Word: glucks
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...cheers that are sweeping the Paris Opera mark the triumph of this spring's new sensation: Christoph Willibald Gluck's Alceste. They mark the triumph too of the "reformers" who are determined to abolish the exaggerated trills and cadenzas of the Italian stage. Writes Britain's Charles Burney, author of the erudite new General history of Music: "The chevalier Gluck is simplifying music . . . He tries all he can to keep his music chaste." Retorts popular Librettist Pietro Metastasio: Gluck is a composer of "surprising fire...
...When Gluck's opera was originally published in Vienna in 1769, he wrote a preface outlining his plan to overcome "the mistaken vanity of singers." his alternative: "I have striven to restrict music to its true office of serving poetry by means of expression and by following the situations of the story, without interrupting the action or stifling it with a useless superfluity of ornaments." Although Italian prima donnas pay little attention to their words, Gluck heaped praises on the "heartfelt language" of his librettist, Ranieri Calzabigi, who also collaborated on Gluck's first big success, Orfeo...
...While Gluck lived in Vienna, his music pupils included the Habsburg princesses, so when one of them became Queen Marie Antoinette two years ago, Gluck began planning to restage his operas in Paris. Although the pro-Italian faction there is strong (once headed by Philosopher and sometime Composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau), Gluck determined to make his opera even more starkly dramatic than before. The revised libretto stays closer to Euripedes' original, restores Hercules as the hero who saves King Admetus and Queen Alcestis from death. Gluck has tightened many scenes and rescored his recitatives for full orchestra...
Across the Rinne, Gluck's triumph is likely to spread far, for opera is becoming increasingly fashionable. At Esterház, for example, where Franz Josef Haydn serves as Kapellmeister to Prince Nicolaus the Magnificent, the composer has been asked to stop writing chamber music for the prince to play on his baryton viol and to drill his 22- man orchestra in opera. Among those who heard Haydn was Archduke Ferdinand, who commissioned him to compose an opera, La Vera Costanza, to be staged in Vienna later this year...
Cadiff's production is enlivened by Gary S. Gluck's striking art deco sets and generally fine choreography. Especially well done are large chorus numbers like "My Darlin' Eileen"--which features the rich harmonizing of a strong male chorus, ably performing Irish jig steps--and "Swing," a '30s number in which black-skirted and leotarded dancers slink their way across the stage...