In contrast with the work of many great composers, the best of Gluck's was done late in life. In fact, before fifty he produced little that was of lasting value. Of the operas written when he was between thirty and forty, and produced at the Haymarket Theater in London, Handel said, and with a good deal of justice, "Sir! they are detestable! The fellow knows no more counterpoint than my cook!" But it is not too much to say that no works have had more effect in reforming the lyric stage than the magnificent productions which followed them, all written when he was in advanced middle age.
Christoph Willibald (afterward Ritter von) Gluck was born at Weidenwang, near Newmarkt, Germany, July 2, 1714. His parents were in a humble position in the household of Prince Lobkowitz at Eisenberg, and he seems at first to have been left to pick up what he could in the kitchen and the fields, no very satisfactory training school for him. When he was twelve years of age, however, he was fortunate enough to be sent to the Jesuit school at Komotau, in Bohemia, and here the good fathers gave him his first instruction, not only in ordinary school lore, but also in playing the violin and organ.
After he had been there a few years his father died, and the poor youth was left entirely to his own resources. He went to Prague, and having acquired some knowledge of the violin and violoncello, he used to earn a scanty living as an itinerant musician, singing, when he could get an engagement, in the churches and, like Haydn, playing the violin at fairs and the village dances of the peasants.
In those days the great thing was to have a patron; and Gluck, who, thanks to his own energy, self-reliance, and study of human nature, was always successful in securing wealthy friends, soon gained an influential patron in the person of Prince Melzi, who gave him a place in his own private band. Soon afterward the Prince took him to Milan and placed him under the instructions of Sammartini, a learned theorist.
Before long he began to compose operas, which were produced at the theaters of Milan, Venice, and Turin. These, like Handel's early operas, quickly caught the melody-loving ear of the populace, and were immensely successful. So great, indeed, was their success, that Lord Middlesex thought he was doing a good stroke of business in securing him as composer-in-chief for the King's Theater in London.
When Gluck arrived in England, in 1745, the times were unpropitious. The Scotch Rebellion then absorbed the public interest, and people were too busy discussing the political situation in their coffee-houses and drawing-rooms to have inclination or time to go to the theater. What was this new piece, "The Fall of the Giants" (La Caduta de' Giganti) by Mr. Gluck, to them, at a time when the fall of the English ministry, and even of the reigning sovereign, was possible? And, truth to tell, the new opera was poor stuff; and neither did "Artamene," an old opera touched up again, or ""Piramo e Tisbe," a pasticcio, or compilation of pretty airs from his other works, succeed any better. Indeed, if Gluck had finished his artistic career at this time, Handel's criticism would have been a sufficiently fair judgment on it.
Though discomfited and sorely mortified by his failure in London, Gluck was able calmly to ponder over his defeat and learn its lesson. Shortly before he left London, he appeared at the theater in a very unexpected character. Consoling himself with the idea that if people would not listen to him as a composer they might as a performer, he played, as the "General Advertiser" of the day says, "at the little theater in the Haymarket, a concerto on twenty-six drinking-glasses tuned with spring-water, accompanied by the whole band, being a new instrument of his own invention, upon which he performs whatever may be done on a violin or harpsichord."
From London he went to Paris, and thence to Vienna, where for some time he lived in retirement, quietly studying that vexed question of music and the drama, which, in later days, Wagner again made prominent. The Abbé Arnaud had said, "Italian opera is only a concert for which the play is the pretext." Gluck began to find out that this was true, and that art had been forgotten in the too eager desire to please, no matter how. He resolved to make a change, and to begin his work again on an entirely new basis.