Palais Garnier
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| Iphigénie (Renate Jett) Images: © Guergana Damianova / OnP |
Iphigénie – Véronique Gens
Oreste – Étienne Dupuis
Pylade – Stanislas de Barbeyrac
Thoas – Thomas Johannes Mayer
Diane, First Priestess –
Adriana González
Second Priestess, Greek Woman –
Emanuela Pascu
Scythian, Minister – Tomasz
Kumiega
Iphigénie (non-singing role) –
Renate Jett
Krzysztof Warlikowski (director)
Małgorzata Szczęśniak (designs)
Felice Ross (lighting)
Denis Guéguin (video)
Claude Bardouil (choreography)
Miron Hakenbeck (dramaturgy)
Chorus of the Opéra national de Paris (chorus master: Alessandro di Stefano)
Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris
Bertrand de Billy (conductor)
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| Thoas (Thomas Johannes Mayer) and Iphigénie (Véronique Gens) |
The greatest of Gluck’s operas?
Certainly. The greatest opera between Monteverdi and Mozart? Quite probably (give
or take a Dido and Aeneas). Iphigénie en Tauride remains an
incredible experience. I say ‘incredible’, since one never quite believes it –
or at least I never quite do – from the previous encounter, until acquaintance
shows that one’s memory was not playing tricks. For, as Raymond Leppard put it,
whilst at work on Orfeo ed Euridice,
not a bad opera itself: ‘The odd thing about Gluck is that you look at the
music, and for a moment you feel that Handel was right and that he is rather a
poor composer, in technique rather inadequate, but then with his flair for the
theatre, you see what is behind the notes. I have never heard an instrumental
piece of Gluck that I wanted to hear again, but when the big emotional moments
come in his operas, they must be played for all they are worth. It all works in
the theatre.’ One need not necessarily subscribe to every word of Leppard’s
claim to know its essential theatrical truth. Gluck shows us, and this must
surely be what so attracted Wagner to his works, that intellect and emotion,
words (is this, perhaps the best of his libretti too?) and music, dramatic
truth and theatrical imagination are not antithetical. Their relations are
(differently) dialectical; they thrive on each other.
Barrie Kosky’s Berlin production (in German) was the first I saw. It packed quite
a punch, and memories still do. Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Paris staging, first seen
in 2006, is more complicated, more multivalent, yet just as powerful. It
concerns itself not just with war – Abu Ghraib was very much Kosky’s name of
the game – and its equally horrific aftermath, but specifically with women and
war. Warlikowski does it with mirrors, a hall of mirrors if you like.
Versailles of course did and does – and we are reminded of the dedication to
Marie Antoinette as the Overture gets under way. (Yes, the opera was premiered
in Paris, but the Queen was naturally in attendance.) Before that, though, as
we have taken our place in the theatre, we have been confronted with glass,
reflection (in more than one sense) of and on our place in the gilded Palais
Garnier, and mysterious glimpses of what might be going on behind the glass.
Theatre is a place of reflection and refraction, of truth and illusion, of seeing
and indeed of failing to see (ditto listening). Women – old women – stride back
and forth, from back to front of stage. They are confident, afraid, lost,
found: they are, we discover, at a retirement home. Greek women need to
remember, to be remembered, just as much as Trojan Women.
The elderly Iphigénie implores
the gods for assistance. ‘Grands Dieux! soyez-nous secourables!’ She relives,
with all the psychoanalytical brilliance of Gluck’s – and Nicolas-François Guillard’s
– fusion of outward and inward storm what took place, and we realise that what
she now seeks is an end to it all. That trauma has never left her; although she
still dresses, not unlike a Dallas matriarch,
to the nines, she is broken inside, condemned to relive those horrors of war,
of sacrifice, of family. The woes of the House of Atreus were not concluded
finished with Elektra.
And so, amongst the annoyance, the viciousness, the touching moments of care,
within her home, she prepares for the end, and achieves it. Mirrored action looks
back, looks forward. Where are we? Back on Tauris? Or at the proud old woman’s
obsequies, a royal funeral? Or are we still at the home, day in, day out,
wishing, like her, to escape, almost anywhere, any time?
