GLUCK


Gluck is a noble and striking figure in musical history, alike in the
services he rendered to his art and the dignity and strength of his
personal character. As the predecessor of Wagner and Meyerbeer, who
among the composers of this century have given opera its largest and
noblest expression, he anticipated their important reforms, and in his
musical creations we see all that is best in what is called the new
school.

The man, the Ritter Christoph Wilibald von Gluck, is almost as
interesting to us as the musician. He moved in the society of princes
with a calm and haughty dignity, their conscious peer, and never
prostituted his art to gain personal advancement or to curry favor with
the great ones of the earth. He possessed a majesty of nature which was
the combined effect of personal pride, a certain lofty self-reliance,
and a deep conviction that he was the apostle of an important musical
mission.

Gluck's whole life was illumined by an indomitable sense of his own
strength, and lifted by it into an atmosphere high above that of his
rivals, whom, the world has now almost forgotten, except as they were
immortalized by being his enemies. Like Milton and Bacon, who put on
record their knowledge that they had written for all time, Gluck had a
magnificent consciousness of himself. "I have written," he says, "the
music of my 'Ar-mida' in such a manner as to prevent its soon growing
old." This is a sublime vanity inseparable from the great aggressive
geniuses of the world, the wind of the speed which measures their force