CHRISTOPHER GLUCK
Dance Of The Blessed Spirits
We’ve published a different portion of this great piece before, but this month Bridget arranges and transcibes a new section for your delight.
In this latest issue, we return to a wonderful work by the operatic composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787). Gluck was born in Bavaria, and was urged to follow his father’s profession of forester. Thankfully for the development of Western music, Gluck resisted this and left home in his early teens, moving to Prague and supporting himself with his prodigious talent as a church musician while continuing music education.
He moved to Vienna in his early 20s, finding the necessary studies and network of people to develop what would be an illustrious international career as an opera composer. Gluck’s bold, dramatic style revealed itself through a staggering 49 operas, which transformed and reinvigorated both the Italian and French operatic traditions.
Gluck’s profound compositional skill resisted flowery arias and ‘crowd-pleasers’ of the day, in favour of a more purified style, which was in a way more timeless, morally and spiritually intense and justifies his association with classical mythology. Gluck’s compositional spirit can clearly be heard in the operas of Mozart, Rossini, Wagner and beyond.
Perhaps his most popular and enduring work is his late opera Orfeo Ed Euridice which was premiered in 1762 in Vienna, and revised several times for different performers, and in 1774 with a French libretto (Orpheé et Eurydice). The myth of Orpheus, a great musician who embarks on a dangerous journey to rescue his dead wife Eurydice from the Underworld, has inspired many a musical composition, but Gluck treats the story with a noble simplicity and the purity of his composing in service of the drama, is a masterpiece. Here I’ve taken the famous Dance Of The Blessed Spirits from Act 2, Scene 2. Scored for two flutes and orchestra, in the ‘pastoral’ key of F Major, the soaring melody beautifully depicts the serenity of Elysium, a Classical conception of the afterlife. Back in issue 295, I arranged the opening F Major section of this work, but here I have made an arrangement of the middle section, which is based in the relative Minor key of D Minor. I’ve preserved this key using drop D tuning. If you’d like to play the two arrangements in succession and still preserve the key relationship you could use a capo on the 1st fret for the first ‘movement’ (which I arranged in E Major) and then remove it and use drop D tuning for this section.
The beauty of this melody has inspired countless arrangements for a variety of ensembles, particularly (but exclusively) with flute as the melodic voice. The main challenge here is to capture the lyrical melodic phrasing, with a harmonic accompaniment. The tab captions will help you get to grips with the techniques needed so you can perform this with the elegance such a wonderful piece deserves.
NEXT MONTH Bridget arranges and transcribes the Andante from Bach’s Violin Sonata #2
TRACK RECORD For the 1762 Italian version I recommend John Eliot Gardiner’s recording Gluck: Orfeo Ed Euridice with soloists Ragin, Sieden and McNair (Decca 1994), and for the 1774 French libretto, the tenor Richard Croft as the title role directed by Marc Minokowski (Decca 2004) is wonderful. For a different approach, check out Jason Sidwell’s rock guitar and piano version on youtube!
CHRISTOPHER GLUCK’S COMPOSITIONAL SPIRIT CAN BE CLEARLY BE HEARD IN THE OPERAS OF MOZART, ROSSINI, WAGNER AND BEYOND