Page "Christoph Willibald Gluck" Paragraph 16

Gluck then began to spread his ideas to France.

Under the patronage of his former music pupil, Marie Antoinette, who had married the future French king Louis XVI in 1770, Gluck signed a contract for six stage works with the management of the Paris Opéra.

He began with Iphigénie en Aulide ( 19 April 1774 ).

The premiere sparked a huge controversy, almost a war, such as had not been seen in the city since the Querelle des Bouffons.

Gluck's opponents brought the leading Italian composer, Niccolò Piccinni, to Paris to demonstrate the superiority of Neapolitan opera and the " whole town " engaged in an argument between " Gluckists " and " Piccinnists.

" The composers themselves took no part in the polemics, but when Piccinni was asked to set the libretto to Roland, on which Gluck was also known to be working, Gluck destroyed everything he had written for that opera up to that point.