Christoph Willibald Gluck

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Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck, painted by Joseph Siffred Duplessis (1775)

Christoph Willibald Gluck , from 1756 Gluck , (* 2. July 1714 in Erasbach in Berching , Upper Palatinate ; † 15. November 1787 in Vienna ) was a German composer of the pre-classical period . He is considered one of the most important opera composers of the second half of the 18th century.

Life

Childhood and youth

Memorial for Gluck in Weidenwang

Gluck was born the first of nine children. Erasbach is usually given as the place of birth. He was baptized on July 4, 1714 in Weidenwang , whose parish Erasbach then belonged to. However, since the place of birth is not given in the baptismal register, there is still speculation about it.

His father and forefathers were foresters , Gluck's mother is unknown, neither her origins nor her family name. In 1717 the family moved to Bohemia : first to Reichenberg , 1722 to Kreibitz and 1727 to Eisenberg , where the father worked as forester in the service of Prince Philipp Hyazinth von Lobkowitz . Very little has been passed on about Christoph Willibald Gluck's school and youth years, much can only be guessed at. Gluck reports in short stories: “My father was a forester in a Bohemian town and had chosen me to be his successor. But in my homeland everything is driven by music […] Passionate about this art, I made surprisingly fast progress, played several instruments. After all, all my thoughts and endeavors were now focused on music and not on being a forester. "If you believe Gluck's reports, a secret escape from my parents 'house follows:" One fine day, with a few pennies in my pocket, I secretly left my parents' home House and wandered [...] in a detour towards Vienna. I got my shelter and food through my singing. On Sundays and festive days I played in village churches. ”On the way to Vienna, Gluck first visited Prague , where from 1731 he studied logic and mathematics . However, nothing is known of a degree. He probably spent the year 1736 in Vienna.

Italy

In 1737 he came to Milan , where he took up a position in an orchestra and there got to know the operation and nature of the opera. He was trained as a composer by Giovanni Battista Sammartini and soon enjoyed success on the stages with Italian opera. When his first documented appearance as a composer he was already 27 years old: on December 26, 1741, his opera Artaserse was premiered in Milan .

In the following years he wrote very productively for the stage: Demetrio (Venice, May 2, 1742), Demofoonte (Milan, January 6, 1743), Il Tigrane (Crema, September 9, 1743), La Sofonisba (Milan, January 18 , 1743) . January 1744), Ipermestra (Venice, November 21, 1744), Poro (Venice, December 26, 1744), Ippolito (Milan, January 31, 1745). All of them are quite conventional opera series , the majority using libretti by Pietro Metastasio .

to travel

Gluck began long journeys through Europe. He was in London with Georg Christian von Lobkowitz . Caduta de 'giganti was performed there on January 7, 1746 , and Artamene on March 4, but both of them had little success. In the same year, Gluck printed six trio sonatas in London , which Gluck probably had already written in Italy. After that he seems to have joined Pietro Mingotti's traveling troop and then Giovanni Locatelli's , and his traveling years began. Such mobile operas occurred in cities without a permanent opera house.

We only know of another appearance on June 29, 1747 on the occasion of a double wedding in the Saxon mansion in Dresden. For the birthday of Maria Theresa was La Semiramide riconosciuta (14 May 1748) staged. La contesa de 'numi (April 9, 1749) is documented for the next year , an opera for the royal court in Copenhagen. On September 15, 1750, Gluck married in St. Ulrich in Vienna, Maria Anna Bergin, who was born there on July 24, 1732, daughter of the trader Joseph Bergin (1686–1738) and Maria Theresa, née Chini (1701–1756). Gluck was 36 years old at his wedding, twice as old as his bride. Apparently Gluck did not settle in Vienna at this point.

