Iphigénie en Tauride, Blackheath Halls Opera, 28 September 2025

Blackheath Halls

Images: Julian Guidera
Iphigenia (Francesca Chiejina) 

Iphigénie – Francesca Chiejina
Thoas – Dan D’Souza
Oreste – Dan Shelvey
Pylade – Michael Lafferty
Priestesses – Emily Williams, Ava Reineke, Eva Hutchins
Scythians – Byron Davis-Hughes, Zac Conibear

Director – Laura Attridge
Designs – Peiyao Wang
Lighting – Charly Dunford
Movement – Corina Würsch
Fight director – Mark Ruddick

Students from Greenvale School and Charlton Park Academy

Blackheath Halls Chorus and Youth Company

Blackheath Halls Orchestra

Chris Stark (conductor)

Priestesses as Diana (Emily Williams, Ava Reineke, Eva Hutchins)

Unquestionably Gluck’s greatest opera and, to my mind, the greatest eighteenth-century opera whose composer is neither Rameau nor Mozart, possibly even that is simply not by Mozart, Iphigénie en Tauride needs to come across as such. In a sense, all is secondary to that. Hats off, then, to Blackheath Halls Opera, employing a mixture of professional soloists, conservatoire students, and local residents of all ages, that the results should be quite so compelling, a vindication of community opera in itself and as dramatic experience. No attentive viewer and listener would have been in any doubt as to the work’s stature in a vividly direct performance and production that displayed not only commitment, but resourcefulness and imagination too. 

Laura Attridge’s production stood at the heart of this, neither imposing something extraneous on the work nor shying away from interpretation, rooted in the work but not confined by it: a metaphor and, I suspect, a foundation for the enterprise as a whole. (The idea that there can be a performance or indeed a reading without interpretation is self-evident nonsense, although it proves curiously persistent.) The drama grabbed and did not relinquish us: Euripides re-created, partly reimagined, but above all given new life; Gluck and librettist Nicolas-François Guillard recreated in turn. Stories, dramas, and their meanings change over time, but a core remains, endures, and in some ways is even strengthened. I am sure this would have been the case whether new to it, as many would have been, or a fervent Gluckian (as a few eccentrics might think ourselves). Such is the magic of human creation—and its riddle, as Marx for instance puzzled over, asking how, in his abidingly historical world-view, the art of the Greeks could continue so directly to speak to us Peiyao Wang’s set made excellent use of the space: on two levels, though not in the fashionable way of large theatres, in which too often those in the less expensive seats struggle even to see the higher level of action. Here, action extended downwards from the raised stage, affording a perfect view to everyone. An upside down house, hanging from the ceiling, served as a constant reminder that, in the aftermath of war and other ‘conflict’, all many involved want is to go home, yet are unable to do so. It may no longer exist or have been so transformed (destroyed) as to render the dream impossible. Iphigenia, worlds away from Mycenae, was foremost among those people onstage, though after the interval, the advent of children playing with smaller houses below reminded us she was far from alone. Beyond the stage, refugees remain on all our minds. And it was clear, quite without fuss, that Orestes and Pylades have not only the most intense, meaningful of male friendships, but are truly in love, sealed with a reuniting kiss at the close. The libretto may say ‘amitié’ rather than ‘amour’, but how could it otherwise? This opera has always been a special case; here, the English ‘love’ conquered all. 

Pylade (Michael Lafferty),Thoas (Dan D'Souza),Oreste (Dan Shelvey)

So too did much of the singing. Francesca Chiejina was a wonderful Iphigenia: compassionate, vulnerable, inwardly (and outwardly) strong, her clarity of diction as noteworthy as that of dramatic purpose. Dan Shelvey and Michael Lafferty offered noble and yet similarly, deeply human portrayals of Orestes and Pylades, oppressed and resurrected by Fate—or Diana, strikingly portrayed by three High Priestesses together: Emily Williams, Ava Reineke, Eva Hutchins. Dan D’Souza brought Thoas, the Taurian king, vividly to life with cruelty and not a little charm. Byron Davis-Hughes and Zac Conibear stepped forward to make the most of their time in the vocal spotlight as two Scythians. Various crowds assumed their parts, vocal and dramatic, presenting individuals who together were considerably more than the sum of their parts. Chris Stark led the musical side, the Blackheath Halls Orchestra included, with a keen ear both for dramatic purpose and for what was desirable in this particular situation. Orchestral drama, of which there is much, unfolded as keenly as that onstage, ballet music considered from all quarters integral to the drama in a venerable line of descent from Rameau and ultimately Lully. 

