The Palace and Park by Phillips, Forbes, Latham, Owen, Scharf, and Shenton

[Born in the early part of the 18th century. Died at Vienna, 1787.] The great merit of Gluck is that he emancipated music from the trammels of conventionalism and false taste, and made it the exponent and minister of poetry and the drama. Gluck, invited to London in 1745 to celebrate in music the butcheries of the Duke of Cumberland, found that the operas represented there were mere concerts, for which the drama was a pretext. Sound was everything, meaning nothing. His own music was set to words with which it had no connexion, and, torn from its original context, lost all its effect. This fact led him to the discovery of the great principle which is the key to the rest of his life: viz., that music is not merely a pleasant arrangement of sounds intended to gratify the ear, but a subsidiary language, able to exalt and strengthen the emotions, raised by the measure and force of the spoken language to which it is allied. In 1761, he composed his opera of “Alceste,” as an illustration of his idea. It was followed in 1762 and 1763 by “Paris and Helena” and “Orpheus.” In 1779, he composed the “Iphigenia in Tauride,” the greatest of his works. Wieland has happily expressed Gluck’s claim upon our respect in a sentence. “He preferred,” he says, “the Muses to the Syrens.” His works are not so much operas, in the ordinary sense of the term, as poems, in which music is employed for producing and sustaining emotion. Off the stage Gluck was nothing, but upon it the musician was himself a poet. The manners of Gluck, like those of Beethoven and Handel, were rough and blunt. He was large in person; and his habits were indolent and somewhat sensual. The bust discloses the man. [From the Terracotta, by Houdon. In the musical collection of the Royal Library at Berlin. The only bust taken from the life.] 327A. CHRISTOPH GLUCK. _Musician._ [From the Terracotta by Houdon, in the Louvre.] 327B. CHRISTOPH GLUCK. _Musician._ [From the bust by Francin (Fils) in the Louvre.] 327C. CHRISTOPH GLUCK. _Musician._ [From a bust by R. Wagner of Berlin.]