In German, the word for happiness and good fortune is the same: Glück.

These qualities also happen to characterize the composer who bears that name (albeit without the umlaut).

Christoph Willibald Gluck has come down to us as one the great operatic reformers. Yet, of his own operas (about 35 survive), he’s pretty much remembered for but a single work, “Orfeo ed Euridice” – especially the “Dance of the Blessed Spirits.”

Gluck’s own blessed spirit lives on primarily through his influence on others – Mozart, Weber, Berlioz, and Wagner.

One can certainly hear anticipations of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” not only in Gluck’s ballet “Don Juan,” but also in his overture to the opera “Iphigénie en Tauride.” Furthermore, there’s no way Mozart did not know Gluck’s “Don Juan” fandango when he himself came to include one in “The Marriage of Figaro.”

More broadly, for Gluck, words and music were to bear equal weight. No more, the florid, showy arias of yore, ornamented beyond recognition by star castrati. Beautiful singing was to remain, of course, but DRAMA was to be of foremost importance.

It was musical theater’s good fortune to attract Christoph Willibald Gluck. Happy birthday to a man who made his own luck. Zum Geburtstag viel Glück!

Otto Klemperer conducts Wagner’s arrangement of the overture to Gluck’s “Iphigénie en Tauride”

The ballet “Don Juan”

Gluck’s “Fandango” staged

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTAqT7MY-Dc

Mozart’s “Fandango” staged

“Dance of the Furies, from “Don Juan” (later reused in “Orfeo”)

Documentary “Gluck the Reformer,” with John Eliot Gardiner, William Christie and others