10. Ballets.

It was no doubt Gluck's experience as music director in the Burgtheater – for ballets as well as for operas and concerts – that moved Durazzo to appoint him as ballet composer for both theatres in 1759, following Starzer's departure for St Petersburg, for he had composed essentially no dance music up to then. Not surprisingly, then, Gluck's earliest surviving ballets adhere closely to the forms and dimensions established by Starzer and his main choreographic collaborator Hilverding, even while showing intimations of the achievements to come. The extent of Gluck's involvement in this area is still unclear, for unlike choreographers, composers of music for repertory ballets at this time are rarely named in printed sources, or even in music manuscripts, even though their identities were often widely known. Borrowing and collaboration in this functional, semi-anonymous sort of theatre music were thus common, and the identification of Gluck's contributions so far rests largely on payment records, and on his re-use of movements from ballets in operas written up to a quarter of a century later. Anonymity also encouraged experimentation in such areas as scoring, where onstage, unnotated instrumental parts (e.g. tambourines and castanets in Le prix de la danse, 1759, and the latter instrument in Don Juan) sometimes supplemented what was played from the orchestra.

Gluck was required to compose music for ballets in several different sub-genres, from simple divertissements and commedia dell'arte farces to mythological and pantomime ballets on well-developed plots. The few generally known pantomime ballets with printed programmes represent only a small fraction of the whole. One ambitious early ballet, given at Schönbrunn in 1759, was Les amours de Flore et Zéphire (see fig.2 above), whose choreography by Angiolini was an imitation of Marie Sallé's ballet Les fleurs from Les Indes galantes by Rameau (1735). The voluptuous music and choreography for the lovers moved one critic to describe the ballet as ‘aussi galant qu'on puisse en imaginer’ (Journal étranger, May 1760), but for the scene of Boreas and his retinue Gluck wrote music of a Sturm und Drang ferocity that presaged the finale of Don Juan. (Another ballet of the same year, Le naufrage, begins with a stormy sinfonia that Gluck reworked more than once, notably in the ‘Tempesta’ movement of Le feste d'Apollo.) La halte des Calmouckes of 1761 is an example of a different sort of ballet, being dependent to a large extent on exotic décors (described by Zinzendorf, C1747–1813, entry for 23 March 1761) for its effect; practice in writing music evocative of this and other exotic climes (whether Turkish, Savoyard or Spanish) was to prove valuable for ballet movements in many of Gluck's later operas (e.g. Iphigénie en Tauride).

Durazzo, himself a connoisseur of dance and dancers, sensed Gluck's potential to take ballet beyond its ordinary subjects and functions, and began in 1761 gradually to free him of routine duties as a ballet composer so that he could pursue larger projects. Angiolini and Gluck's pantomime ballet Don Juan, first given in October 1761, was perhaps not the first complete drama in dance on the modern stage (earlier in the century, John Weaver and various French choreographers had attempted as much), but in this work, for the first time, the music was fully equal to the choreography in ambitiousness and quality, and the creative team (including also Calzabigi and Durazzo) was able also to link the project to the wider intellectual concerns of aesthetic theory and the revival of classical art. Don Juan was not (as has sometimes been said) an ‘evening-length’ ballet, in the manner of many later Noverre ballets; as staged (initially, along with a French comedy and an opéra comique) it comprised a short sinfonia and 15 movements (out of the 31 of the complete score). But, no doubt prompted in part by Angiolini's explanatory programme, and in part by the elaborate stage spectacle (including towards the end a volcano erupting furies, and an earthquake), spectators perceived that this was more than just an ordinary repertory ballet. Writing of a later performance, Zinzendorf (C1747–1813, entry for 8 February 1762) remarked that ‘there is something striking and lugubrious in the scene where the ghost preaches to him [Don Juan] and indicates heaven to him.’

