On a sunny summer’s day in August 2024 three volumes of Gluck’s dance music arrived. It seemed fitting to receive them while the sun was shining brightly on ripening grapes; the garden setting made reading them an even greater pleasure. These volumes offer the most up-to-date scores of Gluck’s music for the ballet stage; they will equip musicians, choreographers, dancers and dance scholars, as well as musicologists, with indispensable, reliable and critical tools to investigate vital aspects of the history of eighteenth-century dance and music. Future research, and perhaps new theatrical productions, will have to take these volumes into serious consideration.

The three volumes belong to series 2 of Bärenreiter’s complete historical-critical edition of Gluck’s works and are devoted to his dance dramas. To understand the importance of dance and ballet in Gluck’s work, it is worth reminding the reader of the other categories that guide the complete edition: series 1 includes the musical dramas, such as Orfeo ed Euridice, Telemaco and Iphigenie auf Taurus; series 3, by far the largest, includes Italian opera seria and operatic serenades, such as La clemenza di Tito; series 4 includes the comic operas; series 5 contains instrumental music; series 6 covers vocal music, with sacred and secular works, odes and songs; and the edition concludes with series 7, ‘Supplements’, in this instance librettos, letters and documents.

The publication of Gluck’s complete works began in 1951 and with series 2 is now finished, covering more than half a century of research. The distinctions within series 2 are also noteworthy: volumes 1 and 2 contain the scores of Don Juan and Semiramis, and Don Juan (original version) and Les amours d’Alexandre et de Roxane respectively. All of these had been published in 1966, revised in 2016 (volume 1) and 2010 (volume 2) and are not discussed here. Volumes 3 to 5 contain music to roughly twenty ballets, arranged in chronological order of composition and performance. The works were mainly choreographed by Gasparo Angiolini, with some by Carlo Bernardi; most are hardly known today. They are as follows:

Volume 3 begins with a general introduction by Bruce Alan Brown, followed by another introduction by Irene Brandenburg. These two essays position Gluck in the world of mid-eighteenth-century opera and ballet and analyse the specific situation at the Habsburg court in Vienna, where these ballets were first performed. Volumes 4 and 5 have shorter introductions that focus on the works within them, relying on the more extensive essays in volume 3.

Having already been involved in the quarrels over a new opera aesthetic and compositions for dance, Gluck then became part of the discourse concerning a major transformation of ballet. Though the reform of stage dance happened across Europe, two well-known ballet masters and choreographers of the time, Gasparo Angiolini in Vienna and Jean-Georges Noverre in Stuttgart, became representatives of an antagonistic battle concerning the new dance. Both used Gluck’s music to reinvent the art and enforce an aesthetics that would reshape the practice, understanding and reception of ballet. The generic term usually employed to capture this development is ballet d’action, a narrative form in which all elements of performance – movement, music, word and stage design – would unite into a new synthesis. The ideal models were found in poetry and painting, and movement was to align itself with the perfection reached in those arts. The new ballet was to seize the attention and, above all, arouse the emotions of contemporary audiences. Affects that had the power to unleash feelings of happiness or sadness, sentiments of joy, despair or terror in the audience were the aesthetic means to overcome what was perceived as old, stale, meaningless dance stuck in formal ornamentations. Movement true to human nature, and not alienated from it, could only result from a new conception of a reasonable and sensible person: the enlightened subject. In passionate debates the new was pitted against the old, the old defended against the new. But the time of formal suites and divertissements was over, and the old had to make way for narratives rooted in human interactions in which passions and feelings played out and in which expression and representation ruled the theatrical stage. Many of these narratives had been inspired by ancient Greek and Roman myths and stories; in those ancient times an ideal had been born that needed to be recovered. By looking back, so it was assumed, the new could be gleaned and the present, contemporary world could be understood. Human nature could now be redefined, expressed and discovered in modern society.

But it remains unclear whether the action in the ballet d’action (which acted as an umbrella term for many subgenres of ballet) constituted a hybrid form of movement and oratory, or of dance and drama – dance as drama, as Edward Nye points out in his analysis given in Mime, Music and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). We therefore do not really know how the relationships between dance and word and mime panned out in practice. Nor do we understand how exactly expression as representation or imitation was realized through dance. Nye also suggests that, unlike Angiolini’s or Noverre’s choreographies, Gluck’s music was less frequently attacked, and that this absence of controversy around his ballet music was a sign of wide acceptance and success.

