Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787)
Revivals of Gluck’s operas are rare these days – the point is not so much to ask why – though it’s an interesting question – but to make the case for reviving them. With Iphigénie en Tauride, partisans of Gluck have not found the case hard to make – they are almost unanimous that this late opera is, if not Gluck’s greatest, then close to it. Alfred Einstein, for example, biographer of Gluck as well as Mozart, writes of ‘this wonderful opera, which so often lifts itself out of its Gallicism to the azure skies, the timelessness of pure humanity’. Einstein reports of the Paris premiere, 18 May 1779, ‘there was no difference of opinion among the public, no polemic among the arbiters, hardly a “critical” pronouncement. This was Gluck’s greatest hit;…’ For a more recent student, Jeremy Hayes writing in the New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ‘Iphigénie en Tauride was the crowning achievement of Gluck’s career, a result of the combination of his lifelong experience as an opera composer and a libretto which is arguably the best he ever set… Of all Gluck’s operas Iphigénie en Tauride is the one in which he was most successful in bringing his theories of operatic reform to life in a memorable combination of music and drama’.
If these impressive opinions from scholars leave doubt, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart may be called as a witness: he attended nearly all the rehearsals of Iphigénie en Tauride when it was produced in Vienna in 1781, and although this was too late to influence his own opera Idomeneo, premiered in January that year, Idomeneo nevertheless was deeply influenced by Gluck’s French operas, and the similarity has been noted between the Priestesses’ processional hymn to Diana in Iphigénie en Tauride, ‘Chaste fille de Latone’, and the March of the Priests in Mozart’s The Magic Flute of 1791.
The reasons for Gluck’s success with this opera, and the admiration it provoked, have much to do with the new life he was breathing into the French operatic tradition. He had followed his patron Marie-Antoinette of Austria to Paris, and produced in quick succession an opera on the earlier episode of the story, Iphigénie en Aulide (April 1774), and a wholesale re-working of his Orfeo ed Euridice, now in French and adapted to French conventions (August 1774). Gluck had to use all his force of personality to impose himself on the moribund tragédie lyrique genre. Julian Rushton explains that Gluck had to convert the Paris Qpéra from a museum into a place of musical novelty and dramatic vitality. As he did this, he established the composer as the driving force in the creation of any opera. One of Gluck’s Paris supporters, the Baron Grimm, had described the dying breed of French opera as ‘a performance at which the characters’ entire happiness and entire sorrow consists of watching people dance around them’.
The French experienced lyric drama above all through its words, and one of the main criticisms of the greatest creative musician ever to compose tragédies lyriques, Rameau, was that he was indifferent to the literary quality of his librettos – he once boasted that he would, if required, set the Gazette de France to music. Whereas in Rameau’s operas characters from Greek mythology speak and behave like the French courtiers who sat in the audience, as well as being partly enslaved to the airs and graces of the dance, Gluck was able to rehabilitate Greek tragedy, making it live again. As André Tubeuf has written in sleeve notes to John Eliot Gardiner’s 1985 Philips recording, Gluck, like the Greeks, presents his stage heroes and demigods as human beings, animated and destroyed by passions and circumstances like those we ourselves face. Gluck assumes an educated audience who know the stories by heart, and he was able to insist on literary collaborators who shared his vision and could give him the right words.
