ed their important reforms, and in his
musical creations we see all that is best in what is called the new
school.

The man, the Ritter Christoph Wilibald von Gluck, is almost as
interesting to us as the musician. He moved in the society of princes
with a calm and haughty dignity, their conscious peer, and never
prostituted his art to gain personal advancement or to curry favor with
the great ones of the earth. He possessed a majesty of nature which was
the combined effect of personal pride, a certain lofty self-reliance,
and a deep conviction that he was the apostle of an important musical
mission.

Gluck's whole life was illumined by an indomitable sense of his own
strength, and lifted by it into an atmosphere high above that of his
rivals, whom, the world has now almost forgotten, except as they were
immortalized by being his enemies. Like Milton and Bacon, who put on
record their knowledge that they had written for all time, Gluck had a
magnificent consciousness of himself. "I have written," he says, "the
music of my 'Ar-mida' in such a manner as to prevent its soon growing
old." This is a sublime vanity inseparable from the great aggressive
geniuses of the world, the wind of the speed which measures their force
of impact.

Duplessis's portrait of Gluck almost takes the man out of paint to put
him in flesh and blood. He looks down with wide-open eyes, swelling
nostrils, firm mouth, and massive chin. The noble brow, dome-like
and expanded, relieves the massiveness of his face; and the whole
countenance and figure express the repose of a powerful and passionate
nature schooled into balance and symmetry: altogether the presentment
of a great man, who felt that he could move the world and had found the
_pou sto_. Of a large and robust type of physical beauty, Nature seems
to have endowed him on every hand with splendid gifts. Such a man as
this could say with calm simplicity to Marie Antoinette, who inquired
one night about his new opera of "Armida," then nearly finished:
"_Madame, il est bientot fini, et vraiment ce sera superbe._"

One night Handel listened to a new opera from a young and unknown
composer, the "Caduta de' Giganti," one of Gluck's very earliest works,
written when he was yet corrupted with all the vices of the Italian
method. "Mein Gott! he is an idiot," said Handel; "he knows no more of
counterpoint then mein cook." Handel did not see with prophetic eyes. He
never met Gluck afterward, and we do n