In 1774 Gluck undertook to deliver six stage works for the Académie Royale de Musique in Paris. He fulfilled this commission partly with reworkings of works premiered earlier in Vienna, such as “Orfeo ed Euridice”.

In the case of “Alceste” which was premiered in 1776 and was the prototype of the “reform opera”, he wrote a completely new version: the libretto was translated from Italian into French and changed at the same time. The music was also fundamentally reworked; for example, Gluck newl...