Both the crowning glory and the downfall of his “first musical life”, Gluck’s Parisian works crystalise that “réunion des goûts” (reconciliation of the Italian, German and French styles) that had been advocated by Couperin and Telemann.

Gluck was born in Erasbach, Bohemia, on 2 July, 1714. His father was a comfortably-off forester who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. Young Christoph Willibald’s passion for music, however, led him to run away from home to pursue his ambitions. By the age of fourteen he was studying music and philosophy in Prague, supporting himself by working as an organist. He later moved to Vienna, where he met a nobleman from Lombardy who engaged him as a musician in his private orchestra. It was in Milan that Gluck rounded off his informal musical education, in all probability studying under Giovanni Battista Sammartini, one of the very few Italian composers of his day to give symphonic composition precedence over vocal music and to have introduced into Italian music the orchestral innovations of the Mannheim school.

It was also in Milan that Gluck made his opera debut in 1741 by setting to music the most famous of Metastasio’s librettos, Artaserse (he was to employ Metastasian librettos more than a hundred times!). The opera met with instant success, and Gluck suddenly found himself inundated with commissions: over the next five years he produced seven more opere serie (and participated in two pasticcii), four of which were to texts by Metastasio. This fact goes a long way toward explaining the supposed rivalry (discussed later in this article) between the Bohemian composer and the official poet of the Viennese court.

In 1746 Gluck took up an invitation from the King’s Theatre at the Haymarket in London. Rather than a true opera, he was commissioned to write a kind of heroic, metaphorical ode: in fact, the purpose of La Caduta de’ Giganti was to celebrate (in advance!) the bloody victory of the Duke of Cumberland over the supporters of the Stuart claimant to the English throne, which was sealed at the battle of Culloden just three months later. Handel also celebrated this event with one of his most popular oratorios, Judas Maccabaeus..

Much has been written about the relations between Gluck and the older composer, Handel, in particular quoting the latter’s withering comment, “Gluck knows no more counterpoint than my cook”. Handel’s cook, Mr Walsh, was clearly an exceptional musician! Whatever the case may be, the remark may well be apocryphal, like the advice that Handel is said to have given his young compatriot: “If you wish to please the English, compose something noisy, like the rumbling of thunder”.

Evidently, Gluck was not an unqualified success with the English, for he promptly resumed his peregrinations. From London, he went first to Hamburg and then to Italy, Dresden and, finally, to Vienna, where he was given an important commission: he was to compose a work celebrating both the re-opening of the Burgtheater and the 31st anniversary of Empress Maria Theresa. The occasion, in 1748, was rendered all the more magnificent by the recent end to the war of the Austrian Succession, unleashed by Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI’s decision, in the face of widespread opposition among other European nations, to pass the Austrian throne to his daughter under the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713. There could be no finer symbolic representation of the empress’s complete public relations makeover than Metastasio’s Semiramide riconosciuta (exploring a situation similar to that of Maria Theresa herself) that Gluck set to music. The opera was yet another triumph. However, neither the success of Semiramide riconosciuta nor that of the nine works which followed it, all based either totally or in part on librettos by Metastasio, served to dissipate the latter’s distrust of the Bohemian composer, who failed to win an official court appointment.