The text of Iphigénie en Tauride is by consensus among the finest in the entire classical operatic literature. It has parallels with spoken drama rather than with other opera librettos. By an extraordinary coincidence, Goethe’s play on the same subject was produced in Weimar in the same year, 1779, and through much of the 19th century, Gluck’s libretto for Iphigeneia in Tauris was preferred to Goethe’s play. Initially Gluck was to have collaborated with Roullet, the poet who had provided him with the libretto for Iphigénie en Aulide. Roullet passed the project to the young Parisian poet Nicholas-François Guillard, who based his libretto on a drama by Guymond de la Touche. Gluck himself played a major part in the shaping of the text, which was ultimately based on the play by Euripides, skilfully compressed. Concerning Euripides’ play, Einstein wrote that ‘a sharp penetration of motives does not let a single thread escape in this drama. It may be regarded as an hour of dramatic verisimilitude in the knotting and untying of a peripeteia of recognition…’
A peripeteia is a sudden change of fortune in a drama, or in life. This is the crux of Iphigénie en Tauride, and everything else is subordinated to it, with decisive dramatic and musical economy. Iphigenia was a daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. When the Greek fleet ready to sail for Troy was becalmed at Aulis, the seer Calchas declared that Artemis (Diana) required the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter. When she was about to be slain, Diana took pity on her and carried her off to be her priestess in the land of the Tauri (the Crimea), substituting a deer for her at the altar. It is crucial to the opera’s plot that her brother Orestes believes Iphigenia to be dead. Nor does she know of her brother’s fate. He has returned to Argos, and avenged his father by killing his mother. This has brought on him the wrath of the Furies, and to expiate his guilt he has been ordered by Apollo to carry off the image of Diana held by the Tauri and bring it to Attica. He and his friend Pylades are captured by the Tauri, and at this point the drama set by Gluck begins.
In one of the most remarkable openings in the history of opera, Gluck begins the orchestral introduction with a gentle minuet, called ‘Le Calme’, suddenly interrupted by an Allegro depicting the approaching storm. This storm symbolises Iphigenia’s inner torment, and at its height her voice joins in, with her priestesses, begging the Gods to help them. In a recitative she describes her dream of the previous night, in which she saw her father fleeing from his murderer, her mother Clytemnestra; then she saw her brother Orestes, and a fatal power forcing her to kill him.
Thus with superb economy the audience is introduced to the familiar characters and the key parts of their past history, and is prepared for what is to follow. The barbarian Thoas, King of Tauris, is characterised in an aria with brutal ostinato rhythms, and his people, the Scythians, have dances and choruses in the exotic ‘Turkish’ style of the 18th century, with piccolos, tambourine and triangle. Their murderous dances, to the words ‘We had need of blood’, seem to seal the doom of the two shipwrecked victims, whom Thoas tells Iphigenia she must sacrifice.
Orestes and Pylades are seen next, in their dungeon solitude. Orestes sings wildly of being pursued by the Gods, and is eager to expiate his crimes by dying; Pylades in a lyrical aria assures Orestes of his undying friendship. Exhausted, Orestes falls asleep, after singing an aria ‘Calm has returned to my heart’ where with telling dramatic irony the violas’ ostinato rhythms contradict what Orestes is saying. As he sleeps, the furies appear and torment Orestes: it was Gluck’s insistence that they should appear on stage. Their slow dance and horrifying chorus is reinforced by trombones. At the climax of the scene, Orestes wakes, and believes he sees his mother, but it is actually Iphigenia (another dramatic masterstroke which was Gluck’s idea). Orestes is struck by the resemblance, but so many years have passed that neither recognises the other. Asking after news of her brother, Iphigeneia learns from Orestes, in words whose dramatic ambiguity is crucial to the rest of the plot, that Orestes ‘has found the death he has long sought’. After lamenting her brother’s death, she leads her priestesses in funeral rites for him.
The third act shows how Iphigenia is moved by an inner voice to favour the man we know to be her brother, to let him escape the sacrifice, and go as a messenger to tell her sister Electra, in Greece, of the torments she is suffering in Tauris. More and more she is struck by the resemblance of one of the prisoners to her dead brother. Neither man wants liberty: in a remarkable trio, each express his desire to die for the other, while Iphigenia voices her indecision over the fatal choice of victim. She leaves the two friends struggling magnanimously for the right to die in the other’s place, returning to witness the victory of Orestes.
