later Ritter (knight) von Gluck born July 2, 1714, Erasbach, Upper Palatinate, Bavaria died Nov. 15, 1787, Vienna, Austria German opera composer. Son of a forester, he ran away to study music in Prague. He traveled widely, writing operas for various cities, before settling in 1750 in Vienna, where he would remain except for an interlude in Paris (1773-79) the rest of his life. In 1762, with the librettist Ranieri di Calzabigi (1714-95), he wrote his famous opera Orfeo ed Euridice, in which he borrowed aspects of French opera to achieve a simplified dramatic style that decisively broke with the static and calcified Italian style. His preface to Alceste (1767) laid out the musico-dramatic principles of his "reform opera"; the goal was "simplicity, truth and naturalness." In 1773 he moved to Paris, where his former pupil Marie-Antoinette was on the verge of becoming queen. There he won acclaim for Iphigénie en Aulide (1774), Armide (1777), and Iphigénie en Tauride (1779). His other operas (numbering more than 40 in all) include Paride ed Elena (1770) and Echo et Narcisse (1779). He also wrote five ballets, of which Don Juan (1761) was one of the first successful ballets d'action
Appointed professor of history at the University of Jena in 1789, he developed his epic masterpiece, the historical drama Wallenstein (1800). During a period spent formulating his views on aesthetic activity, he produced philosophical essays, exquisite reflective poems, and some of his most popular ballads. He spent his last years in ill health in Weimar, near his friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. His mature plays, including Maria Stuart (performed 1800) and Wilhelm Tell (1804), examine the inward freedom of the soul that enables the individual to rise above physical frailties and the pressure of material conditions
born Nov. 10, 1759, Marbach, Württemberg died May 9, 1805, Weimar, Saxe-Weimar German dramatist, poet, and literary theorist, one of the greatest figures in German literature. Schiller was educated at the direction of a domineering duke, whose tyranny he eventually fled to write. With his successful first play, The Robbers (1781), he took up the exploration of freedom, a central theme throughout his works. Don Carlos (1787), his first major poetic drama, helped establish blank verse as the recognized medium of German poetic drama. His jubilant "Ode to Joy" was later used in Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No
born Jan. 5, 1846, Aurich, East Friesland died Sept. 14, 1926, Jena, Ger. German philosopher. He taught primarily at the University of Jena (1874-1920). Distrusting abstract intellectualism and systematics, Eucken centred his philosophy upon actual human experience. He maintained that man is the meeting place of nature and spirit and that it is a human duty and privilege to overcome nature by incessant striving after the spiritual life. A strong critic of naturalism, he held that humans are differentiated from the rest of the natural world by their possession of a soul, an entity that cannot be explained in terms of natural processes. He also was known as an interpreter of Aristotle. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1908