It is over seventy years since the publication of the first volume of the Complete Works of Christoph Willibald Gluck. Now the edition, which made many works accessible for the first time, is almost complete. A preliminary assessment.

In 1951 the first volume of the Gluck Complete Works was published by Bärenreiter-Verlag with the opéra-comique “L’Ivrogne corrigé”. This marked the beginning of the publication of all the works of Christoph Willibald Gluck, a project which is now nearing completion. In 59 volumes, whose familiar light blue binding is increasingly found on conductors’ podiums all over the world, Gluck’s varied output is available for practical music-making in its entirety and invites new discoveries and rediscoveries in equal measure.

In the initial phase of the project, works with largely unproblematic source material were published, that is, editions, which, because of a lack of autographs, were produced from the few surviving copies or a printed score published during Gluck’s lifetime. This particularly applied to the so-called “Reform operas” such as “Orfeo ed Euridice” and “Alceste”, with which he gave a new music-dramatic direction to Italian opera, and to operas such as the two “Iphigénie” settings, commissioned by the Académie Royale de musique in Paris, which also helped give French music theatre an epoch-making new beginning. These works enjoyed a correspondingly prominent position as representative of Gluck’s output, and for a long time dominated the repertoire. Gluck’s oeuvre encompasses a wide range of different genres, the different sections of which have been enriched in many ways in the Complete Edition over the last ten years. In 2013, using the expanded concept of author and work commonly found in dance research, all the surviving ballets from Gluck’s period of activity as a ballet composer in Vienna from 1759 to 1764 were included in the Complete Edition. In addition to his ballets pantomimes Don Juan, “Sémiramis” and “Les Amours d’Alexandre et de Roxane”, twenty ballet scores composed for the Vienna Hoftheater to choreographies by Gasparo Angiolini and Carlo Bernardi were accordingly published in three part-volumes; in most cases the plots were reconstructed by using complementary textual sources as explained in the forewords of the respective volumes. They offer attractive ideas for choreographic treatment for present-day theatrical use. Within the genre of opéra-comique (Gluck was entrusted with editing and arranging the material based on Parisian repertoire to suite Viennese public taste during the same period), the intensification of vaudeville research opened up new approaches and possibilities for reconstruction. In the 2015 and 2018 editions of the Viennese adaptations “L’Arbre enchanté” (1759) and “La Fausse Esclave” (1758), both based on vaudeville comedies, the melodies researched are given in unison with a reference to the original title and with the text underlay indicated in the libretto to the newly composed musical text by Gluck, thus making the work performable again in its entirety. The same goes for the edition of the Vienna version of the opéra-comique “Cythère assiégée” (1759), which will be published soon. With the 1775 arrangement for Paris, Gluck in turn made a contribution to the genre of opéra-ballet which was more popular on the French stage. The alterations in the original score for this, with vocal and dance interludes and the differing versions of the intended, performed and printed work are thereby made available in the four-part appendix to the musical edition. Also included is the final ballet which was added by opera director Pierre-Montan Berton, through which delightful alternatives for current performances are provided. Gluck’s incidental music to “Soliman second”, or “Les Trois Sultanes” is also worth rediscovering. Charles-Simon Favart’s verse comedy, popular because of its exotic atmosphere, was performed in Vienna four years after its successful 1761 premiere at the Comédie-Italienne in Paris; Gluck was commissioned to compose the vocal numbers envisaged for the theatre piece, and his contribution to this genre represents a special case within his output.

Although Gluck’s compositional output was almost exclusively for the musical theatre, he also wrote a series of instrumental works which deserve a place in the Complete Edition, as they do in the concert hall. A detailed consideration of the question of authorship, which is particularly challenging for this group of works, resulted in the edition of seventeen symphonies attributed to Gluck; some of these can be regarded as belonging to the conventional Italian opera overture type, without clearly being assigned to one of his early works, whereas others were probably composed for private or public concerts. Another main emphasis of the project is Gluck’s opere serie, on which he particularly focussed in the early years of his output. Amongst the operas for northern Italian theatres, only his setting of Pietro Metastasio’s dramma per musica “Ipermestra” survives complete; with its impressive title role composed specially for the famous alto Vittoria Tesi, it certainly deserves a revival. The same goes for Gluck’s opera “Demofoonte”, premiered in Milan in 1743, of which all the self-contained numbers and two accompagnato recitatives survive. Supplemented by one of Gluck’s surviving opera sinfonias, and provided with secco recitatives composed later, this work can also take its well-deserved place in the operatic repertoire. Of Gluck’s other early opere serie, on the other hand, only individual vocal numbers survive in various quantities, including primarily the bravura arias composed for star castrati such as Giovanni Carestini, Angelo Maria Monticelli and Felice Salimbeni. These represent a delightful enrichment of the vocal repertoire.

A recent find of eleven vocal pieces from Gluck’s opera “Poro”, composed for the Teatro Regio in Turin in 1744 and including eight previously unknown arias, shows that research on this group of works can almost never be regarded as complete. This means that the proportion of surviving musical text for this work has increased by almost fifty per cent and it continues to expand Gluck’s known output with surprises.

Tanja Gölz
(from “[t]akte” 2023 / translation: Elizabeth Robinson)