Christoph Willibald Gluck was a composer of the early Classical period, born in the Upper Palatinate and raised in Bohemia, whose career took him to Milan, London, Vienna, and Paris. Working chiefly in Italian and French opera, he composed approximately 35 full-length operas along with shorter operatic works, ballets, and instrumental pieces, including his landmark Orfeo ed Euridice. He died in Vienna in 1787 of a heart arrhythmia while lunching with friends.

Gluck is celebrated as a great reformer of opera, breaking the hold that the ornate conventions of Metastasian opera seria had over the genre by introducing orchestrally accompanied recitative and subordinating vocal display to dramatic truth. His reforms profoundly influenced later composers, including Mozart and Berlioz, and established a flourishing school of followers in Paris that dominated the French operatic stage through the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, cementing his lasting importance in the history of opera.

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Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christoph_Willibald_Gluck