Full Name=Christoph Willibald von Gluck, Profession=Composer of Italian and French opera in the early Classical period, Nationality=German (Bavarian-born composer who worked across the Habsburg courts in Vienna and Paris), Born=July 2, 1714, Birthplace=Erasbach, Upper Palatinate, Bavaria, Holy Roman Empire (now Germany), Generation= Enlightenment-era early Classical music generation of 18th‑century European court composers; Chinese Zodiac=Horse (1714 is a Horse year in the traditional 12‑year cycle); Zodiac Sign=Cancer; Age in 2026=312 (would be 312 years old if still alive); Marital Status=Married to Maria Anna Bergin (an 18‑year‑old merchant’s daughter with close ties to the imperial court, married in Vienna on 15 September 1750, in a long and harmonious marriage); Children=None (no children are recorded; contemporary biographical sources state that the marriage produced no children); Cause of Death=Stroke (apoplexy) in Vienna, Austria, Habsburg Monarchy, on November 15, 1787. Description=Christoph Willibald von Gluck was one of the most influential opera composers of the 18th century, renowned for his “reform operas” that deliberately reshaped the relationship between music and drama by simplifying plots, decluttering vocal display, and placing emotional truth and theatrical coherence at the center of the art form. born the son of a forester in the small Bavarian village of Erasbach, he defied his father’s wish that he become a forester, studied music in Prague, and went on to serve various European courts, where he absorbed Italian and French operatic traditions and blended them into a new, powerful style. his breakthrough reform works, including Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), Alceste (1767), Paride ed Elena (1770), and later the French versions Iphigénie en Aulide and Iphigénie en Tauride, rejected the rigid conventions of Baroque opera seria and the dominance of Metastasian libretti in favor of continuous drama, expressive orchestration, and integrated choruses that heightened the spiritual and psychological stakes of mythological stories. Gluck moved to Paris in the 1770s, where his reforms sparked intense artistic debates but ultimately won acclaim from critics and audiences, and his synthesis of Italian lyricism with French dramatic sensibility profoundly influenced later generations of composers such as Mozart and, indirectly, Wagner; throughout his career he insisted that music should “second poetry” and serve the narrative rather than mere vocal virtuosity, and this philosophy earned him a reputation as a quiet revolutionary whose 35‑plus full‑length operas and numerous shorter works permanently transformed opera from a decorative court entertainment into a serious musical‑dramatic art form; in his final years he returned to Vienna, enjoying high status at the Habsburg court, but his health declined, and he succumbed to a fatal stroke, with some contemporary accounts attributing his apoplexy to overindulgence in alcohol, leaving behind a legacy as the most historically important person born on July 2 and a central architect of the Classical era’s operatic language.