Ballets were an integral part of theatre performances. They were set as part of operas or as interludes between acts of an opera. But they were also staged as independent works in their own right. Employed as ‘composer of music for ballets’ in Vienna, Gluck wrote new scores or arranged already existing music for ballets in collaboration with the choreographers. When choreographers could not reach an agreement with their chosen or imposed (by theatre managements) composers, they then tended to write their own musical accompaniments. Most ballet masters used their fiddles in dancing lessons or rehearsals and were adept enough at setting music to scenes to patch together scores. Today, however, such works of utilitarian music are condemned as inferior by musicians and music scholars alike.

In his general introduction, Bruce Alan Brown maps the evolution of Gluck’s success in Vienna and his contribution to making ballet the most innovative stage genre of this time. When Vienna’s main choreographer Franz Hilferding left for a lengthy tour of Russia, his protégé Angiolini was able to expand his position at the Vienna court theatres. As part of a group that comprised Ranieri de Calzabigi (at the time financial advisor to the court), State Chancellor Count Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz (who was guided by Enlightenment ideas of running the state), Gluck, Angiolini and the Portuguese Duke of Braganza, Angiolini undertook a serious reform of ballet. (And as an aside, in 1822 Kaunitz’s grandson was put on trial in Vienna, accused of pimping, sexual abuse and rape of young ballet dancers in more than one hundred cases.) With Count Giacomo Durazzo as manager and intendant of the court theatre, ambitious projects were planned and executed which could only have happened because of the support of influential statesmen and politicians, who also made the finances available. This combination of, and collaboration between, politicians and artists could not have been more auspicious. Ballet became a matter of state interest and importance once again.

Brown gives detailed analyses of the emerging print culture of ballet programmes and public announcements, considering the effect they had on the public perception of ballet and its music. Elaborate programme notes communicated the meaning of ballet narratives and undermined the notion that dance and ballet were self-explanatory. This print culture encouraged a new and interactive form of criticism and appreciation. It also made possible the ensuing musicological research that is based on such documentation, which is today considered crucial.

Brown’s comments on the accidental finding of the Gumpenhuber Repertoire (scores once owned by the dancer, choreographer, chronicler and ballet master Philipp Gumpenhuber (1706–1770)) in the 1970s, and then the discovery of handwritten scores in the Schwarzenberg archive in Český Krumlov, Czech Republic after 1989, are particularly fascinating and demonstrate how easily sources such as music scores and programmes are mislaid or lost and how random and yet painstaking their rediscovery then is. Finding so many scores of ballet music in this way has changed and broadened the image of Gluck as composer, but it has also corrected the knowledge we have of the position of ballet within the canon and the hierarchy of the arts, not to mention the way in which the genre of narrative ballet advanced. This is of importance as Parisian and French ballet are usually associated with innovation and originality. The case of ballet in Vienna contradicts such one-dimensional perspectives, as can be gleaned from a lists of all ballets staged in Vienna between 1758 and 1765.

Irene Brandenburg (editor of volumes 3 and 5) and Ingeborg Zechner (editor of volume 4, with a foreword by Vera Grund) provide detailed information on Gluck’s ballet music that, according to Brown, was not known when the scores for Gluck’s Don Juan and Semiramis were published in volume 1 in series 2 in 1966, or even in the 1970s and 80s. These introductions to the individual volumes lay out the sources on which the publications rest as well as the performance context. They place Gluck’s ballets within the repertoire of the Vienna theatres, trace the careers and aesthetic preferences of choreographers and performers and discuss the broad range of forms that existed within the genre of ballet. They also lay out how music, movement and stage action might have interacted. The editors confirm Brown’s claim that a wide variability existed in formal and generic descriptions of ballets. They adopt the four eighteenth-century typologies applied to Hilferding’s works to order the ballets – ballets d’invention, ballets de métiers, ballets de fables and ballet des nations – and classify Gluck’s works accordingly. All ballets (but one) in the volumes are grouped within these four categories and are introduced by tracing origin and production, authorship, genre and content, and musical details such as formal structure and orchestration. The music for all ballets follows, as scored for wind instruments (the orchestration specified usually contains two flutes, two oboes, bassoon and horn), string instruments (violin 1, violin 2, viola, cello and bass) and continuo. The movements all begin with a sinfonia, and only very occasionally refer explicitly to dances such as the minuet or gigue, with their specific rhythmic patterns. It is striking that the overwhelming tempo indication is Allegro or similarly energetic speeds.

This publication of Gluck’s ballet music provides the most complete picture of his compositional techniques and the production conditions of the ballet d’action in Vienna in the mid-eighteenth century. The volumes are handsomely illustrated with performance images, costume designs, examples of handwritten scores, manuscript reproductions and descriptions of repertoire. More significantly, they are a vital repository of knowledge concerning the embodiment of music and the relationship between music and movement on stage that will greatly enrich the application of scholarship and dramaturgical practice in theatres.