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L'arbre enchanté

Music by Christoph Willibald Gluck

L'arbre enchanté, ou Le tuteur dupé (The Magic Tree, or, the Tutor Duped), Wq 42, is a one-act opéra comique by Christoph Willibald Gluck to a libretto based on the 1752 opéra-comique Le poirier ("The Peartree") with a text by Jean-Joseph Vadé. Vadé's libretto was based on a tale from Boccaccio's Decameron, as retold by Jean de La Fontaine. Gluck's opera was written for the name day of Emperor Francis I, premiering at the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna on the evening of 3 October 1759, the anniversary of the death of Saint Francis of Assisi. Gluck revised the work to a versified adaptation by Pierre-Louis Moline of the original libretto, to which was also added (for Lubin) the ariette "Près de l'objet qui m'inflamme", parodied from Gluck's earlier opera Le cadi dupé. The revised version was first performed on 27 February 1775 as L'arbre enchanté, at the Palace of Versailles. The story is slightly varied in Chaucer's tale of May and Januarie ("The Merchant's Tale"), where it is instead the pair of lovers who climb the tree. The diarist Karl von Zinzendorf related that Gluck sang the part of an ailing singer from the wings in 1761.

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About the Composer

Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck (; German: [ˈkʁɪstɔf ˈvɪlɪbalt ˈɡlʊk]; 2 July 1714 – 15 November 1787) was a composer of Italian and French opera in the early classical period. Born in the Upper Palatinate and raised in Bohemia, both part of the Holy Roman Empire at the time, he gained prominence at the Habsburg court in Vienna. There he brought about the practical reform of opera's dramaturgical practices for which many intellectuals had been campaigning. With a series of radical new works in the 1760s, among them Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste, he broke the stranglehold that Metastasian opera seria had enjoyed for much of the century. Gluck introduced more drama by using orchestral…

Text from the Wikipedia article "Christoph Willibald Gluck", licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

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Other Operas by Christoph Willibald Gluck