Christoph Willibald Gluck

Born in the Upper Palatinate on 2 July 1714 and raised in Bohemia, Gluck rose to prominence at the Habsburg court in Vienna, where intellectuals had long campaigned for opera reform and he delivered it. In the 1760s he shattered the Metastasian opera seria template with works like Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste, introducing orchestral recitative and slashing the da capo aria until his operas ran half the length of typical baroque fare. The pull of French opera brought him to Paris in November 1773, where he fused Italian and French traditions - rich choruses included - into eight works for the Parisian stage. Iphigénie en Tauride in 1779 became his greatest success and is often considered his finest work, but after Echo et Narcisse flopped that same year, he left Paris in disgust and returned to Vienna, where he died on 15 November 1787.