Habent sua fata libelli -- TERTIANUS MAURUS

FEW books can have had such a strange history as this first complete
edition of Gluck's letters. In 1913, at the suggestion of my great
teacher, Professor Dr Hugo Riemann, I was invited by the Gluck
Society in Leipzig to collect the maestro's letters. A year later the First
World War broke out and brought the work to a halt. After the war,
the inflation in Germany forced the Gluck Society into liquidation.

In the mid-twenties Dr George Kinsky, Director of the Heyer
Museum in Cologne, proposed that I should collaborate with him
on an edition of the Gluck letters, as he had acquired from a large
antiquarian bookshop in Vienna for 25,000 marks thirty-eight
unpublished letters by Gluck addressed to the Head of Chancery of
the Austrian Embassy in Paris, Franz Kruthoffer. He was anxious to
annotate this new addition to his collection himself. Pressure of work
prevented my wife and myself from completing the manuscript by
the agreed time. It was therefore agreed that Dr Kinsky should bring
out the letters of Kruthoffer separately, in view of the fact that in
1926 the collections in the Heyer Museum were put up for auction
and all their rare autographs were scattered to the four winds.
Finally, when the collection of Gluck letters was nearing completion,
it was Dr Kinsky who very kindly agreed that his research should be
incorporated in a complete edition. For this we shall always be
deeply indebted to him. Eventually, in 1939, the manuscript was
ready, but once more publication was delayed by the outbreak of
war. With considerable difficulty the type was set, only to be
destroyed by bombs, together with the manuscript.

It was not until 1948 that we were able to start work again, and
from then until his death in 1952 Dr Kinsky gave us unstinted
support. Then followed several years in which we knocked in vain
at the doors of Austrian and German publishers. But, thanks to the
friendly intervention of Mr H. C. Robbins Landon, to whom we
owe a great debt of gratitude, the firm Barrie and Rockliff, London,
decided to accept the manuscript. So after forty-eight years of
preparation the first edition of Gluck's collected letters has at last
appeared. In order to complete the picture, we have included

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