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 favor 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
immortalized 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 'Ar-mida' 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 afterward, 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 characterized 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,
July 2,1714. 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 recognized 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.