Handel had many enemies in England, but he also had friends. Although imperious, he had a sweet side, and made friends with humble folk who loved music, even though he hobnobbed with royalty. Thomas Britton, a coal heaver, his friend, is sketched by an artist of the day in a picture where Handel is playing The Harmonious Blacksmith to Alexander Pope, the Duchess of Queensbury, Colley Cibber and other famous folk. Yet he stormed at everyone and even royalty “quaked in their boots” and were forced to behave themselves at rehearsals and concerts which Handel directed.
Accused of using someone’s melody, he answered, “That pig couldn’t use such a melody as well as I could!” He helped himself to so many that he was called the “Great Plagiarist.”
His latter life was spent quietly, with a few intimate friends, drinking his beer and smoking his beloved pipe. He was always generous and as he grew older seemed to become kindlier and softer. He contributed largely to the Foundling Asylum and even played the organ there.
He wanted to die on Good Friday, “in hopes,” he said, “of meeting his good God, his sweet Lord and Saviour on the day of his resurrection,” and on Good Friday, April 6th, 1759, he died.
Christoph Willibald Gluck—Father of Modern Opera
1714–1787
Now we come to the next genius, Christoph Gluck (1714–1787) born when George Frederick Handel was twenty-nine years old. He also attacked the frivolous drift of his time, but in another field from Handel and Bach, and gave the fashionable, aimless Italian opera its death blow for all time.
Gluck’s life is different from Handel, Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven as you will see later when you have read about all of these. For, until he was almost forty years old, Gluck did nothing to make him great, whereas these other men showed from their earliest years that they were unusual.
Gluck belongs to two periods for his life bridges Bach’s and Haydn’s. You will see how he first belonged to the frivolous fashion-loving composers like Hasse, Jomelli and Piccinni, and how later he blossomed into the great renewer and constructor of opera and escapes into a class of his own! His is the most remarkable instance of a man who starts with an ordinary talent, and later in life grasps a vision that never came to him in his early youth and which was not caught by others in his day.
Furthermore he was able to carry his point and not merely see the vision and let it go by. But first let us see how his life unfolded, for a man’s life helps us to understand his works.
Christoph Willibald Gluck, born July 2nd, 1714, at Weidenwang, near Nüremberg, was the son of a gamekeeper, who moved from estate to estate in the service of princes and nobles, and at the time of Christoph’s birth, was ranger to Eugene, Prince of Savoy. So, this little boy destined to become the great Chevalier von Gluck, was a child of the people even as was Haydn and others.