Christoph Willibald Gluck

Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–1787) was the great reformer of eighteenth-century opera. Working in Vienna and then Paris, he set out to rescue serious opera from what he saw as its excesses: the vain display of star singers, the rigid, ornament-laden da capo arias, the neglect of drama in favour of vocal showing-off. In a famous series of ‘reform operas,’ beginning with Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) and culminating in the Paris masterpieces Iphigénie en Tauride (1779) and others, he aimed for ‘a beautiful simplicity,’ in which music served the drama directly: continuous, flowing scenes, a newly important role for the orchestra and chorus, and emotional truth above vocal fireworks. His reforms reshaped the course of opera and influenced everyone from Mozart to Berlioz and Wagner. He stands at the threshold between the Baroque world of Rameau and the Classical age.