A STUDY OF GLUCK

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 57, 30 November 1935, Page 25

A STUDY OF GLUCK

Welcome Biography By Martin Cooper “Gluck,” by Martin Cooper (London: . Chatto and AVindus). The number of books devoted to the study of Christoph Willibald Gluck, eighteenth century musician, is surprisingly small in comparison with the attention that has been directed to other composers certainly of no greater interest or importance. This is explainable partly because he is so greatly over-shadowed by his famous con temporaries, Haydn and Mozart, and mostly because he has had comparatively little influence on the history of music. More recent composers have expressed admiration for his works, but they have rarely been tempted to imitate him, and he founded no school, although his one real follower, Salieri, was later for a time the teacher of both Beethoven and Schubert.

Mr. Cooper’s book is very welcome, especially as it seems to be the first full-length study of Gluck published in England since Mr. Ernest Newman’s “Gluck and the Opera” appeared forty years ago. As Professor Edward Dent suggests in the preface, it is time for a critical reconsideration of Gluck’s work from the angle of modern research. For any adequate estimate of his achievements the composer must be considered primarily as a man of his own period, aud this is what Mr. Cooper sets out to do. He places Gluck in hi s correct musical and cultural environment besides suggesting a new valuation of his works.

To this end Mr. Cooper begins with a survey of opera in the first century of its existence and very interestingly traces the development of that blend of musical and dramatic values which was to reach perfection in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” Here, incidentally, Mr. Cooper raises a novel point and makes it. appear very likely that Mozart obtained some of the ideas for his masterpiece from Gluck's ballet music for “Don Juan.” The resemblances he quotes are curiously striking. Mr. Cooper has chosen his musical illustrations throughout the book with the greatest of care, and in doing so calls attention to some astonishingly vital passages in the works of composers quite unknown to the public and nothing more than a name to readers of musical li’stories. Not the least interesting part of Ihe book is that given over to quotations from Gluck’s lesser known works, some of which have never been published.