Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Gluck: Demofoonte

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

This was the third opera of the many others to follow from the great reformer Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-87). At this early stage in his career he was writing works in the gallant style: progressive, to be sure, but not overtly reformist. Demofoonte (1743) premiered in Milan with much success and continued to be performed around Italy for several years thereafter. It really launched Gluck's career as an opera composer, leading to international recognition.

The libretto of Demofoonte was set by at least 73(!) composers during the course of the eighteenth century. The poet Pietro Metastasio wrote a batch of very durable and adaptable stock Italian-language libretti. Gluck met Metastasio in Vienna; their cordial artistic relationship is documented in Metastasio's correspondence. The poet personally approved of the young composer's settings of his verse.

The British conductor/musicologist Alan Curtis has been praised for his recorded restorations of the Italian opere serie of Handel. Curtis and his period instrument group Il Complesso Barocco did the best they could with their restoration of Gluck's Demofoonte. Sure enough, the Brilliant Classics release of this opera seria in 2020 again won praise from reviewer Bertil van Boer in the pages of Fanfare magazine. There will never be a verifiably complete recording of an opera seria like this because of the way composers reworked their music so much in those days, But on three Brilliant CDs we get as much of Gluck's opera as we're ever likely to get, beautifully sung and played.