The cemetery-and-hellfire scene in Act 3 that so impressed Zinzendorf, cast as a large-scale chaconne with slow introduction, was a principal source of the musical idiom known as Sturm und Drang, with its vocabulary of rapid string scales, leaping martelé figures, tremolo and diminished harmonies. On hearing Traetta's Ifigenia in Tauride in 1763, with its representation of Orestes’ dream, Zinzendorf remarked on 8 December, ‘and that brings on the furies, which since the ballet of Don Juan are all the rage in Vienna's French theatre’. Orchestral writing of the sort associated with depictions of furies quickly found its way into the symphonies of Joseph Haydn and other composers. Gluck emphasized the specifically eschatological concerns of the finale of the ballet with otherworldly trombones (an extra expense for Durazzo), which in the Allegro non troppo section call back and forth to the horns (trumpets, in some later sources), echoing the dialogue of threats and defiance between Don Juan and the statue.

Gluck's music for Don Juan has survived the loss of the choreography in part because it is gestural while also satisfying as pure instrumental music – in direct response to Angiolini's habit (following Hilverding) of thoroughly mixing pantomime and dance. (Noverre's clear separation of the danced and pantomime sections of his works meant that the music for the latter was rarely self-sufficient when separated from its choreography or the ballet-master's extremely detailed explanation of the action.) At the conclusion of the printed programme Angiolini, after high praise for Gluck, specifically addresses the interdependence of music and gesture:

Music is essential for pantomimes: it is what speaks; we only make the gestures, like those ancient actors of tragedies and comedies who had the verses of the piece declaimed, and limited themselves to gesticulation. It would be nearly impossible for us to make ourselves understood without music, and the more it is apt for what we wish to express, the more we render ourselves intelligible.

Also fundamental to the success of Don Juan (and Gluck's reform operas in general) is the composer's increased concern for continuity, which he achieved mainly through linking and recall of movements or sections thereof, thereby promoting the spectators’ absorption in the spectacle. And in a way that looks forward to Mozart's treatment in Don Giovanni, Gluck plants early on in the score musical ideas that will assume major importance at the catastrophe. Mozart seems also to have remembered the Fandango in Don Juan (no.19) when composing the dance music that underlies much of the Act 3 finale of Le nozze di Figaro.

For Sémiramis of 1765, his only other collaboration with Angiolini and Calzabigi (though by no means his only ballet since Don Juan), Gluck composed a score of even greater concentration, in keeping with the increased theoretical rigour of the choreography and accompanying essay (in which the ballet is said to last a mere 20 minutes). The more functional, even abstract, style of much of the music was possibly a reflection of Noverre's influence, in that the protagonist of the ballet, Nancy Trancard (née Levier), had been a member of the rival choreographer's troupe. Also reflected in Gluck's music is his conscious effort – no doubt made in consultation with Calzabigi – to create an atmosphere suggestive of ancient drama, as in no.9 of the score, an archaic-sounding ‘air that is supposed [by the audience] to be danced to a canticle’ in praise of Baal.

Although unaccompanied by a programme, and serving no higher purpose than entertainment, Gluck's ballet Les amours d'Alexandre et de Roxane of 1764 was deemed by the young Ditters, in an article for the Wienerisches Diarium of 18 October 1766 (supplement) to be one of a handful of works sufficient to make the composer immortal. This work and the unperformed Achille in Sciro of 1765 were later to serve as sources of music for Gluck's Parisian operas, but as originally conceived they were both allegories of the mutual temperance of amorous and warlike passions, represented first alternately and then together in a concluding chaconne or passacaille. Both the chaconne in Alexandre et Roxane, with its voluptuous intertwining of lines (perhaps representing the lovers’ arms), and the short sinfonia are in a convincingly French style, which bespeaks Gluck's acquaintance with the music of Lully and Rameau, but also his prior experience of writing for such exponents of la haute danse as Antoine Pitrot and Jean Dupré and his close study of the Ciaccona in Hasse's Alcide al bivio of 1760.

Gluck, Christoph Willibald Ritter von