A Charming Performance

In the second half of the eighteenth century, composer Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck (1714-1787) wanted to change the way opera was being presented. His plan was to simplify the music and give more weight to the drama. In doing that he eventually broke opera seria's stranglehold on the art form. In 1761, Italian poet and librettist Raniero Simone Francesco Maria da Calazbigi (1714-1795), who had been impressed by French tragédie en musique and was also eager to reform Italian opera by making it simpler and more dramatically effective, settled in Vienna where he met Gluck...