8. Early Italian operas.

The operas of Gluck's early Italian and ‘itinerant’ periods formed the basis for his international reputation; they thus merit re-examination (in so far as they survive), and not just for what they may predict about his later reform works.

Gluck's career was initially associated closely with that of the imperial court poet Metastasio (the author of all but seven of the first 21 texts that he set), despite the librettist's disdain for his unruly manner of writing. Like most composers of drammi per musica at that time, Gluck was concerned primarily with musical and dramatic units no larger than a single set piece, sometimes with preceding accompanied recitative. Large-scale planning was mostly the province of the poet, who laid out an array of artfully varied aria texts (and associated affects), by means of which, with the aid of appropriate musical ‘clothing’ (partly written out, and partly improvised by the singers), multi-faceted characterizations were built up. What distinguished Gluck from his fellow composers in the genre was his fertile imagination, coupled with a seeming disregard for the rules of part-writing and harmony, and even of proper melodic writing and prosody. This wild streak (associated by some commentators with his Bohemian ancestry) put him in stark contrast to the more craftsmanlike and accommodating – though no less imaginative – Hasse, who also (at least after the early 1740s) showed greater respect for Metastasio's texts, making fewer cuts and substitutions. Gluck's compositional roughness was of a piece with his sometimes brusque social manners and his sure instinct for publicity, which were to mark the whole of his career.

There is considerable evidence (e.g. in the story of the première of Artaserse, mentioned in §1 above, and in the words of the Neapolitan impresario Tuffarelli, quoted in §2 above) that from early on Gluck consciously cultivated a vigorous, sometimes even bizarre style. In his Ipermestra (1744), the only work before Le nozze d'Ercole e d'Ebe to survive complete, the many solecisms of declamation, harmony and part-writing are in keeping with the violent subject matter, but seem only intermittently connected with specific provocations in the text. Already in the overture there are huge leaps in the violins, presaging those in the melodies of Danaus's and Linceus's first arias, but elsewhere shorthand accompaniments of throbbing quavers lead to harsh, apparently unintended clashes with the voice part (e.g. in Danaus's aria ‘Non hai cor per un'impresa’). The most effective – and recognizably Gluckian – moments in the opera tend to be pathetic in character: the descending bass line under the violin figures in tonic harmony that depict Hypermnestra's tears in her aria ‘Se il mio duol, se i mali miei’, for instance. At numerous points in Gluck's score, fermatas or changes of metre convey changes of affect within an aria, distracting the listener from the predominating da capo structures.

Burney, writing with benefit of hindsight (BurneyH, ii, 844), remarked on one of the more striking numbers in Gluck's first London opera, La caduta de’ giganti:

The following air [‘Sì, ben mio, sarò, se il vuoi’], for [Angelo Maria] Monticelli, is very original in symphony and accompaniments, which a little disturbed the voice-part in performance, I well remember, and Monticelli called it aria tedesca. His [Gluck's] contemporaries in Italy, at this time, seemed too much filed down; and he wanted the file, which when used afterwards in that country, made him one of the greatest composers of his time.

The passage is telling on several counts. Though said to be ‘original in symphony’, the piece was in fact a parody of an aria in the earlier opera Tigrane; the combination in Gluck of fervid imagination and frequent reliance on borrowing and parody (nearly always for an audience different from the original one) constitutes one of the most intriguing paradoxes of his career. The labelling of accompanimental complexities as ‘German’ was a commonplace in the later 18th century, being applied notably also to Jommelli during and after his Stuttgart years. Interestingly, Burney claims that it was in Italy that Gluck's style was subject to ‘the file’, by which he presumably means experience in writing for the finest singers and the most discriminating opera seria audiences. It is clear that Gluck profited greatly from his contacts with numerous celebrated singers during his early career, in ways that will probably become better understood as modern interpreters recover the vocal and acting techniques of that era and study the careers of the artists in question. His debt to his teacher Sammartini is obvious not only from actual borrowings, but also from many similarities of manner, such as the exchange of motifs between the violin parts (e.g. in the sinfonia to Don Juan of 1761).

The most applauded number from Gluck's London sojourn was the aria ‘Rasserena il mesto ciglio’ in Artamene, about which however Burney complained that its ‘motivo’, though grateful, was ‘too often repeated, being introduced seven times, which, there being a Da Capo, is multiplied to fourteen’ (BurneyH, ii, 845). (The criticism could be applied to any of a number of Gluck's sentimental arias, such as the above-mentioned ‘Se il mio duol’ in Ipermestra.) More than a quarter of a century later, when Burney reminded Gluck of the fame of the aria, the composer responded with remarks which were meant to be flattering to the Englishman, but which also probably contained more than a grain of truth (see BurneyGN, i, 267–8):

He told me that he owed entirely to England the study of nature in his dramatic compositions … He … studied the English taste, and finding that plainness and simplicity had the greatest effect upon them, he has, ever since that time, endeavoured to write for the voice, more in the natural tones of the human affections and passions, than to flatter the lovers of deep science or difficult execution; and it may be remarked, that most of his airs in Orfeo are as plain and simple as English ballads …

The resemblances between Handel's and Gluck's styles are many, particularly in tender or pathetic airs, where one finds similar galant configurations of part-writing, and it has been demonstrated (Roberts, H1995) that Gluck's acquaintance with the elder composer's music (and even his borrowing from it) predated his stay in England. But the stylistic differences are rather more numerous (Gluck's slower harmonic rhythm and greater reliance on accompaniments with drum basses, for example, and his more independent wind writing), owing to the simple fact that the composers were of different generations.

