[Born in the early part of the 18th century. Died at Vienna, 1787.]
The great merit of Gluck is that he emancipated music from the trammels
of conventionalism and false taste, and made it the exponent and
minister of poetry and the drama. Gluck, invited to London in 1745 to
celebrate in music the butcheries of the Duke of Cumberland, found that
the operas represented there were mere concerts, for which the drama was
a pretext. Sound was everything, meaning nothing. His own music was set
to words with which it had no connexion, and, torn from its original
context, lost all its effect. This fact led him to the discovery of the
great principle which is the key to the rest of his life: viz., that
music is not merely a pleasant arrangement of sounds intended to gratify
the ear, but a subsidiary language, able to exalt and strengthen the
emotions, raised by the measure and force of the spoken language to
which it is allied. In 1761, he composed his opera of “Alceste,” as an
illustration of his idea. It was followed in 1762 and 1763 by “Paris and
Helena” and “Orpheus.” In 1779, he composed the “Iphigenia in Tauride,”
the greatest of his works. Wieland has happily expressed Gluck’s claim
upon our respect in a sentence. “He preferred,” he says, “the Muses to
the Syrens.” His works are not so much operas, in the ordinary sense of
the term, as poems, in which music is employed for producing and
sustaining emotion. Off the stage Gluck was nothing, but upon it the
musician was himself a poet. The manners of Gluck, like those of
Beethoven and Handel, were rough and blunt. He was large in person; and
his habits were indolent and somewhat sensual. The bust discloses the
man.
[From the Terracotta, by Houdon. In the musical collection of the
Royal Library at Berlin. The only bust taken from the life.]
327A. CHRISTOPH GLUCK. _Musician._
[From the Terracotta by Houdon, in the Louvre.]
327B. CHRISTOPH GLUCK. _Musician._
[From the bust by Francin (Fils) in the Louvre.]
327C. CHRISTOPH GLUCK. _Musician._
[From a bust by R. Wagner of Berlin.]