Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice

1762

At Vienna's Burgtheater, Christoph Gluck premiered an opera that abandoned castrati ornament for dramatic truth. It was the beginning of his operatic reform - cleaner lines, fewer arias, the music serving the story. Mozart was six. European opera had its first whiff of what would become its nineteenth-century soul. The aria 'Che faro senza Euridice' remains one of the most performed pieces in the operatic repertoire.