“Perfection,” said Shaw, “is inexhaustible. If ever a nation tried to extinguish Gluck – one of the attainers of perfection – by the simple British method of ignoring him, that nation is ourselves.” Shaw, one of the most communicative of Gluck enthusiasts was here being excessively harsh to the British: Gluck, at the time of his death, perhaps the world’s most famous opera composer, and now (I believe) opera’s most misunderstood creator of front-rank importance, has since 1787 been ignored in Britain neither more nor less than elsewhere.
In any examination of Gluck, paradoxes abound. In the history and development of the operatic medium he stands as one of the key figures who in...
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