Living in Vienna and turning away from the classic series

Eventually Gluck settled in Vienna and later became Kapellmeister . He wrote Le cinesi (September 24, 1754) for a festival lasting several days and La danza (May 5, 1755) for Archduke Leopold's birthday . After the performance of his Antigono (February 9, 1756) in Rome, Gluck was made Knight of the Golden Spur (2nd class) by Pope Benedict XIV . Since that time Gluck used the title "Knight of Gluck" or "Chevalier de Gluck".

Over time, Gluck had fundamental concerns about the content and form of the opera. The serious as well as the comic form of opera seemed too alienated from what Gluck believed opera should really be. The opera seria chants seemed unnatural, aimed at superficial effects, their content uninteresting and petrified. The opera buffa had been lacking its original freshness for a long time, it had used up its jokes, you always got to see the same people as caricatures. Especially in the Seria, the singers were regarded as the absolute rulers of the stage and the music, which they honed with the highest level of skill and sometimes changed so much that the listener could no longer even guess the original melody. Gluck wanted to bring opera back to its origins, an opera in which human drama, passion, strokes of fate and primeval human feelings are in the foreground and where music and words were of equal value, if not the music should support or underline the dramatic situation: “great le parole, poi la musica ”.

In the following years Gluck completely turned away from the Italian opera seria and instead worked on French opéra-comique works. He was attracted by the unabridged language as well as the rapid changes in mood and scene that required him to adapt the music. Gluck was 44 years old and a famous composer in Europe when, after two years of artistic silence, he published the first comic opera. Characteristic of these comic operas are the short, song-like chants of the simplest construction, with which Gluck essentially obeyed the French generic term. Gluck also began a process of dissolution here. It gave  the upper voices more freedom - with the bass being consistent . That meant the removal of the old foundation and an inner revival of an external scheme. The first of these works was apparently Tircis et Doristée (1756), in which his share is very small.

In 1761 the highly acclaimed performance of the Don Juan ballet took place, for which the dancer and choreographer Gasparo Angiolini created the choreography . Angiolini envisioned an animated dance performance. In doing so, he set himself apart from the given courtly ballet tradition, with its masks and the resulting typicity and rigidity; His wish was to replace the typical representative ballet with a narrative ballet that should follow a meaningful dramaturgical sequence. He says of Gluck:

“Gluck set the music. He captured the piece perfectly and tried to express the passions that are presented and the horror that dominates the disaster! Music is the main thing in pantomime: it is the one that speaks, we just make the movements [...] It would be almost impossible for us to make ourselves understandable without music and the more it is adapted to what we want to express, the more we are better understood. "

Title vignette for Orfeo ed Euridice (Paris 1764)

Angiolini attached particular importance to the fact that the music was composed specifically for the ballet, i.e. not created as a choreography for older pieces. Even the new ballet cannot be imagined without a suggestion from Paris. On October 17, 1761, Gluck presented the ballet Don Juan in Vienna . (Later, in his opera buffa Le nozze di Figaro (1786) , Mozart was to fall back on the fandango he had heard in this ballet.) La rencontre imprévue (German "The unexpected encounter") of January 7, 1764 forms the summit of Glucks comic opera. The work falls into the time of his so-called reform operas . The opera is better known under the name Les pèlerins de la Mecque ("The Pilgrims of Mecca"). In his opera reform he received substantial support from the director of the imperial theater Giacomo Durazzo in Vienna .

The opera reform

Ernestine Schumann-Heink sings “Oh, I've lost her” (“Che farò senza Euridice”) from Orfeo ed Euridice , 1907

The very serious ballet Angiolini was followed on October 5, 1762 by Orfeo ed Euridice based on a libretto by Ranieri de 'Calzabigis . This work, which made Gluck the creator of new music in the literary reception of those days, was felt to be as heavy and gloomy as Don Juan . In his Orfeo Gluck strengthened the dramatic expression of the recitatives and preferred - with a similar thrust - the Accompagnato - over the Secco recitative . He also anchored the arias more strongly in the dramatic situation and gave each of them an individual shape; overall he achieved a greater unity of musical drama .

