Synopsis

In German, “Gluck” means ‘luck’, and today’s date marks the birthday of a German composer named Christoph Willibald Gluck, whose good fortune it was to be credited with “reforming” the vocally ornate but dramatically static form of Baroque opera.

In the 18th century, opera was the biggest and most high-profile of all musical forms, and Gluck wrote 49 of them during his 67 years of life. Like many 18th century opera composers, the stories Gluck chose were often based on ancient Greek myths such as “Orpheus and Eurydice.”

It wasn’t the matter of Gluck’s operas that was revolutionary, but the manner in which he set these stories to music. When the British music historian Charles Burney visited Gluck in 1771, he recorded the composer’s own words on the subject.

“It was my design,” said Gluck,” to divest music of those abuses which the vanity of singers, or the complacency of composers, had so long disfigured Italian opera and made the most beautiful and magnificent of all public exhibitions into the most tiresome and ridiculous.”

To sum it all up, Gluck told Burney, “My first and chief care as a dramatic composer was to aim at a noble simplicity.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Christoph Willibald von Gluck (1714 - 1787) Dance of the Blessed Spirits, fr Orpheus Academy of Ancient Music; Christopher Hogwood, cond. L'Oiseau-Lyre 410553