Description

Adolf Bernhard Marx (1795-1866), the music critic and composer, spent much of his career as professor of music in Berlin and was a friend and mentor of Mendelssohn. His publications included an influential textbook on composition and a biography of Beethoven. The preface to this two-volume study, published in 1863, ranks Gluck (1714-87) wtih Handel, Mozart and Beethoven at the pinnacle of musical achievement. Marx describes Gluck's radical innovations in operatic composition in the context of the wider European tradition, and sets them in a chronological account of the composer's life. Volume 1 focuses on Gluck's early career in Italy and northern Europe, and his enormously productive middle years in Vienna, 1750-70, where he premiered reformist works including Orfeo. Volume 2 covers his ten years in Paris, and includes a substantial appendix of music extracts. Marx illustrates his analyses with music examples, and quotations from Gluck's writings.