Christoph Willibald Gluck

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About Christoph Willibald Gluck

Although only his opera Orfeo ed Euridice remains in the regular repertoire today, Christoph Willibald Gluck exerted a profound influence over European music that long outlived him. Born in Bavaria in 1714, he scored early operatic successes in Milan, Venice, Turin, Naples, Copenhagen, and London. But it was in the 1760s that he made his name with a series of “reform” operas that reacted against the vacuity and primacy of vocal display by instead insisting that arias should be integral to dramatic development. He had already sown the seeds of the style in his ballet Don Juan (1761). Starting with Orfeo (1762; revised for Paris as Orphée et Eurydice in 1774) and continuing with Alceste (1767) and Paride ed Elena (1770), he put his innovative ideas into practice, influencing the operas of Mozart (especially Don Giovanni), Berlioz (who prepared an edition of Orphée that long remained standard), and Wagner (who studied and performed the 1774 opera Iphigénie en Aulide). An annual imperial stipend enabled him to live his last years in style in Vienna, where he died in 1787, mourned by musicians across Europe.

HOMETOWN
Erasbach, Germany
BORN
July 2, 1714
GENRE
Classical

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