Who Killed Chevalier Gluck?

This chapter examines how Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck's opera reforms responded to Victorian culture to become the revolutionary icons his contemporaries believed them to be. Gluck was music tutor to Marie Antoinette in Vienna and, after her marriage to Louis XVI, followed her to Paris, where he was a regular at Versailles. He died two years before the Revolution broke out. His music, according to Jean-Baptiste Leclerc, led to the shattering of the throne of France. The chapter considers formal elements of composition as well as frames of comprehension: the role of classicism in the critical understanding of theater; the role of dance in opera; the role of the chorus as a specifically classical element in modern opera. It also analyzes the differences between Vienna and Paris and London as sites for Gluck's operatic success and failure—within the incipient but self-conscious nationalism of the era.