As Act IV begins, Iphigeia tries to summon the resolution necessary to perform the sacrifice, her words leading to an aria whose bass is derived from the Gigue of J.S.Bach’s B flat keyboard Partita. Orestes has achieved a new serenity because the relief of death is so close, and the sacrifice is prepared to the strains of the already-mentioned processional chorus of priestesses (which Mozart remembered). Recognition comes just as the knife is raised, as Orestes sings the words ‘Thus also did you perish in Aulis, O Iphigeneia, my sister!’ Gluck sets this in a very telling few bars of accompanied recitative, then there is astonished rejoicing, cut short by the entrance of a Greek woman warning of the approach of Thoas, who has heard that one of the captives has left Tauris. Thoas determines to sacrifice Orestes himself, even now that he knows his true identity, but Pylades returns with an army of Greeks and kills Thoas. Fighting between Greeks and Scythians is interrupted by Diana, deus ex machina. She orders the Scythians to return her statues to the Greeks, tells Orestes that his remorse has effaced his guilt, and sends him to rule in Mycenae. The opera ends in a chorus of departure, alluding to the calm sea of the opening.
This festive conclusion (followed by a ballet for which Gossec, not Gluck, composed the music) is the most recognisably ‘French’ feature of this opera, one some regret. Those who admire Gluck for his classicising, for his lifting of his dramatic themes to a universal level, are inclined to undervalue how practical he was in adapting his work to the fashion of the place and time. The preceding paragraphs emphasise the dramatic aptitude of Gluck’s opera rather than purely musical felicities, but it is wrong to underestimate how much Gluck owed his success to what he learnt from the best features of the French tragédie lyrique tradition: the flexible declamation of the words, the expressive use of orchestral and vocal colour.
Gluck was well aware that one of those controversies so beloved of French intellectuals pitted him against an Italian rival, Piccinni, who was even given the same story of Iphigénie en Tauride, to compose (Piccinni’s opera, produced two years after Gluck’s, was a failure). Gluck, as usual, was very clever at fighting literary as well as musical wars, and he shows diplomacy in his acknowledgement of the French tradition: ‘In looking through the scores of our old operas, despite the trills, cadenzas and other defects with which their airs seemed to me to be burdened, I found therein a sufficient number of real beauties to become convinced that the French had their own resources ready to hand (on which I might draw)’.
Positioning himself as the inheritor of what was best in the French lyric drama, Gluck was able to put his efforts into enhancing its dramatic effectiveness. To make his operas succeed in performance, he also needed to reverse a deep decline in standards. In Paris he achieved the necessary thoroughgoing rehearsal, disciplined orchestral playing, and he insisted on having singers who could be persuaded to produce appropriate gestures and truthful inflexions – indeed truthfulness was central to his aims. This was a continuation of his ‘reform’ of opera.
André Tubeuf suggests that to experience Gluck properly, we have to forget Mozart. Mozart dressed music in sumptuous attire, ‘whereas Gluck’s simplicity was a divestment, taking leave, so to speak, of bad mannerisms. Gluck is simply prosody coming to life in song’. The French, not surprisingly, have failed to accept Gluck completely. Debussy, for example, addressed the shade of Gluck, saying ‘your prosody is awful: you turn French into an accented language when it is really a language of nuances (Yes, I know you’re German)’. For Debussy, Rameau was a far worthier representative than Gluck of what is best in the old French opera, not only because of his understanding of the language, but because of his much greater powers of sheer musical invention.
The opening question returns – why are Gluck’s operas not revived more often? Are Gluck’s champions those to whom dramatic and literary values are more important than musical ones? In their admiration for Gluck’s theories and the literary qualities of his librettos do they overlook the musical weaknesses - the kind of thing that made Handel say that Gluck knew less of counterpoint than did his cook?
The majority of opera audiences don’t notice such things. Perhaps they do hanker, on the other hand, after precisely the things Gluck tried to reform – the indulgence of the brilliance of star singers; the lavish spectacles – the ‘machines’ of the French operatic stage, as opposed to the machinations of true drama. There are those who, then as now, if they want to follow the dramatic text, and look for truthfulness of characterisation and emotion, go to the spoken theatre rather than the opera house.
If these people were to give Gluck a chance, and especially his Iphigénie en Tauride, they might feel for once the same catharsis as in the spoken theatre. If in the emotion of the moment they didn’t notice how music contributed, since musical considerations are subordinated to the needs of the drama, then Gluck would take that as a compliment, rather than a criticism. Making this happen is the challenge to any modern production of Iphigénie en Tauride
First published in Opera~Opera, 1997