Biography
Christoph Willibald Gluck was born in 1714 in Erasbach in the Upper Palatinate and is considered one of the most significant opera reformers in music history. With his reform opera Orfeo ed Euridice, premiered in 1762 in Vienna, he radically broke with the conventions of Baroque opera and placed dramatic expression above virtuoso vocal artistry. His preface to the opera Alceste of 1769 became the manifesto of a new aesthetic aiming at truth and naturalness. Gluck worked in Vienna and Paris and ignited in the French capital the famous quarrel between Gluckists and Piccinnists about the future of opera. His influence reached through Mozart and Berlioz deep into the nineteenth century. As a cosmopolitan, he united Italian, French, and German traditions into a new whole. Gluck died in 1787 in Vienna.
On Stagelog
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