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The Portraits of Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck
I doubt that there is any major composer, of the 18th century at least, who receives shoddier treatment than Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck (1714 - 1787), the composer who epitomizes better than any other the inexorable transition from the Baroque to the Classical, the composer who freed opera from the "drama of stasis" principles that are the essence of the opera seria, an approach to the composition of musical dramas that reached its zenith in the remarkable series of operas created by the unsurpassable George Frideric Handel, with whom Gluck had a "close encounter" in London in 1745.
I recall with sadness how little attention was paid to Gluck during the bicentenary of his death in 1787. The world had commemorated the tercentenary of the births of Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, and Domingo Scarlatti in 1985 with stupendous hoopla and oceans of "hype", but the 200th anniversary of the death of the composer of Orfeo ed Euridice (or Orphée et Euridice, if you prefer, as I do, the Paris version of 1774!) passed by with a nary a mention. This page is not the correct forum for a disquisition on the shameless but inexcusable neglect of Gluck. I shall defer that discussion for another time and place. I shall only say that a recent impulsive decision to open a Gluck discussion list at YahooGroups.com, just to see how many others there were in cyberspace who share my admiration for the music of the son of the Bavarian forest manager, has given me hope that a Gluck risorgimento is beginning.
As many readers of this page already are well aware, I have a particular interest in composer portraits, and I recently decided that the construction of a page devoted to the portraits of Gluck would prove a particularly pleasant "busman's holiday" from such on-going endeavors as The Face Of Bach.
Certainly the best known portrait of Gluck is the ubiquitous and justly renowned depiction of him at the keyboard. This image, which exists in a number of exemplars, was painted by the French portraitist Jacques Duplessis, who is also justly renowned for the portrait that he painted of Benjamin Franklin during his tenure as Ambassador to the Court of Louis XVI. It was a masterstroke on Duplessis's part to depict Gluck at the keyboard, for, like his exact contemporary Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Gluck often was totally transported while playing and was oblivious to all that surrounded him. To my annoyance and frustration, I cannot put my hand on a color photograph of the Duplessis portrait of Gluck at the moment, but I promise to replace this black and white version with a color one as soon as I can!
This wonderful painting has been widely reproduced and, even in Gluck's own lifetime, it appears to have been regarded as the "official" image. Soon after its completion, a portrait print was derived from it by a Parisian graphic artist, S. C. Miger:
Miger, of course, has "flopped" the image, by copying the Duplessis portrait directly to the plate from which the prints were pulled. Computer image manipulation programs, of course, make it possible to undo the "flop" with ease, and here is a direct comparison of Miger's image and the original Duplessis portrait in oils:
Miger has done, as you can see, a remarkable job of copying Gluck's facial features accurately, but I doubt that anyone would argue with me when I observe that, alas, the ineffable expression of ecstacy that Duplessis captured is in no way evident in Miger's print.
That is one reason why I suspect that Miger's print, rather than an original Duplessis exemplar, is the basis for what might well be the print version of the portrait that was the one best known to a number of generations of music lovers, the print made about 1850 by the German engraver, Sichling:
Here is a side by side comparison. The flopped form of the Miger print is on the left, the Sichling engraving is on the right:
Sichling restores the original orientation of the portrait by copying from the Miger print directly to the plate, but that is not the only reason why I am convinced that he worked from the Miger print rather than a Duplessis original. Consider, if you will, the contour of Gluck's coat.
To make my point easier to understand, here are the flopped form of the Miger print, the Sichling engraving, and the equivalent detail from the Duplessis original, all lined up in a row:
Please note that Miger's print is but a detail, a detail within a tondo, a roundel, and that it is at precisely the point at which Gluck's jacket disappears behind the frame of the roundel that Sichling turns Gluck into a figure significantly more svelte than he is in the Duplessis original!
At about the same time that he sat for Duplessis, Gluck also sat for Jean Antoine Houdon (1741-1828), the renowned sculptor who was then at the beginning of his long and illustrious career. The marble bust that resulted was, alas, lost in the fire that leveled the Opéra in Paris, the theatre that preceded the famed Palais Garnier in the Place de l'Opéra. The plaster maquette, however, does survive, because Houdon sold it to Frederick the Great, King of Prussia:
There can be no doubt that Houdon sculpted the same man whom Duplessis painted.
But Duplessis's image of Gluck and Houdon's portrait bust are not the only ones! So far, the portrait images of Gluck that I have been able to locate come from the last two decades of his life. That there are not any "early" portrait images may well be another facet of the unfortunate loss of almost the whole of Gluck's Nachlass, which, though cherished and carefully preserved by his nephew, was among the contents of a country villa that was looted and binladenized by Napoleon's army during its assault on Vienna in 1809.
Among the portrait images that have survived is this wonderful painting of Gluck and his beloved wife, Marianne Pergin, about to enjoy a glass of wine or a cordial at table:
This delightful image, which apparently escaped the binladenization of the nephew's country villa and remained in the family's possession for several generations before passing into the collections of one of the Vienna museums, gives me no end of pleasure. Dated in some sources to the year 1772, this painting, by an as yet undidentified artist, depicts a Gluck whose facial features are identical to those of the Gluck that Duplessis painted so effectively in 1775. The anonymous artist of the double portrait captures not only Marianne's total love for and devotion to her husband but also their equally total, shared delight in the pleasures of life. This portrait, however, is a double-edged sword for those of us who know the details of Gluck's life. In the last seven or eight years of his life, Gluck had several strokes, and, after he retired to Vienna in poor health, his enjoyment of the pleasures of the table was severely circumscribed by the strict diet on which he was placed by his physicians. And his wife, it appears, was a Cerberus of the first order when it came to being certain he stuck to the diet, which proscribed spirituous liquors of any description. On November 15, 1787, some old friends from Paris stopped in for a visit. Marianne left the table for a while, and Gluck, feigning anger that one of the guests would not have yet another glass of "the good stuff", finished it off himself. Shortly thereafter, Gluck and his wife took their quotidian carriage ride. During that drive, Gluck was leveled by the stroke that carried him from this world to the next. I do not ever look at this sensitive, perceptive portrait of a couple devoted to each other and to their total enjoyment of the life that they shared with each other that I do not recall the circumstances of Gluck's departure from this world.
The only other contemporary portraits of Gluck of which I have knowledge have to date from the last months of his stay in Paris. The first of these is a profile portrait print, dated 1781, by Saint Aubin:
Unless Saint Aubin journeyed to Vienna to make the drawing from which this print was made, this profile portrait could not have been made any later than the end of 1779 or the beginning of 1780, when the Glucks took leave of Paris for what turned out to be the last time. Regardless of when the stichvorlag was actually made, the portrait depicts a Gluck older and less well than the Gluck of the Duplessis portrait.
Much the same can be said about this remarkable portrait of Gluck, by another renowned 18th century French artist, the genre painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805):
This magnificent image, a depiction of a Gluck casually but elegantly garbed, a Gluck whose complexion and sagging left cheek provide poigant testimony of his health problems, a Gluck worn down by the political in-fighting and fed up with the hypocrisy and the backstabbing of the fickle Parisian musical world. It is the same face that one sees in the Duplessis portrait, but it is the face of a man who has had quite enough of the stress and strain of a professional career that is no longer rewarding. It is the face of a man ready to retreat from the front lines and enjoy as fully as possible however much time he might have left in this dimension.
Teri Noel Towe
September 22, 2001
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