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Christoph Willibald Gluck music biography continued...

music at Prague University and earned some money by playing the organ at churches and giving singing lessons. He traveled to Vienna and later to Italy as a musician, under the patronage of the young Prince Ferdinand Lobkowitz. Prince Melzi heard about his talent and induced Gluck to accompany him to Milan. He became chamber musician and student of the Italian composer Giovanni Battista Sammartini, later his good friend. His first opera Artaserse (libretto by Pietro Metastasio) was first performed in Milan and well received. He began to travel widely across Europe and in 1754 he secured the post of Kapellmeister to Maria Theresa of Austria, and settled in Vienna. While in Vienna, Gluck composed Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), one of his best known works, and the ballet Don Juan (1761). These both showed some of the changes in style that were to reach full expression in Alceste (1767), which included a preface laying out his ideas on a new style of opera. Gluck's idea was to make the drama of the work more important than the star singers who performed it, and to do away with recitative which broke up the action. His reforms proved controversial, and in 1773 he moved to Paris and, under the protection of Queen Marie Antoinette, wrote Iphigénie en Aulide and several of his other works. Gluck revised both Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste for Parisian productions, also translating them from the original Italian into French. After the premieres of Armide in 1777 and Iphigénie en Tauride in 1779, Gluck returned to Vienna. He continued to write some smaller works there, but largely retired. He died there on November 15, 1787, leaving around 35 completed operas, several ballets and instrumental works, and a legacy that would influence some of the giants of classic music that would follow.