Gluck has long been celebrated for his operatic reforms. This article examines the role of the orchestra in Gluck's reformed style. I trace how Gluck's audiences learned new audile techniques in order to understand the role of his instrumental accompaniment. This form of listening posed challenges: some eighteenth-century listeners struggled to understand the role of the orchestra. The ‘naturalness’ so prized in the reformed style was achieved, I argue, by having the orchestra take on a larger role, but one that was rhetorically sublimated to the text. This is naturalised today: from Wagnerian music dramas to contemporary films, orchestral accompaniment often serves as a sonic commentary. The tensions in Gluck's reception, then, point to a seismic shift in the history of listening, showing how audiences came to understand the orchestra as a subtext. Gluck's orchestra offers broader lessons for musicology today, in particular for the burgeoning subfield of timbre studies: the form of ‘orchestral listening’ required for Gluck's operas is a form of timbral listening avant la lettre. While timbre is often invoked in order to escape musicology's traditional disciplinary ideologies, the story of Gluckian operatic drama points to the ways that orchestral listening emerged only through acts of disciplining and restraint.