck to Italy – though mistakenly naming Milan as the destination, rather than Naples. (The confusion may have stemmed from an earlier report, in J.N. Forkel's Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek (1778–9), that Gluck was being asked to write an opera for Milan – possibly to inaugurate the Teatro alla Scala.) Though without naming Calzabigi as the conduit for the invitation, in his letter of 29 November 1780 Gluck spoke of staging four operas in Naples, one of which presumably would have been a setting of the poet's Ipermestra. (Already in 1777 a ‘Nobile Accademia delle Dame e dei Cavalieri’ had performed Gluck's Paride ed Elena, and the return to Naples of Millico in 1780 was another factor favouring a visit by Gluck.) According to Calzabigi's letter of 15 June 1784 to the Mercure de France, protesting the unauthorized appropriation and translation of his libretto, he had written Ipermestra for Gluck in 1778, after the composer had rejected a Semiramide of his (see below). In the event, the death of Maria Theresa on 20 November 1780 derailed Gluck's planned trip (Queen Maria Carolina being the empress's daughter), though a production of Alceste was mounted in 1785.

Although Gluck was by now semi-retired, his pre-eminence among composers in Habsburg service was evident during the 1781–2 season, when four of his operas were staged, as centrepieces of the festivities for the visit to Vienna of the Russian Grand Duke Paul Petrovich and his wife Maria Feodorovna, née Sophia Dorothea (travelling incognito, as ‘Count and Countess of the North’). Despite Kaunitz's urging that a new Italian opera be commissioned, Joseph II instead ordered productions of Gluck's Orfeo and Alceste, in the original language, as well as two vehicles with which to display his German Singspiel troupe: a translation of La rencontre imprévue, under the title Die Pilger von Mekka, and a new adaptation by Gluck himself of Iphigénie en Tauride, translated by Johann Baptist von Alxinger as Iphigenia auf Tauris (or Iphigenia in Tauris). This last reached the stage first, on 23 October, well before the arrival of the duke and duchess. (Gluck's work on the opera was mostly complete by the time of his second stroke in May, which paralysed his right arm.) The adaptation involved a change of tessitura for both Thoas and Orestes (downward in the first instance, upward in the second) and numerous rhythmic alterations, as well as various changes in the orchestral accompaniment. The composer himself arranged (through Kruthoffer) for the use of the scenic designs by Jean-Michel Moreau (le jeune) that had served for the original Parisian production of Iphigénie en Tauride; he later reported in a letter to Kruthoffer (2 November 1781) that these had ‘contributed substantially to the [opera's] good reception’ 9letters of 31 Jan and 2 Nov 1781). Unable to attend performances himself, Gluck received the compliments of Grand Duke Paul in his home.

The production of Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail was considerably delayed by the presentation of these various operas of Gluck's (particularly Die Pilger von Mekka, which used many of the same singers). Several numbers in Die Entführung are indebted to Gluck's opera, not only in regard to ‘janissary’ style and instrumentation, but also in terms of form (e.g. the major–minor alternation and run-on construction of the overture and first vocal number). Some spectators apparently found the resemblances to be too close, but Gluck effectively countered such concerns by specially requesting a performance of Die Entführung (as was his right, as a court composer) in early August 1782, and complimenting Mozart publicly on his opera.

During the next year, Gluck's generosity towards another younger composer, Salieri, took a different and more complex form, as he lent his name and prestige to his protégé's opera Les Danaïdes for the Paris Opéra (première on 26 April 1784). Unbeknown to Calzabigi, Gluck had given his libretto for Ipermestra, o Le Danaidi to his former collaborators Roullet and Tschudi to translate and adapt; unable or unwilling after 1779 to return to Paris himself, the composer instead passed the project on to Salieri (as he may have done with regard to the 1777 commission from Milan, and also when Beaumarchais sent him his Tarare some years later). The directors of the Opéra, and later the public, were encouraged to believe that Salieri had composed the work either ‘sous la dictée’ of Gluck or ‘under his direction’; only when the work proved successful did Gluck write (via Du Roullet, letter of 26 April 1784) to the Journal de Paris (16 May 1784) and reveal Salieri as the sole author. Yet as John Rice has shown (C1998), Joseph II, who actively supported Salieri's attempt to follow his mentor to Paris, was well aware who the true composer was, and the Opéra directors, too, were under few illusions. In Vienna, Gluck himself was less than forthright about the question. Joseph Martin Kraus, visiting the composer in April 1783, reported that ‘Pan Gluck’ (as he called him, using a Czech honorific) thought ‘the music [would] have too many of his own ideas in it … for it to be Salieri's work, yet he did not have sufficient confidence in the young man's talent to let the music be passed off under his name’.

During the winter of 1783–4 Gluck suffered another stroke, though he recovered sufficiently to be able to receive occasional visitors, and to carry on correspondence through his amenuensis Carlo Calin. His last will, dated 2 April 1786, named his wife as sole heiress (apart from gifts to servants, and token gifts to charities). On 14 November 1787 he suffered yet another stroke while out on a drive with his wife, supposedly after drinking a liqueur against doctors' orders. At his death the next day he was attended by Salieri, who directed a performance of Gluck's motet ‘De profundis clamavi’ (a work of his later years) at the burial two days later at the Matzleinsdorf cemetery. Gluck was later reburied in the Zentralfriedhof outside Vienna; his original headstone is preserved in the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien.

Gluck, Christoph Willibald Ritter von