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| Iphigénie, Oreste (Étienne Dupuis), et al. |
The world of dreams, of hidden
familial desire is strongly present. A younger Oreste, starved yet beautiful,
dreams of, creates his mother, possesses her, feeds from her breast, kills her.
He loves Pylade, as strongly as anyone has loved anyone on stage: here, we
feel, are the origins of Tristan and Kurwenal. And he loves, possesses Iphigénie
too. Forbidden love was imagined, experienced, remembered in three guises: yet
the hero then lived, almost Siegfried-like, in the moment. When he and his
equally beautiful, all-too-perfect royal family, chiselled cheekbones,
exquisite dress, and all, come to mourn the death of his sister, they seem
almost as if they are the ones who have died, or perhaps never even lived.
Embalmed, they keep it together for almost as long as they need, before the
King’s children succumb to their forbidden desire – for each other.
Two stages of future, then, neither
of them good, frame the ‘actual’ action. It is not, in any banal way, ‘explained’
by the rest, but we make our own connections, we question, we recoil in horror,
not least when those nagging orchestral figures – that celebrated Gluckian
syncopation, for instance – prey upon our, their, raw emotions. Mystery,
however, remains. The Scythians are certainly ‘other’, their rites not ‘ours’,
but perhaps they are truer, less preoccupied, less weighed down by pasts and
futures experienced or imagined. The first-act ballet exhilarates: not only do
we come close to witnessing a rite we cannot understand, but we see one of
Iphigénie’s elderly companions at its centre, a proud woman, undaunted, at
least momentarily, by age, confident in her sexuality, in her dance. Or is it a
throwback to Tauris, even a response to an old woman’s medication?
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| Pylade (Stanislas de Barbeyrac) |
The cast was excellent, its
silent members too. None of that would have been remotely possible without
them. So often, French opera is plagued by an inability to sing in French: not
just the language, but the style too. Such was never a question here. Véronique
Gens drew one in, made us her confidants, never needing to raise her voice,
although occasionally she could – and did – expand her dynamic range. Hers was
a subtle, unfailingly alert performance in which all dramatic elements, just as
Gluck requires, seemed to be at one. Her alter ego, Renate Jett, complemented,
contrasted to powerful effect indeed. Étienne Dupuis, as (the sung) Oreste, for
so long (seemingly literally) blinded by his past, rose to dramatic heights as
his character progressed (and regressed). Stanislas de Barbeyrac’s Pylade was
one of the most moving portrayals I have heard on stage for some time: unflinchingly
honest, heart-rendingly beautiful of tone, the two qualities intertwined as if
the souls of Oreste and Pylade themselves. ‘Smaller’ roles were all well taken.
Choral singing was impressive
throughout, although, just sometimes, I longed for something a little more
forthright. There is no room for crudity in Gluck, of course, but this should
be visceral drama. (Perhaps, though, that was more a reflection, as it were, of
the chorus rarely being seen on stage. Psychoanalytical approaches have their
snares, practical as well as theoretical.) My only disappointment was with the
somewhat lacklustre conducting of Bertrand de Billy. It was not bad, and
indeed, once past a rushed Overture, was generally well paced. One rarely,
however, had the sense of this musical drama – even music drama? – being lived,
let alone lived as if there were no tomorrow, which, for Iphigénie, was here a
thought very much of the essence. As ever, though, the Opéra’s orchestra was on
fine form, euphonious to a degree. All we needed was a Riccardo Muti to stir
them up…
One thing we did know, however
(at least those who did not partake in philistine booing at the close):
Iphigénie had seen – and heard – it all. We shall have our own particularly
strong associations, whether operatically – Nono’s Algran sole carico d’amore, Stefan Herheim’s Götz Friedrich post-Second
World War hommage in that legendary Bayreuth Parsifal, etc. – or from
history and the world around us (where to start?) Warlikowski and a tremendous
cast, allow her, allowed the scorned victims of war – women, men who love men, ‘foreigners’
– to speak, to sing, to remember, and to be remembered.