Beginning of the aria “Misero e che farò” from Alceste in the autograph

On December 26, 1767, the world premiere of Alceste followed , described by the critic Joseph von Sonnenfels as "a serious Singspiel without castrati, music without solfeggias, or, as I would prefer to call it, without gargling, a Welsh poem without gay and fluttering jokes" praised. Others criticized that the work was " after tears" : "[...] to buy two guilders a fool who dies for her husband!" The attribution to Alceste is one of the most important testimonies to Gluck's reform efforts. It says:

"When I set out to set the opera Alceste to music, my intention was to carefully avoid all those abuses which the misappropriated vanity of the singers and the overly great courtesy of the composers had introduced into Italian opera, abuses, who have degraded one of the most beautiful and magnificent spectacles to the most boring and ridiculous. I therefore tried to return the music to its true purpose, that is: to support the poetry in order to intensify the expression of feelings and the interest of the situations without interrupting the action or distorting it with useless adornments. "

Gluck further explains his method to the effect that he has dispensed with “boring ritornelles” and that he has concerned himself with the fluency of the recitatives and the textual setting of the arias, as well as with the “noble simplicity” of the clarity of the dramatic plot. Adolf Bernhard Marx saw Orfeo as an undramatic work despite all the appreciation of the musical composition and only recognized a dramatic plot in Alceste , albeit again solely thanks to the protagonist.

Title page of the printed score of the Iphigénie en Tauride (Paris 1779)

Paris

Now Gluck set out to spread his ideas in France too. Under the protection of his former singing student Marie Antoinette , who in 1770 the French Dauphin Louis XVI. married, he signed a contract for six operas with the Paris Opera Management. It began with Iphigénie en Aulis (19 April 1774). The first performance sparked an unexpected dispute, almost a war that was reminiscent of the Paris Buffonist dispute twenty years earlier. Gluck's opponents brought the Apulian Niccolò Piccinni to Paris to prove the superiority of the Neapolitan opera , and “tout Paris” got involved in the dispute between the “supporters” of Gluck and Piccinni.

Gluck, lithographed by FE Feller after a Physionotrace by Edmé Quenedey , which in turn was posthumously etched after a bust by the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon from 1776

The composers themselves did not take part in the polemics. But when Piccinni was asked to set the libretto for Roland , on which Gluck is known to work, Gluck destroyed what he had written up until then. Gluck made his breakthrough with Iphigénie en Aulide , after which he edited his reform operas in Vienna to translate them into French. For this purpose, he rewrote the main part - originally composed for alto part - for tenor part , which entailed transposing other voices.

Jean-Joseph Rousseau as Renaud in Armide , around 1780

On August 2, 1774, his French version Orphée et Euridice was premiered, which was already more favorably received by the Parisian audience. In the same year he returned to Vienna, where he was appointed imperial-royal court composer . In the years that followed, the composer, now famous throughout Europe, traveled back and forth between Vienna and Paris, and on April 23, 1776, the Alceste , translated into French, was performed in Paris .

For Paris he wrote Armide (September 23, 1777), Iphigénie en Tauride (May 18, 1779) and most recently Écho et Narcisse (September 24, 1779). Gluck suffered a first stroke on July 30, 1779 while rehearsing for Écho et Narcisse . After this opera he returned to Vienna. His legacy in Paris was the Venetian Salieri , whom Gluck had been on friendly terms with since his arrival in Vienna in 1767. Gluck introduced Salieri to Paris and in 1783 gave him the textbook for the tragédie lyrique Les Danaïdes . The work was initially announced in Paris as a joint project between the two composers; after the overwhelming success of the premiere on April 26, 1784, Gluck announced in the renowned Journal de Paris that Salieri was the sole author of the work.

