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• Major Operas
• Classical Era
• Opera

Triumphantly premiered in Vienna’s Burgtheater on 26 December 1767, Alceste was the second of the three collaborations between Gluck and Calzabigi. Today it is probably more famous for the reforming manifesto of its preface than for its magnificent music. Like Orfeo, Alceste cultivates Gluck’s ideal of noble simplicity, with the whole opera based essentially on a single situation ...

• Major Operas
• Classical Era
• Opera

musical structures, with many ensembles and a fluid intermingling of recitative and arioso, powerfully enhance the development of the drama. Iphigénie and her tormented brother Oreste drew from Gluck some of his most intense and anguished music – the heroine’s grieving aria ‘O malheureuse Iphigénie’, with its forlorn oboe solo and agitated syncopated accompaniment (a favourite Gluckian combination); or ...

• Major Operas
• Classical Era
• Opera

but diffusing the dramatic force of the original. In Vienna the hero had been sung by the castrato Gaetano Guadagni. The French deemed castrati an offence against nature, and Gluck duly reworked the role for the celebrated haute-contre (high tenor) Joseph Legros. Composed: 1762; revised 1774 Premiered: 1762, Vienna (revised version 1774, Paris) Libretto by Raniero de’ Calzabigi ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Classical Era
• Composer

(Khres’-tof Vil’-le-balt fun Glook) 1714–87 Bohemian composer Gluck was born in Erasbach, by the Czech-German border; his native language may well have been Czech. His father, a forester, was opposed to a musical career, but the boy left home at 13 to study in Prague, where he took musical posts and went briefly to the university. At ...

• Personalities
• Classical Era
• Opera

1714–87, German Famous above all as the composer of Orfeo ed Euridice, Christoph Willibald von Gluck was, more than anyone, responsible for purging opera of what he dubbed the ‘abuses’ of opera seria in favour of ‘beautiful simplicity’, emotional directness and dramatic truth. From Bohemia to Vienna Born in the small town of Erasbach in the Upper ...

• Instruments
• Brass

trombone). There was an entire family of cornetts, from the bass cornett to the high-pitched cornettino. However, little music composed for the cornett is extant. Christoph Willibald von Gluck (1714–87) was among the last to include the cornett in his scoring – for Orfeo ed Euridice (1762). Gradually the cornett was replaced by other instruments that provided similar effects ...

• Instruments
• Percussion

mounted on the top of the bass drum, so that the player could play the bass drum with one hand and the cymbal with the other. Christoph Willibald von Gluck (1714–87) composed one of the first independent cymbal parts in his opera Iphigénie en Tauride (1779). Berlioz was the first composer to specify a cymbal struck with beaters. A suspended ...

• Instruments
• Percussion

Puckeridge created an angelic organ, or seraphim, from glasses rubbed with wet fingers. The glasses were filled with water to different levels to produce different pitches. The composer Gluck also played a similar instrument. Glass Armonica Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) adapted the idea and created an armonica – or glass armonica – in 1761, in which nested bowls of ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Classical Era

by having the appropriate quantity of water poured into them; they were then struck like bells to produce a ringing sound, or the rims were dampened and then rubbed. Gluck played a concerto on such an instrument in the 1740s, but it was the American Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) who in 1761 took on the task of producing a serious ...

• Instruments
• Woodwind

Of the woodwind instruments, the oboe has experienced perhaps the most organic development. There is no single, revolutionary moment at which the oboe became a modern instrument, and it retains strong links with the past both in sound and design. Shawm The modern oboe is a direct descendant of the shawm and the hautboy. The shawm was a ...

• Classical

appreciated by taking into account music by the many recognized masters who do not feature here: among them Du Fay, Tallis, Byrd, Palestrina, Domenico Scarlatti, Gluck and a whole pantheon of Romantic and twentieth-century figures. Women are also absent from the story because, for reasons too complex to be merely regrettable, they have had ...

• Major Operas
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

Strauss’s final opera marked a belated return to form. He had suffered since the end of his collaboration with Hofmannsthal and jettisoned his original librettist, Joseph Gregor, in favour of the conductor Clemens Krauss. The conception was a simple but subtle one in which the characters in the piece decide to write an opera. Only at the end is ...

• Major Operas
• Classical Era
• Opera

the inspired synthesis of French and Italian opera in Gluck’s ‘reform’ works. His greatest opera seria, Idomeneo, premiered in Munich on 29 January 1781, draws much from Gluck, especially the hieratic scenes of Alceste (another opera concerned with human sacrifice). Yet its harmonic daring, orchestral richness and lyrical expansiveness are entirely Mozart’s own. Combining the sophistication ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical
• Singer

b. 1933 English mezzo-soprano Baker studied in London, and made her debut in Smetana’s The Secret in Oxford in 1956. She sang Handel roles early in her career, and made a particular impression as Purcell’s Dido, a role she recorded several times. At Covent Garden, where she first appeared as Hermia in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream ...

• Personalities
• Early Romantic
• Opera

1802–39, French Adolphe Nourrit, the French tenor, made his debut at the Paris Opéra in 1821, singing Pylade in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride. Nourrit remained at the Opéra until 1837, singing, among other roles, Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Rossini’s Otello. Nourrit was a brilliant all-round performer, charming his audiences with his subtle, ...