2. Itinerant ‘maestro di cappella’.

A recommendation from the Milanese composer Lampugnani, who staged three operas in London during the 1743–4 season, has sometimes been cited as the reason for Gluck's having been invited in 1745 to become house composer at the King's Theatre, though Howard (A1995) pointed to Francesco Vanneschi (acting for Lord Middlesex) as a more likely conduit, in part because he recruited several singers from earlier productions of Gluck's operas at the same time. The composer is supposed to have travelled by way of Frankfurt, where the coronation of Francis Stephen of Lorraine (husband of the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa) as Holy Roman Emperor on 28 September 1745 provided conspicuous opportunities for musicians; Joseph Maria Carl von Lobkowitz, son of the Austrian governor in Milan, is known to have been in Frankfurt at the conclusion of the festivities on 15 October. Another Lobkowitz, Prince Ferdinand Philipp (son of Philipp Hyazinth, whom Gluck's father had served), was in England during the same period as Gluck, as Burney notes (BurneyH, ii, 844), but this may have been coincidental.

The timing of Gluck's London sojourn was hardly opportune; the King's Theatre had been closed for much of the year, owing to the ongoing Jacobite rebellion, and Gluck's initial offering, La caduta de' giganti (première on 7 January 1746), was a transparent allegory of the rebels' imminent defeat, calculated to forestall anti-foreigner and anti-Catholic sentiment among spectators. The work was for the most part assembled from numbers originally composed for Italy. A second opera, Artamene, first given on 4 March 1746, likewise relied heavily on pre-existing music. This practice of borrowing or parodying numbers from earlier works presented elsewhere was to persist throughout Gluck's career. The performers in the Haymarket company during the 1746 season included Teresa Imer (Theresa Cornelys), shortly thereafter a member of Pietro Mingotti's opera troupe along with Gluck, and the Viennese dancer Eva Weigel (‘Mlle Violetti’), future wife of the reform-minded actor David Garrick. Exposure to the new, more naturalistic acting style of Garrick (whose pupil Gaetano Guadagni became the first Orpheus of Gluck's opera) and to the music of Handel can be counted among the more important results of the composer's visit to Britain, ahead of more tangible products such as the above-mentioned operas and the set of trio sonatas published by J. Simpson (which were probably composed in Milan). No credible evidence of a direct meeting with Handel survives, though he may have appeared with him at a charity concert on 25 March 1746, the music of which was mostly by those two masters and Galuppi. In his account of the 1784 Handel commemoration (specifically, in his ‘Sketch of the Life of Handel’), Burney reported that Handel, asked for his opinion of Gluck, had responded with an oath and the statement that ‘he knows no more of contrapunto, as mein cook, Waltz’ (Burney, C1785). As the singer Gustavus Waltz seems not to have served Handel in that capacity, it is likely that Handel's comment had been misreported or misremembered. During Burney's visit to Vienna in 1772 Gluck told him ‘that he owed entirely to England the study of nature in his dramatic compositions’ (BurneyGN, i, 267). While a desire to flatter certainly entered into Gluck's remark, Burney did not find it implausible.

Before leaving for the Continent, Gluck twice exhibited his skill in playing ‘upon Twenty-six Drinking Glasses, tuned with Spring-Water’ (General Advertiser, 31 March 1746), accompanied by performers from the opera. He gave similar performances in Copenhagen in 1749, and found occasion in many later compositions to use other exotic instruments (if not this one). His choice of the musical glasses for these concerts probably also indicates that, though competent as an accompanist and orchestral leader on both the harpsichord and the violin, he was not of a soloist's calibre on either instrument.

Gluck next surfaces in June 1747, as composer of Le nozze d'Ercole e d'Ebe, one of two operas (the other being by Hasse) presented by the troupe of Pietro Mingotti in the gardens of Schloss Pillnitz near Dresden for the double wedding uniting members of the ruling Bavarian and Saxon dynasties. Gluck had apparently already become a member of the company, which he had possibly encountered at the imperial festivities in Frankfurt two years earlier. For this festa teatrale he again borrowed heavily from earlier works, and even took a movement of its overture from a symphony by his teacher Sammartini. A receipt (dated 15 September 1747) for payment to Gluck by the Saxon court of 412 thaler, 12 groschen, calls him a ‘Sänger’, though this may reflect his rank in terms of the pay-scale for the festivities, rather than his actual function. Gluck's biographers have assumed that shortly before or after the Saxon festivities Gluck travelled to Bohemia to settle his inheritance, his mother having died on 8 October 1740 (not in August 1740, as often reported), and his father on 26 July 1743.