The last few years

Memorial plaque on Gluck's house where he lived and died in Wiedner Hauptstrasse No. 32, Vienna (4th district)

Gluck wrote a few smaller works in Vienna, but lived mainly in seclusion. In 1781 he produced the German version of Iphigenie auf Tauris . Other of his operas also enjoyed great popularity in Vienna.

Gluck's grave in Vienna's central cemetery

On November 15, 1787, Gluck suffered another stroke and died a few hours later. For the solemn Requiem on April 8, 1788, Salieri Gluck performed De profundis and a Requiem by the Italian composer Niccolò Jommelli . Like many other prominent musicians and painters, Gluck was buried in the Matzleinsdorf Catholic cemetery. This cemetery was converted into Waldmüllerpark in 1923 . Gluck's body was reburied on September 28, 1890 in a grave of honor in Vienna's central cemetery (group 32 A, number 49).

In 1894, Gluckgasse in Vienna's Innere Stadt (1st district) was named after him. The Gluck Peak , a mountain in Antarctica, bears his name since 1,961th In 1997 the asteroid (7624) Gluck was named after him.

Christoph Willibald Gluck is considered the first internationally recognized star composer. Past epochs have referred to him as the Richard Wagner of the 18th century. Mozart and Beethoven as well as Wagner Richard Strauss saw in Gluck's music and theory the beginning of modern incidental music. In the judgment of Eduard Hanslick , one of the most important music critics of the 19th century, Gluck was the "solemn high priest" of musical tragedy.

Works

Christoph Willibald von Gluck left around 50 operas as well as several ballets and instrumental works. Gluck's reform of opera bore fruit - although he had not composed a single German libretto himself - in German opera, especially in the works of Johann Christoph Vogel , Carl Maria von Weber , Heinrich Marschner and Richard Wagner . An arrangement of Iphigénie en Aulide , written by Wagner in 1846/47, was the common version of the opera for decades and was performed in numerous opera houses all over Europe.

