Gluck's next work was _Iphigénie en Tauride_, the success of which finally disposed of Piccinni, who produced a work on the same subject at the same time and who is said to have acknowledged Gluck's superiority. Gluck's next work was _Écho et Narcisse_, the comparative failure of which greatly disappointed him; and during the composition of another opera, _Les Danaïdes_, an attack of apoplexy compelled him to give up work. He left Paris for Vienna, where he lived for several years in dignified leisure, disturbed only by his declining health. He died on the 15th of November 1787. (F. H.; D. F. T.)
The great interest of the dramatic aspect of Gluck's reforms is apt to overshadow his merit as a musician, and yet in some ways to idealize it. One is tempted to regard him as condoning for technical musical deficiencies by sheer dramatic power, whereas unprejudiced study of his work shows that where his dramatic power asserts itself there is no lack of musical technique. Indeed only a great musician could so reform opera as to give it scope for dramatic power at all. Where Gluck differs from the greatest musicians is in his absolute dependence on literature for his inspiration. Where his librettist failed him (as in his last complete work, _Écho et Narcisse_), he could hardly write tolerably good music; and, even in the finest works of his French period, the less emotional situations are sometimes set to music which has little interest except as a document in the history of the art. This must not be taken to mean merely that Gluck could not, like Mozart and nearly all the great song-writers, set good music to a bad text. Such inability would prove Gluck's superior literary taste without casting a slur on his musicianship. But it points to a certain weakness as a musician that Gluck could not be inspired except by the more thrilling portions of his libretti. When he was inspired there was no question that he was the first and greatest writer of dramatic music before Mozart. To begin with, he could invent sublime melodies; and his power of producing great musical effects by the simplest means was nothing short of Handelian. Moreover, in his peculiar sphere he deserves the title generally accorded to Haydn of "father of modern orchestration." It is misleading to say that he was the first to use the timbre of instruments with a sense of emotional effect, for Bach and Handel well knew how to give a whole aria or whole chorus peculiar tone by means of a definite scheme of instrumentation. But Gluck did not treat instruments as part of a decorative design, any more than he so treated musical forms. Just as his sense of musical form is that of Philipp Emmanuel Bach and of Mozart, so is his treatment of instrumental tone-colour a thing that changes with every shade of feeling in the dramatic situation, and not in accordance with any purely decorative scheme. To accompany an aria with strings, oboes and flutes, was, for example, a perfectly ordinary procedure; nor was there anything unusual in making the wind instruments play in unison with the strings for the first part of the aria, and writing a passage for one or more of them in the middle section. But it was an unheard-of thing to make this passage consist of long _appoggiaturas_ once every two bars in rising sequence on the first oboe, answered by deep _pizzicato_ bass notes, while Agamemnon in despair cries: "_J'entends retentir dans mon sein le cri plaintif de la nature_." Some of Gluck's most forcible effects are of great subtlety, as, for instance, in _Iphigénie en Tauride_, where Orestes tries to reassure himself by saying: "_Le calme rentre dans mon coeur_," while the intensely agitated accompaniment of the strings belies him. Again, the sense of orchestral climax shown in the oracle scene in _Alceste_ was a thing inconceivable in older music, and unsurpassed in artistic and dramatic spirit by any modern composer. Its influence in Mozart's _Idomeneo_ is obvious at a first glance.