ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how Christoph Willibald Gluck's opera reforms responded, to classical culture to become the revolutionary icons his contemporaries believed them to be. It continues with Wagner's rewriting of Gluck in the 1840s, to produce a score which then enters the German repertoire as Gluck, even though Wagner's Hellenism is stamped all over it. The chapter also looks at Hector Berlioz's reinvention of Gluck for Paris. For modern audiences, Gluck's classicism seems to occupy a similar position to 'period instruments'— part of the specialist recovery of a lost world of operatic style, rather than a revolutionary artistic and political aesthetic. One could say that Gluck is killed and revived at different significant junctures of opera's love affair with the ancient world. As Gluck's Orphee is a self-reflexive artistic expression for the revival of the classical past, so reviving Gluck is a repeated, self-conscious, discrete gesture in opera's rediscovery of antiquity.