Operas

Gluck's statue next to the Karlskirche in Vienna
  1. Artaserse , libretto: Metastasio , first performance: Milan , December 26, 1741 (only two arias survived)
  2. Cleonice (also Demetrio ), libretto: Metastasio, first performance: Venice , May 2, 1742 (eight arias preserved)
  3. Demofoonte , libretto: Metastasio, first performance: Milan, January 6, 1743; with Giovanni Carestini (symphonia, recitatives and an aria lost)
  4. Il Tigrane , Libretto: Goldoni after Francesco Silvanis La virtù trionfante dell'amore , first performance: Crema , September 26, 1743 (eleven arias and one duet received)
  5. La Sofonisba (or Siface ), libretto: Silvani (recitatives) and Metastasio (arias), first performance: Milan, January 18, 1744 (eleven arias and one duet received)
  6. Ipermestra , libretto: Metastasio, first performance: Venice, November 21, 1744; with Vittoria Tesi in the title role
  7. Poro (also Alessandro nell'India ), libretto: Metastasio, first performance: Turin , December 26, 1744 (sinfonia, four arias and one duet received)
  8. Ippolito , libretto: GG Corio, first performance: Milan, January 31, 1745 (eight arias and one duet received);
  9. La caduta de 'Giganti , libretto: Francesco Vanneschi , world premiere: Haymarket Theater , London , 7 January 1746 (five arias and one duet received)
  10. Artamene , libretto: Francesco Vanneschi, world premiere: Haymarket Theater, London, March 4, 1746 (six arias preserved)
  11. Le nozze d'Ercole e d'Ebe , libretto:?, First performance: Pillnitz , June 29, 1747
  12. La Semiramide riconosciuta , libretto: Metastasio, world premiere: Vienna , May 14, 1748; with Vittoria Tesi and Angelo Amorevoli
  13. La contesa de 'numi , libretto: Metastasio, first performance: Charlottenborg near Copenhagen , April 9, 1749
  14. Ezio (first version), libretto: Metastasio, world premiere: Prague Carnival , 1750
  15. Issipile , libretto: Metastasio, first performance: Prague Carnival, 1752 (four arias preserved)
  16. La clemenza di Tito , libretto: Metastasio, first performance: Naples , November 4, 1752; with Caffarelli
  17. Le cinesi , libretto: Metastasio, first performance: Schlosshof near Vienna, September 24, 1754
  18. La danza , libretto: Metastasio, first performance: Laxenburg , May 5, 1755
  19. L'innocenza giustificata , libretto: Giacomo Durazzo based on Metastasio, first performance: Vienna, December 8, 1755; with Caterina Gabrielli
  20. Antigono , libretto: Metastasio, first performance: Rome , February 9, 1756
  21. Il re pastore , libretto: Metastasio, world premiere: Vienna, December 8, 1756; with Caterina Gabrielli
  22. La fausse esclave , libretto: after Louis Anseaume and Pierre Augustin Lefèvre de Marcouville , first performance: Vienna, January 8, 1758 (51 vaudevilles, 13 airs nouveaux received)
  23. L'île de Merlin, ou Le monde renversé , libretto: Louis Anseaume based on Alain René Lesages and D'Ornevals Le Monde renversé , first performance: Schönbrunn, October 3, 1758
  24. La Cythère assiégée (first version), libretto: Charles-Simon Favart after Favart and Barthélemy-Christophe Fagous Le pouvoir de l'Amour ou Le siegè de Cythère , first performance: Vienna, spring 1759 (overture and 26 Airs nouveaux received)
  25. Le diable à quatre, ou La double métamorphose , libretto: Michel Jean Sedaine and Pierre Baurans based on Charles Couffrey's The Devil to pay , first performance: Laxenburg, May 28, 1759
  26. L'arbre enchanté, ou Le tuteur dupé (first version), libretto: Pierre Louis Moline based on Jean-Joseph Vadés Le poirier , first performance: Vienna, 1759 (overture lost, 15 Airs nouveaux preserved)
  27. Tetide , libretto: Giovanni Ambrogio Miglavacca , world premiere: Vienna, October 10, 1760; u. a. with Caterina Gabrielli
  28. L'ivrogne corrigé , libretto: L. Anseaume and Jean-Baptiste Lourdet de Santerre , first performance: Vienna, end of 1760
  29. Le cadi dupé , libretto: based on Jean-Baptiste Lourdier , first performance: Vienna, December 8, 1761
  30. Orfeo ed Euridice , libretto: Calzabigi , world premiere: Vienna, October 5, 1762; with Gaetano Guadagni in the title role
  31. Il trionfo di Clelia , libretto: Metastasio, world premiere: Teatro Comunale di Bologna , May 14, 1763
  32. Ezio (second version), libretto: Metastasio, first performance: Vienna, December 26, 1763
  33. La rencontre imprévue , libretto: Louis Hurtaut Dancourt based on Alain René Lesages and D'Ornevals Les pèlerins de la Mecque , first performance: Vienna, 7 January 1764
  34. Il Parnaso confuso , libretto: Metastasio, first performance: Schönbrunn, January 24, 1765; sung by children Maria Theresia s
  35. Telemaco ossia L'isola di Circe , libretto: Marco Coltellini after Carlo Sigismondo Capece , world premiere: Vienna, January 30, 1765
  36. La corona , libretto: Metastasio, first performance: planned for October 4, 1765, first performed on November 13, 1987 in Schönbrunn; sung by children Maria Theresia s
  37. Il Prologo , libretto: Lorenzo Ottavio del Rosso , first performance: Florence , February 22, 1767
  38. Alceste (Italian version), libretto: Calzabigi based on Euripides , world premiere: Vienna, December 26, 1767; with Antonia Bernasconi in the title role ( digitized libretto in the Internet Archive )
  39. La Vestale (second version of L'innocenza giustificata ), Vienna, summer 1768 (adaptation not preserved)
  40. Le Fest d'Apollo with the parts: Prologo , Libretto: Gastone Rezzonico  - Atto di Baucis e Filemone , Libretto: Giuseppe Maria Pagnini  - Atto d'Aristo , Libretto: Giuseppe Pezzana  - Atto d'Orfeo , Libretto: Calzabigi, Parma , 24 August 1769
  41. Paride ed Elena , libretto: Calzabigi, first performance: Vienna, November 3, 1770
  42. Iphigénie en Aulide , libretto: François-Louis Gand Le Bland Du Roullet after Jean Racine , first performance: Paris, April 19, 1774; with Sophie Arnould in the title role
  43. Orphée et Euridice (French version), libretto: Pierre Louis Moline after Ranieri de 'Calzabigi, first performance: Paris, August 2, 1774
  44. L'arbre enchanté, ou Le tuteur dupé (second version), libretto: Pierre Louis Moline after Jean-Joseph Vadé, first performance: Paris, February 20, 1775
  45. Cythère assiégée (second version), libretto: Charles-Simon Favart, world premiere: Paris, August 1, 1775
  46. Alceste (French version), libretto: François-Louis Gand Le Bland Du Roullet after Ranieri de 'Calzabigi, first performance: Paris, April 23, 1776
  47. Armide , libretto: Philippe Quinault based on Torquato Tasso ( La Gerusalemme liberata ), first performance: Paris, 23 September 1777
  48. Iphigénie en Tauride , libretto: Nicolas François Guillard and François-Louis Gand Le Bland Du Roullet after Claude Guimond de La Touche , first performance: Paris, May 18, 1779
  49. Echo et Narcisse , libretto: Louis Théodore Baron de Tschudi based on Ovid's Metamorphoses , first performance of the first version: Paris, September 24, 1779, first performance of the second version: Paris, August 8, 1780
  50. Iphigenia in Tauris (German version), libretto: Johann Baptist von Alxinger and Gluck after Nicolas François Guillard, world premiere: Vienna, October 23, 1781

