page_title: Christoph Willibald Gluck
section_title: Operatic reforms
hierarchical_section_title: Christoph Willibald Gluck / Operatic reforms
caption_attribution_description: English: Title page of the first printed edition of the score of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride Italiano: Frontespizio della prima edizione a stampa della partitura dell'Iphigénie en Tauride di Christoph Willibald Gluck
context_page_description: Christoph Willibald Gluck was a composer of Italian and French opera in the early classical period. Born in the Upper Palatinate and raised in Bohemia,
  both part of the Holy Roman Empire, he gained prominence at the Habsburg court at Vienna. There he brought about the practical reform of opera's dramaturgical practices for which many intellectuals had been campaigning. With a series of radical new works in the 1760s, among them Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste, he broke the stranglehold that Metastasian opera seria had enjoyed for much of the century. Gluck introduced more drama by using simpler recitative and cutting the usually long da capo aria. His later operas have half the length of a typical baroque opera.
  The strong influence of French opera encouraged Gluck to move to Paris in November 1773. Fusing the traditions of Italian opera and the French into a unique synthesis, Gluck wrote eight operas for the Parisian stage. Iphigénie en Tauride was a great success and is generally acknowledged to be his finest work.
context_section_description: Gluck had long pondered the fundamental problem of form and content in opera. He thought both of the main Italian operatic genres, opera buffa and opera seria, had strayed too far from what opera should really be and seemed unnatural. Opera buffa had long lost its original freshness. Its jokes were threadbare and the repetition of the same characters made them seem no more than stereotypes. In opera seria, the singing was devoted to superficial effects and the content was uninteresting and fossilised. As in opera buffa, the singers were effectively absolute masters of the stage and the music, decorating the vocal lines so floridly that audiences could no longer recognise the original melody. Gluck wanted to return opera to its origins, focusing on human drama and passions and making words and music of equal importance.
  Francesco Algarotti's Essay on the Opera (1755) proved to be an inspiration for Gluck's reforms. He advocated that opera seria had to return to basics and that all the various elements—music (both instrumental and vocal), ballet, and staging—must be subservient to the overriding drama. Several composers of the period, including Niccolò Jommelli and Tommaso Traetta, attempted to put these ideals into practice (and added more ballets).
  In Vienna, Gluck met like-minded figures in the operatic world: Count Giacomo Durazzo, the head of the court theatre, and one of the primary instigators of operatic reform in Vienna ; the librettist Ranieri de' Calzabigi, who wanted to attack the dominance of Metastasian opera seria; the innovative choreographer Gasparo Angiolini; and the London-trained castrato Gaetano Guadagni.
  The first result of the new thinking was Gluck's reformist ballet Don Juan, but a more important work was soon to follow. On 5 October 1762, Orfeo ed Euridice was given its first performance, on a libretto by Calzabigi, set to music by Gluck. Gluck tried to achieve a noble, Neo-Classical or "beautiful simplicity". The dances were arranged by Angiolini and the title role was taken by Guadagni, a catalytic force in Gluck's reform, renowned for his unorthodox acting and singing style. Orfeo, which has never left the standard repertory, showed the beginnings of Gluck's reforms. His idea was to make the drama of the work more important than the star singers who performed it, and to do away with dry recitative (recitativo secco, accompanied only by continuo) that broke up the action. In 1765 Melchior Grimm published "Poème lyrique", an influential article for the Encyclopédie on lyric and opera librettos.
  Gluck and Calzabigi followed Orfeo with Alceste (1767) and Paride ed Elena (1770), dedicated to his friend João Carlos de Bragança (Duke de Lafões), an expert on music and mythology, pushing their innovations even further. Calzabigi wrote a preface to Alceste, which Gluck signed, setting out the principles of their reforms:
  no da capo arias
  no opportunity for vocal improvisation or virtuosic displays of vocal agility or power
  no long melismas
  a more predominantly syllabic setting of the text to make the words more intelligible
  far less repetition of text within an aria
  a blurring of the distinction between recitative and aria, declamatory and lyrical passages, with altogether less recitative
  accompanied rather than secco recitative
  simpler, more flowing melodic lines
  an overture that is linked by theme or mood to the ensuing action
  Joseph von Sonnenfels praised Gluck's tremendous imagination and the setting after attending a performance of Alceste. In 1769 Gluck performed his operas in Parma.
  On 2 September 1771 Charles Burney visited Gluck, living in Sankt Marx. Burney thought Gluck's preface, in which Gluck gives his “reasons for deviating from the beaten track”, important enough to give it almost in its entirety: "It was my intention to confine music to its true dramatic province, of assisting poetical expression, and of augmenting the interest of the fable; without interrupting the action, or chilling it with useless and superfluous ornaments; for the office of music, when joined to poetry, seemed to m
caption: Title-page of the first printed score
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