Gluck's next commission, in the spring of 1748, was even more prestigious: an opera – Metastasio's Semiramide riconosciuta (originally for Rome, 1729) – celebrating the birthday of the empress, Maria Theresa, for the inauguration of the newly renovated Viennese court theatre (or Burgtheater). The choice of Gluck (presumably by the impresario Rocco Lopresti, in consultation with the court) over resident composers such as Bonno and Wagenseil, or the empress's former music teacher Hasse, seems to have been due largely to the favourable impression made by his serenata for Dresden, where representatives of the Habsburg court had been in attendance. But other factors probably entered into the decision as well: in 1747 his Demofoonte had been revived in Milan in celebration of the empress's birthday (13 May), and his works may even have been heard in the imperial capital (Deutsch, A1969; Antonicek, E1987). It was certainly also helpful to Gluck's cause that the protagonist of the 1748 opera, Vittoria Tesi (recently appointed as an imperial virtuosa di camera), had been the Hypermnestra of his last opera for Venice. Though past her prime as a singer, this imposing ‘donnone’, possessed of a powerful low register, was well suited to play the part of an Assyrian queen disguised as her own son; she had already played the role three and a half years earlier, in Hasse's setting of the opera for Venice.

The choice of piece probably preceded that of the composer. The story of the embattled queen Semiramide, acclaimed by her people and reaffirmed in her right to rule, was perfectly apt as an allegory of Maria Theresa in her struggle to retain the Habsburg throne, and, as was noted by Croll in his preface to the edition of the opera (Sämtliche Werke, iii/12), had already served such a purpose at the empress's Prague coronation in 1743, when the War of the Austrian Succession was at its height. Metastasio was almost certainly not involved in the 1748 revision; the variants in the text as set by Gluck largely derived from Hasse's setting for Venice (1744) and its revision for Dresden (1747). Conscious of the importance of the occasion, Gluck wrote a completely original score, but did not moderate all the extravagances of his style (e.g. in roughness of part-writing). Metastasio reported that the opera was ‘exalted to the stars’ (it was given 27 times in all), despite Gluck's ‘archvandalian music [musica arcivandalica], which is insupportable’ (letter of 29 June 1748, trans. in Burney, C1796). The negative opinion of so influential a figure as the court poet helps to explain why Gluck did not remain in Vienna after the success of his opera; it is likely too that, just as in the case of Mozart, nearly half a century later, there was no position vacant for a new court composer.

Some time during the summer of 1748 – presumably after the last performance of Semiramide on 11 July – Gluck left the Austrian capital, and by September he had rejoined the Mingotti troupe in Hamburg, where he took over the direction of the orchestra from Paolo Scalabrini, who had entered the employ of the Danish court. Judging from Mannlich's account (C1934) of the elaborate, gleeful fantasy about an itinerant opera buffa troupe in which Gluck and his friends and family indulged during one of his Parisian sojourns many years later, the composer cherished memories of his time in the actual Mingotti company. Yet it was also during this period that Gluck contracted a venereal infection from the prima buffa of the troupe, Gaspera Beccheroni (the mistress also of the British diplomat John Wyche); his and his wife's later childlessness can probably be traced to that illness. In late November the Mingotti troupe moved on from Hamburg to Copenhagen, where Gluck received a commission for a festa teatrale, entitled La contesa de' numi, in celebration of the birth to Queen Luise of a son and heir (Christian). The work (on a text by Metastasio, originally set by Vinci in 1729) had its première on 9 April 1749; its music was mostly original, but included an orchestral movement borrowed from Sammartini. As the queen's confinement was a protracted one, the stay of the Mingotti troupe was extended, allowing Gluck the leisure again to present concerts (one of them on 19 April) in which he performed on the musical glasses. There is mention also of a concert ‘di Cimbalo’, which would be the only known instance of Gluck performing as a keyboard soloist.

At some point later in 1749 Gluck transferred his allegiances to a former member of the Mingotti troupe, the impresario Giovanni Battista Locatelli, whose opera company was then active principally in Prague. A desire to return to the city in which he had spent much of his youth may well have entered into the composer's decision. For the Carnival 1750 season at the Kotzen Opera (Nuovo Teatro) Gluck composed a setting of Metastasio's Ezio; he was essentially to recompose the same text for Vienna 14 years later. During 1750 the company also performed Gluck's Ipermestra, and both operas were performed in Germany (Leipzig and Munich, respectively) in 1751, though with other music added and without the composer being present.