Thoas

Given in English as Iphigenie in Tauris, in a new translation commissioned from Martin Pickard, this knocked spots off my previous evening’s Cenerentola at ENO, which had fallen victim not only to half-baked staging and conducting but to an often excruciatingly unmusical translation. Opera in translation, even from French, can work—and was clearly the right decision in this context. It is, moreover, not only what Gluck would have expected, but what he did when presenting the opera in Vienna for the visit of Russia’s Grand Duke Paul in 1781, only two years after the Paris premiere. (An Italian version would be given in the same theatre only two years later, in light of the failure of the National Singspiel, in a translation by one Lorenzo da Ponte.) One sensed, moreover, a strong partnership between Pickard and Attridge, herself a poet (as well as someone who speaks great sense about what the role of an opera director is—and is not). A memorable occasion, then, all in all: dare we hope for more Gluck in London, and even in Blackheath?

Iphigénie en Tauride, Opéra national de Paris, 2 December 2016

Palais Garnier

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)

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?

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?

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.

Iphigénie en Tauride, English Touring Opera, 5 March 2016

 

Images: Richard Hubert Smith

Hackney Empire Theatre

Iphigénie – Catherine Carby

Oreste – Grant Doyle
Pylade – John-Colyn Gyeantey
Thoas – Craig Smith
Scythian Guard – Simon Gfeller
Ministers of the Sanctuary – Ashley Mercer, Bradley Travis
Priestesses of Diana – Susanna Fairbairn, Samantha Hay

James Conway (director)

Anna Fleischle (designs)
Guy Hoare (lighting)
Bernadette Iglich (choreography)

Orchestra and Chorus of English Touring Opera
Martin André (conductor)

At last, an opera company bothering, in London, to perform an opera by one of the most important composers in the history of the genre! (When the Royal Opera performed Orphée et Eurydice, it condescended to Gluck by hiving him off to an external orchestra, as if he somehow were not good enough for its own players.) One grows weary of lamenting, year after year, Gluck’s absence from our programmes. This performance at the Hackney Empire sold out, showing that there is a keen audience, both of devotees and newcomers; if Gluck is not programmed, just as when Schoenberg, say, is not programmed, it is because companies have decided not to do so, not because no one will go. It is all the better, then, that English Touring Opera will take the production to many theatres around the country that would otherwise receive no opera at all, let alone any Gluck operas.

What most, me included, would consider the crowning masterpiece of Gluck’s career will win converts from any willing to treat opera as a serious art form; those who are not might as well remain in front of the television. For Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the great German art historian and archaeologist, ‘the only way for us to be great, and if at all possible, immortal,’ was ‘by imitating the ancients’. Such was the context for Gluck’s crystallisation of plans for operatic reform, opera, which should have been the inheritor of Attic tragedy, being seen instead to have degenerated into an undramatic farrago of vocal and scenic exhibitionism. (It is hard not to sympathise in the case of, say, Vivaldi’s operas, and many others.) Gluck’s (well, Ranieri de’ Calzabigi’s) 1769 Preface to Alceste remains a landmark document in operatic history, the archetypal declaration of operatic reform. It was very much what we heard here:

I have striven to restrict music to its true office of serving poetry by means of expression and by following the situations of the story, without interrupting the action or stifling it with a useless superfluity of ornaments; and I believe that it should do this in the same way as telling colours affect a correct and well-ordered drawing, by a well-assorted contrast of light and shade which serves to animate the figures without altering the contours. Thus I did not wish to arrest an actor in the greatest heat of dialogue in order to wait for a tiresome ritornello … nor to wait while the orchestra gives him time to recover his breath for a cadenza. … I have sought to abolish all the abuses against which good sense and reason have long cried out in vain. ... Furthermore, I believed that my greatest labour should be devoted to seeking a beautiful simplicity.

Moreover, it was what we saw too. James Conway’s production, focused on Anna Fleischle’s resourceful single set will doubtless transfer well to other, smaller theatres. It proves eminently adaptable, focusing our attention, like Gluck’s music, on the drama, not upon extraneous ‘effects’. That is not to say that there is anything bloodless to it. Quite the contrary, in fact, the blood-drenching of the opening scene, Iphigénie and her priestesses compelled to perform their appalling task, hits home powerfully, the well-nigh psychoanalytical quality of Gluck’s writing – storm external and internal – powerfully conveyed. Conway concentrates on the characters and their plight, permitting the drama to do its own work, or so it seems. One especially welcome aspect is his willingness to follow the homoeroticism of the relationship between Oreste and Pylade. (Quite why many other directors decline to do so remains a mystery to me.) Their second-act kiss is a splendidly handled moment. Have they (physically) been lovers all along? Perhaps, but I had the impression that, at this moment, facing death and the prospect of never seeing each other again, they could finally act as their romantic friendship had all along urged them. However difficult Oreste had become, perhaps even tried to be, they now found themselves helpless, compelled by Fate to snatch the moment. The openness of Conway’s staging allows one to read that moment as one will; there is no doubt, however, that this is the truest of love. Nothing, however, detracts from the playing out of the tragedy, Guy Hoare’s lighting clearly focusing our expectation and concentration.

