The German reception of Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck in the early nineteenth century

Performances of operas by Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787) were particularly frequent in the German-speaking area of Europe during the early 19th century, constituting what might be called a Gluck-Pflege. For the most part, past writings on this subject have lacked discussion of the revisions opera companies made to Gluck’s operas and the impact these changes would have had upon critics’ and audiences’ perceptions of the composer and his works. Just as opera houses strayed farther from Gluck’s original scores, writers similarly manipulated and mythologized Gluck’s biography in order to portray a composer bent on reforming the opera world and offering a new path for younger opera composers. In particular, 19th-century writers dramatized the role he played in the Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinnistes, in which Gluck, an uncompromising German composer (his upbringing was in fact Bohemian), transformed French opera by creating unified works of art by adhering to his true artistic principles. Whereas previous scholarship mostly dismissed these stories because of their historical inaccuracies, I will use these accounts to illuminate critics’ perceptions of Gluck as an alternative to the prevailing popularity of French and Italian grand opera and as a beacon to young German composers in their search for a new and original direction in opera.