From the time of his Semiramide riconosciuta (1748), and especially after he had settled in Vienna, where several court composers vied for imperial commissions, Gluck clearly acquainted himself with his rivals’ earlier settings of texts by Metastasio – whose presence in the imperial capital he could not ignore either (he lived directly opposite the Burgtheater, in the Michaelerhaus). The libretto of Semiramide that Gluck set contains variants which Metastasio had recently supplied to his favourite composer Hasse and which are not found in standard editions of the poet's works, and, as Heartz (C1995) has shown, in his setting of Il re pastore (1756) Gluck took into account metrical choices, and even melodic writing from the original setting by Bonno from five years earlier. But rather than ‘file’ down his compositional extravagances, Gluck seems positively to have flaunted them in Vienna, now with a greater sense of purpose. In Semiramide there were extravagances sufficient for Metastasio (who had considerable technical knowledge of music) to complain of intolerably ‘archvandalian music’. By this he probably meant matters textual (such as the splitting apart of individual words) as well as strictly musical – for instance the entrance of the voice without ritornello in as many as six numbers, notably in the protagonist's harmonically audacious aria ‘Tradita, sprezzata’. (Gluck had had already used this strategy tellingly in Ipermestra, and even as early as Demofoonte.) And yet Semiramide ‘went to the stars’, and not only on account of its rich visual spectacle (on which Khevenhüller commented admiringly on 14 May 1748).

Though written for Naples, La clemenza di Tito of 1752 helped assure Gluck's fortunes in Vienna, above all on account of his extraordinary setting of Sextus's aria ‘Se mai senti spirarti sul volto’. In this opera, as often in his earlier works, Gluck concentrated a maximum of expression on a few principal singers and arias, somewhat neglecting the music for more peripheral characters (a practice in keeping with the hierarchical nature of Metastasian dramma per musica). ‘Se mai senti’, Sextus's poignant farewell to his lover and co-conspirator Vitellia, owed much of its effect to the talents of the star castrato Caffarelli, who in Gluck's characteristically irregular second phrase is required to cover a span of nearly two octaves. But it was Gluck's orchestral accompaniment that elicited the most comment. Over a variegated background of strings and arpeggiated bassoon, oboes in unison imitate and cross with the elegantly simple vocal part, suggesting the wafting sighs described in the text. Near the end of the prima parte, after being silent for some 20 bars, the oboes return with a chain of suspensions, against which the horns sustain the dominant for five and a half bars, as an achingly dissonant illustration of the word ‘fido’ in the lines ‘… gli estremi sospiri / del mio fido che muore per me’ (the last sighs of my faithful one who dies for me). The effect is intensified when the passage returns, with Sextus now participating in the pedal point. The combination of pedals and minor harmonies within a major mode was one that Gluck was thereafter to exploit again and again.

More immediately indicative of the direction in which Gluck would turn in the next decade was his setting of the unique Metastasian comedy Le cinesi, as part of the elaborate fête given by the Prince von Hildburghausen for the imperial couple at Schlosshof an der March in September 1754. Here suppleness of characterization was of utmost importance, as each singer only had one aria in which to present a portrait not only of himself or herself, but also of a theatrical genre. There is more than a touch of self-parody in the tragic scena that Gluck wrote for Lisinga (sung by Vittoria Tesi) – in the vast stretches of tremolo strings in the accompanied recitative, and even in her histrionic through-composed aria ‘Prenditi il figlio …! Ah no!’, in which the repeated question ‘Che fo?’ (What am I doing?) coincides with the off-key return of the first quatrain, in a text that the audience surely expected would be set da capo. The care that Gluck lavished on this opera is evident also in his unfailingly inventive string writing and coloratura passages, and in effective caricatures of the French foppishness of Silango, the ‘young Chinese, returned from a tour of Europe’.

Occupying a sort of middle ground between dramma per musica and reform opera is L'innocenza giustificata of 1755, Gluck's first important project with Durazzo. Although the count constructed his libretto around nine aria (or duet) texts by the imperial poet, several of which served as provocations for stunning displays of coloratura, in its lack of the usual secondary characters and intrigues the opera diverged distinctly from Metastasian norms. The principal role, that of Claudia, was sung by Caterina Gabrielli (making her Viennese operatic début), at the time ‘la sultane favorite du chancellier’ (in Khevenhüller's words of 29 July 1755) and thus an unlikely vestal virgin. Claudia's first aria contains spectacular passaggi, but opens without ritornello, in striking declamatory fashion, and as the opera progresses Gluck strays ever further from the customary manner of setting Metastasian texts. In the parte seconda there are choruses wherein Roman citizens are called upon to act while singing, a ‘cavata’ and an ‘arietta’ (both interrupted before their ends), as well as a Metastasian aria (‘La meritata palma’) that Gluck declines to set in da capo form. The ‘cavata’ (‘Fiamma ignota nell'alma mi scende’) had originated in Gluck's Tigrane, but Durazzo's parody text was in keeping with the music's throbbing muted accompaniment and other-worldly horns in octaves (mainly on the tonic and dominant). As often in Gluck, this major-mode piece spends much time in the minor. The heroine's ‘Ah rivolgi, o casta diva’ is surely the only ‘arietta’ ever sung while pulling a boat (a bark carrying a likeness of the goddess Vesta, or Cybele). But its music is of inspired nobility, utterly devoid of coloratura display, and counts as one of Gluck's most impressive creations thus far. Beginning without ritornello, Claudia's vocal phrases intermingle with a pizzicato accompaniment, and culminate in a ravishing chain of 7th chords and falling phrases depicting her submission to the goddess. Such music as this did not combine with Gabrielli's earlier showpieces to make a consistent musical characterization, but it was sufficient to encourage Durazzo to think again of Gluck as a collaborator in innovation.

Gluck, Christoph Willibald Ritter von