Pasticci

Gluck statue in the Paris Opéra
  1. La finta schiava , libretto: Francesco Silvani, first performance: Venice, May 13, 1744 (music by Lampugnani, Leonardo Vinci , two arias by Gluck)
  2. Tircis et Doristée , libretto: Charles-Simon Favart, first performance: Laxenburg, October 10, 1756 (an aria from L'innocenza giustificata parodied, probably two other arias by Gluck)
  3. Le caprice amoureux ou Ninette à la cour , libretto: Charles-Simon Favart, first performance: Vienna, 1760 (probably two arias by Gluck)
  4. Arianna , libretto: Giovanni Ambrogio Miglivacca, world premiere: Laxenburg, May 27, 1762 (music lost)
  5. Isabelle et Gertrude , libretto: Charles-Simon Favart, world premiere: Paris, August 14, 1765 (Gluck parodied two arias from La rencontre imprévue , probably another aria by Gluck)

Ballets

  1. Les amours de Flore et Zéphire , Schönbrunn, August 13, 1759
  2. Le naufrage , Vienna 1759 (?)
  3. La halte des Calmouckes , Vienna March 23, 1761
  4. Don Juan, ou Le festin de Pierre , Vienna, October 17, 1761 (preface in print by Calzabigi)
  5. Citera assediata , Vienna, September 15, 1762 (music lost)
  6. Alessandro (Les amours d'Alexandre et de Roxane) , Vienna, October 4, 1764
  7. Sémiramis , Vienna, January 31, 1765 (preface in print by Calzabigi)
  8. Iphigénie , Laxenburg, May 19, 1765 (music lost)
  9. Achille (in Sciro) , Innsbruck , August, 1765 (not listed, music lost)
Johann Anton de Peters : Homage to Gluck , around 1775

