In May of 1774, 15 years before the French Revolution, the 18-year-old Marie Antoinette ascended the throne as queen of France. Less than a month before that, German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck ...

The 2024/25 season of the Greek National Opera commences with a significant artistic challenge. Gluck’s two famous operas based on the ancient Greek legend of Iphigenia –Iphigénie en Aulide and ...

What makes a myth reverberate through thousands of years? What makes artists of so many eras and creative modes — from the playwright Euripides and the poet John Dryden, to the filmmaker Jean Cocteau, ...

"There is no musical rule that I have not willingly sacrificed to dramatic effect," 18th-century composer Christoph Willibald Gluck wrote in program notes to one of his groundbreaking operas. What an ...

Opera's new direction had been confirmed by the work that stands out as Gluck's finest. As a result, Gluck is referred to as the father of 19th century opera, and he was revered throughout that period ...

“The conventions (of opera) are that a bunch of people stand and wave their arms in the air and sing and sort of act, and there’s beautiful music being made, usually an absurd story in a language you ...