Christ. Wilh. Gluck (1714-1787), after doing good service to Italian opera in Italy and London, went to Vienna in 1748, and there wrote, partly for the Prince of Hildburg-hausen, partly and chiefly for the imperial court, a succession of Italian operas of no very striking originality. It was precisely the time when the traditional forms were becoming more and more conventional formulas, and when the vocal art was demanding the sacrifice of simplicity, nature, and truth to the whim of each virtuoso. The decadence of operatic music, which Metastasio bitterly laments (Vol. I., p. 163), inspired Gluck with the desire to lead it back to its first principles. He was a man of earnest thought and strong will. The tendency of German literature to give dignity and importance to poetry did not pass by him unnoticed, and he was a warm admirer of Klopstock, whose odes he set to music.[58] The efforts then being made to raise the German stage in Vienna had an influence on him, and his own first attempts at reformation were greeted with loud applause by Sonnenfels. Gluck has professed his principles of dramatic composition in the well-known dedication to his "Alceste." He declares his opposition to the abuses introduced by the vanity of singers and the servility of composers, by which the most beautiful and stately drama becomes the most tiresome; he refused to interrupt the action at a wrong time by a ritornello, to sacrifice expression to a run or a cadenza, to neglect the second part of a song when the situation demands that peculiar stress shall be laid on it, in obedience to the custom which requires the fourfold repetition of the words of the first part, or to give an ending to the song against the sense of the text; his overtures were to be characteristic of the drama which was to follow, and to prepare the minds of the spectators for it. His fundamental law of operatic music was its due subordination to the words, so that every turn in the action should be suitably expressed, without any superfluous adornment, just as colour gives life and expression to a {CALSABIGI'S LIBRETTI.} (19) sketch. He professed his highest aim to be simple beauty;[59] he condemned all difficulties which hinder clearness, all novelties which do not proceed from the necessities of the situation; he set aside all rule in order to obtain true effects. There can hardly be a doubt as to the justice of these principles in general, and we are only concerned with the result of their adoption on musical progress.[60] Our remarks on a style of music which professes itself the handmaid of poetry, and is content with giving the fittest expression to verse, must be prefaced by some notice of the poets who supplied the verse.