Instrumental works

  1. 9 symphonies (presumably overtures that cannot be assigned to a specific opera)
  2. 6 - 12 minuets, Vienna 1763 (?; Lost)
  3. 6 trio sonatas (C major, G minor, A major, B major, E flat major, F major) London, 1746
  4. 2 trio sonatas in E major, F major (handed down by hand)
  5. Flute Concerto in G major

Religious music

  1. The 50th Psalm ( Miserere mei ) for eight-part choir (?), Turin, 1744–1745 (music lost)
  2. The 8th Psalm ( Domine Dominus noster ), 1753–1757 (music lost)
  3. Alma sedes motet for voice and orchestra, before 1779
  4. The 130th Psalm ( De profundis ), 1785–1787, performed on April 8, 1788 as part of the Requiem for Gluck organized by the Vienna Tonkünstler Society
  5. Psalm 24: 9-10 ( Open up, you gates of the world ) for choir

Cantatas

  1. 2 Cori da cantarsia a Schlosshof , Schlosshof near Vienna, 1754 (music lost)

Songs and arias

  1. Spiritual songs based on texts by Gellert (music lost)
  2. The dead Clarissa , text: Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (music lost)
  3. Le triomphe de la beauté , Ariette, around 1780
  4. Singing Klopstock's odes and songs on the piano , Vienna 1785 or 1786 (1. "Vaterlandslied", 2. "Wir und Sie", 3. "Schlachtgesang", 4. "Der Jüngling", 5. "Die Sommernacht", 6. "The early graves", 7. "The slope")
  5. To death , recorded from memory by Johann Friedrich Reichardt
  6. Minona lovely and sweet , duet
  7. Ah, negli occhi un tal 'incanto , aria

Letters and documents

  1. Letters , selected and translated by Wilhelm Michael Treichlinger , Zurich 1951
  2. The Collected Correspondence and Papers of Christoph Willibald Gluck , ed. By Hedwig and EH Mueller von Asow, London 1962
  3. Patricia Howard: Gluck. An Eighteenth-Century Portrait in Letters and Documents , Oxford 1995

literature

Gluck's scores and critical reports have been published in the Gluck Complete Edition since 1951 .

See also

Web links

Commons : Christoph Willibald Gluck  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Catalog of works as PDF  sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. Science repeatedly debates whether Gluck's birthplace is Weidenwang, such as B. can already be read in Wurzbach, see Constantin von Wurzbach : Gluck, Christoph Willibald . In: Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich . 5th part. Typogr.-literar.-artist publishing house. Establishment (L. C. Zamarski & C. Dittmarsch.), Vienna 1859, pp. 221–232 ( digitized version ).
  2. Biography on the website of the International Gluck Society
  3. Bruce Alan Brown:  Gluck, Christoph Willibald Ritter von, § 1: Ancestry, early life and training. In: Grove Music Online (English; subscription required).
  4. Dagmar Fuhrmann: Wasn't Gluck born in Weidenwang? In: Mittelbayerische Zeitung , May 2, 2014.
  5. For new discussions about Gluck's place of birth cf. Werner Robl: In the footsteps of the Gluck family in Erasbach and Weidenwang. Pitfalls and solutions in regional Gluck research. Multimedia lecture in Weidenwang on January 23, 2015 ( digitized ; PDF).
  6. ^ Adolf Bernhard Marx : Gluck and the opera . First part. Janke, Berlin 1863, pp. 305-309 ( digitized version ).
  7. Quoted from Adolf Bernhard Marx: Gluck and the opera . First part. Janke, Berlin 1863, p. 393 f.
  8. Quoted from Adolf Bernhard Marx: Gluck and the opera . First part. Janke, Berlin 1863, p. 440.
  9. ^ Adolf Bernhard Marx: Gluck and the opera . First part. Janke, Berlin 1863, p. 436.
  10. Minor Planet Circ. 30802 (PDF)
  11. ^ Wiener Zeitung , April 9, 1788, p. 855