Gluck is a noble and striking figure in musical history, alike in the
services he rendered to his art and the dignity and strength of his
personal character. As the predecessor of Wagner and Meyerbeer, who
among the composers of this century have given opera its largest and
noblest expression, he anticipated their important reforms, and in his
musical creations we see all that is best in what is called the new
school.
The man, the Ritter CHRISTOPH WILIBALD VON GLUCK, is almost as
interesting to us as the musician. He moved in the society of princes
with a calm and haughty dignity, their conscious peer, and never
prostituted his art to gain personal advancement or to curry favour
with the great ones of the earth. He possessed a majesty of nature
which was the combined effect of personal pride, a certain lofty
self-reliance, and a deep conviction that he was the apostle of an
important musical mission.
Gluck's whole life was illumined by an indomitable sense of his own
strength, and lifted by it into an atmosphere high above that of his
rivals, whom the world has now almost forgotten, except as they were
immortalised by being his enemies. Like Milton and Bacon, who put on
record their knowledge that they had written for all time, Gluck had a
magnificent consciousness of himself. "I have written," he says, "the
music of my 'Armida' in such a manner as to prevent its soon growing
old." This is a sublime vanity inseparable from the great aggressive
geniuses of the world, the wind of the speed which measures their
force of impact.
Duplessis's portrait of Gluck almost takes the man out of paint to put
him in flesh and blood. He looks down with wide-open eyes, swelling
nostrils, firm mouth, and massive chin. The noble brow, dome-like and
expanded, relieves the massiveness of his face; and the whole
countenance and figure express the repose of a powerful and passionate
nature schooled into balance and symmetry: altogether the presentment
of a great man, who felt that he could move the world and had found
the _pou sto_. Of a large and robust type of physical beauty, Nature
seems to have endowed him on every hand with splendid gifts. Such a
man as this could say with calm simplicity to Marie Antoinette, who
inquired one night about his new opera of "Armida," then nearly
finished--"_Madame, il est bientôt fini, et vraiment ce sera
superbe._"
One night Handel listened to a new opera from a young and unknown
composer, the "Caduta de' Giganti," one of Gluck's very earliest
works, written when he was yet corrupted with all the vices of the
Italian method. "Mein Gott! he is an idiot," said Handel; "he knows no
more of counterpoint then mein cook." Handel did not see with
prophetic eyes. He never met Gluck afterwards, and we do not know his
later opinion of the composer of "Orpheus and Eurydice" and "Iphigenia
in Tauris." But Gluck had ever the profoundest admiration for the
author of the "Messiah." There was something in these two strikingly
similar, as their music was alike characterised by massive simplicity
and strength, not rough-hewn, but shaped into austere beauty.
Before we relate the great episode of our composer's life, let us take
a backward glance at his youth. He was the son of a forester in the
service of Prince Lobkowitz, born at Weidenwang in the Upper
Palatinate, 2nd July 1714. Gluck was devoted to music from early
childhood, but received, in connection with the musical art, an
excellent education at the Jesuit College of Kommotau. Here he learned
singing, the organ, the violin and harpsichord, and had a mind to get
his living by devoting his musical talents to the Church. The Prague
public recognised in him a musician of fair talent, but he found but
little encouragement to stay at the Bohemian capital. So he decided to
finish his musical education at Vienna, where more distinguished
masters could be had. Prince Lobkowitz, who remembered his
gamekeeper's son, introduced the young man to the Italian Prince
Melzi, who induced him to accompany him to Milan. As the pupil of the
Italian organist and composer, Sammartini, he made rapid progress in
operatic composition. He was successful in pleasing Italian audiences,
and in four years produced eight operas, for which the world has
forgiven him in forgetting them. Then Gluck must go to London to see
what impression he could make on English critics; for London then, as
now, was one of the great musical centres, where every successful
composer or singer must get his brevet.
Gluck's failure to please in London was, perhaps, an important epoch
in his career. With a mind singularly sensitive to new impressions,
and already struggling with fresh ideas in the laws of operatic
composition, Handel's great music must have had a powerful effect in
stimulating his unconscious progress. His last production in England,
"Pyramus and Thisbe," was a _pasticcio_ opera, in which he embodied
the best bits out of his previous works. The experiment was a glaring
failure, as it ought to have been; for it illustrated the Italian
method, which was designed for mere vocal display, carried to its
logical absurdity.