From Bach to Gluck (by way of Gluck)

If yesterday's remark about Gluck's "almost blatant" debt to Bach came off as a bit too arcane (since my wife is always quick to accuse me to that kind of self-indulgence), I decided to see if it had been documented anywhere on the Web. By now I expect to find things like this in some remote corner of the Web or another, but I have to confess that I had not expected to find it at the Wikipedia site! As a matter of fact, I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that Wikipedia had an entry for not only Gluck but also thirteen of his operas! According to the Iphigénie en Tauride entry, Gluck did quite a lot of borrowing for this particular score. Here is the paragraph that covers this topic:

The borrowings Gluck made in this, his last significant opera, are numerous, and many scholars feel that they constitute a "summing up" of the artistic ideals he pursued throughout his career as a composer. Most of the reused music is his own, culled from his earlier, Italian-language operas or from his ballet Don Juan (1761). The Act II music for the Furies, for example, adapts music from Gluck's ballet. In at least one case, however, an aria in Iphigénie en Tauride is actually Gluck borrowing from himself borrowing from Johann Sebastian Bach; the Act IV number for Iphigenia, "Je t'implore et je tremble," is a parody of "Perchè, se tanti siete" from Gluck's Antigono, which in turn uses material from the Gigue of the Partita no. 1 in B Flat (BWV 825) by Bach.

That last sentence should explain the rather playful title I composed for this post! I was also pleased to see that this entry has hyperlinks to both the San Francisco Opera page for the production I saw and the Lyric Opera of Chicago page for their performance of the same production. I should also mention (since I so rarely have anything nice to say about Wikipedia!) that the "background piece" that Michael Zwiebach prepared for San Francisco Classical Voice, while it offers some very interesting perspectives on Gluck, seems to have overlooked the idea of this particularly opera being an act of "summing up."