Between the 1750 and 1751 Carnival seasons at the Kotzen Opera, Gluck's principal preoccupation was his marriage on 15 September to Maria Anna (Marianne) Bergin (or Pergin), the 18-year-old daughter of a wealthy Viennese merchant, Joseph Bergin, long deceased. According to a story supplied to Schmid (D1854) by members of Gluck's family, the couple had met during the composer's previous visit to the capital, but the match had been opposed by the girl's father; with her guardian, Joseph Salliet, substituted for her father, this account may be plausible. The bride brought a considerable fortune to the marriage (some 4000 gulden, not including the dowry), which secured the composer's future financially (at least until his ill-fated involvement with the impresario Giuseppe d'Afflisio; see §4 below). Gluck's place of residence is not specified in the marriage-contract, and it is assumed that the couple lived initially with the bride's mother Therese in the Laurant'sche Haus (in the present Mariahilferstrasse). They presumably remained in the city between Gluck's foreign engagements, but at the time no musical post seems to have been available to him there.

Gluck's continued presence in Vienna during 1751 is implicit in Metastasio's mention of him (in a letter of 6 November of that year to Farinelli) as one of two ‘German’ composers known to him there: ‘The first [Gluck] has surprising fire, but is mad; and the other [Wagenseil] is a great harpsichord player. Gluck composed an opera for Venice [Ipermestra is probably meant], which was very unfortunate. He has composed others here with various success. I am not a man to pretend to judge of him’ (trans. Burney, C1796). When the poet's judgment of Gluck here is at best equivocal, his opinion of Wagenseil is hardly better: as Heartz has noted (C1995), his praise for his keyboard skills was certainly meant ironically in this context. By the end of the year Gluck was again in Prague with Locatelli's troupe (in the capacity of director, or maestro di cappella), for a revival of his Ezio and a new setting (apart from one re-used aria) of the imperial poet's Issipile for Carnival; of the music, only three arias survive.

In terms of prestige, Gluck's next commission rivalled the earlier one for Semiramide riconosciuta: an opera for the nameday (4 November 1752) of King Charles III of Naples, to be performed in the vast Teatro S Carlo. The impresario, Diego Tuffarelli, had sought out the composer specifically in the hope of procuring a novel operatic setting – ‘una musica di stile tutto vario e maippiù inteso’ (Prota-Giurleo, C1965) – and Gluck did not disappoint. As Tuffarelli's correspondence reveals, on arriving in Naples with his wife towards the end of August, Gluck asked to be allowed to set not the libretto that had been offered him (Antonio Salvi's Arsace, first written in 1715 as Amore e maestà), but rather Metastasio's La clemenza di Tito (which had been proposed as the second opera of the season), on account of the latter opera's ‘strong situations’ and ‘more attractive and varied scenery’. Tuffarelli saw the wisdom of agreeing to his request. The main stars of the cast were the tenor Gaetano Ottani as Titus (he was to repeat the role in Andrea Adolfati's setting of La clemenza di Tito for Vienna the next year) and the celebrated but temperamental castrato Caffarelli (Gaetano Majorano) as Sextus. For the latter Gluck wrote an audaciously (and expressively) dissonant setting of the Act 2 aria ‘Se mai senti spirarti sul volto’ that provoked both criticism and admiration in Neapolitan musical circles (‘in all of Italy’, according to Dittersdorf (C1801)), and also was distributed in numerous manuscript copies. The highly respected Neapolitan composer and teacher Francesco Durante was called upon to pass judgment (according to Reichardt's account (E1792), possibly derived from Gluck's own): while declining to say whether Gluck's aria was in accordance with the rules of composition, he declared that he and all his colleagues ‘should have been proud to have conceived and written such a passage’. Gluck himself thought well enough of the piece to rework it in his Iphigénie en Tauride a quarter of a century later. In writing the piece as he did, he was no doubt consciously seeking notoriety – as he was also in again performing on the musical glasses while in Naples – but he also sought to accommodate the wishes of singers in the cast, as is shown by alternative settings he composed for two arias.

Gluck, Christoph Willibald Ritter von