Gluck Starts Traveling
When he was three years old he was taken to Bohemia, (now Czecho-Slovakia), for his father entered the service of Prince Lobkowitz, a great music lover, of whom you will hear again. His parents were quite poor, yet it is remarkable that above everything else they gave Christoph a good education and at twelve he went to a Jesuit school near Eisenberg, the home of Prince Lobkowitz.
Here he learned to sing and to play the organ, the violin, the ’cello and the clavier. He was diligent and became most proficient and was loved and admired by the school fathers. But little did they dream that some day he was to write classic operas, based not on Christian stories but the pagan dramas of the Greeks!
When nearly nineteen, he left the seminary and said good-bye to the Church of St. Ignatius and went to Prague. To support himself and to carry on his scientific and musical studies he gave lessons, played for rustic festivals and earned money the best way he could, until Prince Lobkowitz became interested in him and introduced him to the musical circle at court. Here he met Count Melzi who took him to Milan, where he was taught by Giovanni Battista Sammartini, a celebrated organist and teacher of counterpoint. After four years of study he completed his musical education.
In Milan, he wrote his first opera, Artaserse which was performed in 1741. Metastasio, the popular librettist, wrote the words to Artaserse, as he did for many of Gluck’s works written in the loose style of the Italian opera. He was now twenty-eight and in the five years spent here, he composed eight operas, through which he gained great popularity. But not yet had it come to him to revolutionize opera; he simply used the old pattern which was really nothing but groups of songs, recitatives and choruses having very little connection except to give the performers the chance to do musical feats to amaze the audience with their skill. The story of these operas, meagre as it was, stopped short, for some long and elaborate cadenza, and then it went on again with no thought of the meaning of the drama but rather to tickle the taste of the audience and the performer. The orchestra, too, was a step-child, for no one cared where it came in as long as it was politely subdued, keeping the singers on the key, and doing its best to be heard only when bidden. So, Gluck followed these ideas in the beginning and perhaps it was better that he did, otherwise he might never have realized how far opera had strayed from the ideals of Monteverde.
Having eight operas to his credit, he began to get commissions from other cities and countries, and next accepted an invitation, in 1745, to go to London as composer of opera at the Haymarket Theatre. In 1746 he wrote La Caduta de Giganti (The Fall of the Giants), with no doubt a libretto of Metastasio’s, then he gave his Artamene and was assisted in their production by Handel, who is supposed to have treated the works with contempt. He is said to have exclaimed, “Even my shoe-black can write better counterpoint than Gluck.” But we must remember that Gluck had not yet become the great Gluck. His visit to England was fruitful, for Gluck heard and digested the great oratorios of Handel, and realized that the voice and orchestra might be handled the same way in opera. No doubt his mission was beginning to dawn on him; it came, not as a great revelation, but gradually.
He Makes Success of Failure
Another thing that gave him a push forward and shows how great people can make a success of failure: he was asked to write a pasticcio (Italian word meaning a meat-pie), or a string of melodies, very fashionable in his day. He strung together his best airs from his Italian operas, and called it Pyramus and Thisbe, but it was a dismal failure. “Ah, ha!” he must have thought, “why shouldn’t this musical drivel fail, for it is naught but trash, and with nothing that is needed to make a good literary drama.” So this was one of the experiences that led him to reform opera, making the words fit the music and not stopping a performance, so that a popular soloist could sing a meaningless trill and then start again with the other part of the word,—the way that opera was being written at that time.
After his London ups and downs he went to Paris and heard the operas of Rameau. He realized now the value of musical declamation and recitative to the meaning and action of opera if used with thought, and he was not slow in taking suggestions.
Gluck was probably the most all round man of his day, for he knew literature and science as did few musicians. He knew all the influential people in the arts, sciences, and music in London, Hamburg, Dresden and Vienna, and his home was a center of learned and delightful people. When in Vienna but a short time, he was commissioned to write an opera and he produced, with success, La Semiramide, after which he went to Copenhagen. His next opera Telemacco in which he began to work out his new ideas was well received, in Rome and Naples.