Day 49
Gluck Iphigénie en Aulide
Soloists
Monteverdi Choir
Orchestre de l'Opera de Lyon
John Eliot Gardiner
Gluck is obviously an important composer in the history of opera so not surprisingly he was part of the A level and undergraduate syllabuses. So I duly wrote essays on his operatic reforms and made all of the usual comments one finds in the history books. But I don't recall actually hearing any of his music and so the essays were completely theoretical. I might possibly have heard the odd snippet here and there but it was a long time before I heard one of the operas complete and started to see what all the fuss was about. I know the other Iphigénie opera (en Tauride) but this was my first encounter with its lesser known companion.
Gluck is a particularly interesting compose in that for the most part his music looks very ordinary, dare one say dull, on the page. In these reform operas there are very few big gestures, the harmony is largely straightforward and the orchestration often very straightforward. You look at the music and wonder quite why this its such highly regarded music. But in performance the effect is quite different. There is genuine beauty in many parts of the score and some extremely moving moments, such as the aria for Iphigénie herself as she contemplates the sacrifice that the gods have demanded of her in return for safe passage of the Greek army to Troy. There is of course a Deus ex Machina at the end when the goddess Diana appears to cancel the demand for the sacrifice and allow everybody to live happily ever after.
The music inhabits an interesting world between the operas of Rameau and Mozart - some of the dance music is reminiscent of Rameau (though not quite with his rhythmic freedom and harmonic audacity) but at other times the opera is close to the world of the Magic Flute. One of its most striking features is the extensive use of the chorus - here we are not far away from Haydn's late choral masterpieces. Orchestrally the score is relatively straightforward but there are some interesting touches for the horns and some early uses of the clarinets.
Gluck's place in the history of opera is secure. One can trace a clear line through to the French Revolutionary/Napoleonic era composers such as Méhul, Cherubini and Spontini and onwards to Berlioz. He was a great admirer of Gluck and Les Troyens would be a very different work had Gluck never existed. Wagner too was a great admirer of Gluck and produced his own version of the this opera - something John Eliot Gardiner describes in his booklet notes to this recording as a 'deplorable inflated version'. Perhaps I should listen to it sometime!
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