Of the three major composers celebrating tercentenaries during 2014 – Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Christoph Gluck and Niccolò Jommelli – the first received the lion's share of attention, as measured by the number of commemorative articles, conferences and performances. Likewise, over the last five years the composer's Complete Works edition (published by the Packard Humanities Institute) has garnered more reviews than has Gluck's Sämtliche Werke (published by Bärenreiter) – forty-two to none, according to a RILM search. (There is no complete-works edition for Jommelli, though individual operas have received modern critical editions.) This is perhaps to be expected for a fairly recent enterprise, as opposed to a Gesamtausgabe underway since 1951, in which the major masterworks have long since been published. Nevertheless, recent and forthcoming volumes of the Gluck edition offer material of considerable interest to scholars of eighteenth-century music.
Cecilia Bartoli's 2001 CD ‘Dreams & Fables’ (Decca 289 467 248-2) revealed to a broad public the attractions of individual numbers from Gluck's pre- and non-reform Italian operas, and some of these works, in their entirety, are now gaining a foothold on the modern stage. This music exhibits above all Gluck's fresh and inventive responses to the texts (several of them by Metastasio) and to the talents of the singers performing in these operas. As later revised by Gluck and set to different words, some of these showpiece arias – such as Berenice's ‘Perché, se tanti siete’ (adapted from the gigue from J. S. Bach's Partita No. 1 in B flat major, bwv825) in Antigono (Rome, 1756, ed. Irene Brandenburg, 2007) – arguably lost in effectiveness. The detailed prefaces to recent editions of these drammi per musica (as in Angela Knapp's 2008 edition of Il trionfo di Clelia and Tanja Gölz's 2014 edition of the incompletely surviving Demofoonte) constitute some of the best work currently being done on Gluck's career and on the venues of these works’ performances.
In other genres, too, new volumes of the Gluck-Gesamtausgabe (which has its headquarters at the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz) are adding to our picture of Gluck's stylistic development and professional situation. A 2010 volume included the first publications of both a major, but little-known, ballet of 1764 by the composer, Les Amours d'Alexandre et de Roxane (ed. Irene Brandenburg), and the Kurzfassung (short version – the one actually performed on stage) of Don Juan of 1761 (ed. Sibylle Dahms), the latter with indications throughout of the dramatic action, collated from early sources. Several forthcoming volumes of ballets will break new ground in that they will contain the so-called ’Krumauer Ballette’ – Viennese works probably by Gluck that are preserved in contemporary orchestral partbooks in the Schwarzenberg family archive in Český Krumlov. Though several of these ballets contain movements that Gluck reused in later works, most of them are unattributed, their authenticity resting on court payment records that name him as ‘Compositor von der Music zu denen Balletten’ for a given season. The editors are embracing a broad definition of the role of ‘composer’, opting to include repertoire ballets whose music may have been partly or entirely outsourced by Gluck (as is hinted at in contemporary reports) or that contain borrowed material.
A similarly inclusive attitude is guiding publication of Gluck's opéras comiques. My own edition (2014) of L'Arbre enchanté, a 1759 adaptation for Vienna of a Parisian fairground comedy, contains not just the composer's airs nouveaux, but also nearly all of the sixty-odd vaudevilles (popular tunes, signalled in the libretto only by title, and here recovered from printed and manuscript sources) that, along with spoken prose, carried the opera's dialogue. Daniela Philippi's forthcoming edition of the 1775 Parisian version of Cythère assiégée will include not just the numbers by Gluck, but also the final ballet by Pierre-Montan Berton that accompanied performances at the Opéra (and appeared in the first published score), much to the annoyance of the already absent Gluck.
Finally, Gluck-Gesamtausgabe team member Yulia Shein has launched a new online catalogue of the composer's works, the Gluck-Werkverzeichnis, or GluckWV-online <www.gluck-gesamtausgabe.de/gwv/>, which replaces the long out-of-date catalogues by Alfred Wotquenne (Catalogue thématique des œuvres de Chr. W. v. Gluck (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1904)) and Cecil Hopkinson (A Bibliography of the Printed Works of C. W. von Gluck, 1714–1787 (London: author, 1959)). Entries are being added incrementally according to work-groups, with a full, hard-copy thematic catalogue as an eventual goal.