An unfortunate exception came with the decision to present the deus ex machina in the guise of a little girl Diana, splashing around in the puddles. It makes for an undeniably arresting moment of theatre. Alas, its vocal effectiveness stood in inverse proportion to the element of visual surprise. Another aspect of vocal weakness came with Craig Smith’s stiff Thoas, king of Tauris. It is not the most grateful of roles, perhaps, but he sounded elderly rather than barbarous. Otherwise, there was much to admire in the cast. Catherine Carby’s gave a heartfelt performance as Iphigénie; how could one not deeply sympathise with her plight? Grant Doyle’s Oreste came across as properly conflicted, properly stunted by his appalling experiences, growing in humanity and self-knowledge. If John-Colyn Gyeantey’s Pylade was not always vocally secure, sometimes possessed of an unduly distracting vibrato, he had one believe in his character and his motivations, which is of greater importance; moreover, ‘Divinité des grandes âmes’ proved a proper climax to the third act. An excellent small chorus made its mark in various guises, as did those taking the smaller roles.

What a joy, moreover, to hear Gluck performed on modern instruments! If Martin André’s direction sometimes veered a little towards the frenetic for my taste, one hears far more extreme examples. Rarely did the instruments sound circumscribed, even if a little warmer string tone would not have gone amiss at times. More importantly, though, the bubbling of this well-nigh proto-Wagnerian (and proto-Berliozian) wordless Chorus told us so much of what we needed to know, explained so much of what we saw on stage and heard in the vocal line. Continuity and variety were impressive, André ensuring that both emerged as sides of the same dramatic coin. This was not a performance on the grand scale of, say, Riccardo Muti’s legendary recording from La Scala, but one would not have expected it to be. ETO does in many respects a far more important job, for which we should all offer thanks. There could be no doubt that it gave us the opportunity to hear just what Louis Petit de Bachaumont wrote of, in the account he gave in his Mémoires secrets of the 1779 premiere:

It is a new genre. It is truly a tragedy, … a tragedy in the Greek style. There is no Overture, … no arias [an exaggeration, but one knows what he means!]; but many indications of passion expressed with the greatest energy; they arouse an interest hitherto unknown on the lyric stage. One can only congratulate Chevalier Gluck for having discovered the secret of the ancients, and he will raise it to a pitch of undoubted perfection.

Now, more Gluck, please!

 

 

Gluck: A Musical Dramatist for a Better World

For New Year, I posted some Rameau excerpts for the 250^th anniversary of his death, commenting that, in general, our opera houses seemed quite indifferent to him and to that anniversary. Now there are good arguments about incessant marking of anniversaries; I have certainly tried to voice a few on occasion. Yet the arguments in favour of such acknowledgement become far stronger in terms of unjustly neglected composers. (We all know about the pallid legions of the justly neglected, for instance the Baxes, Bantocks, et al., whom a few sandal-wearing ‘British music’ enthusiasts would foist upon the Proms every year.) There are even some who claim that they would rather celebrate a birth than commemorate a death. We may even wish to restrict ourselves to centenaries, rather than come up against divisions thereof. So if, on the latter two counts, we are not to hear Rameau, whose stature seems almost to increase with every hearing, then what of one of the most significant figures in the history of opera, who was born in Erasbach in the Upper Palatinate on 2 July 1714.

Sometimes it seems as though that entire history of the form has been characterised by a struggle to reform it, to return – whether knowingly or otherwise – to the noble aspirations of the Florentine Camerata and Monteverdi. (That the Camerata’s belief that Greek tragedy was sung may have been misguided is in that sense neither here nor there; fruitful misunderstandings have long been a hallmark of musical and artistic development, as was more recently illustrated by the post-war serialists’ appropriation of Webern.) It is certainly not the case, of course, that composers have had to be operatic reformers to be great composers of opera. Stravinsky’s knowingly provocative comments on The Rake’s Progress – that wonderful instance of a masterwork founded upon the most highly problematical of æsthetics – serve as a warning in that respect:

Having chosen a period-piece subject, I decided – naturally, as it seemed to me – to assume the conventions of the period as well. The Rake’s Progress is a conventional opera, therefore, but with the difference that these particular conventions were considered by respectable circles to be long since dead. My plan of revival did not include updating or modernising, however – which would have been self-contradictory in any case – and it follows that I had no ambitions as a ‘reformer’, at least not in the line of a Gluck, a Wagner, or a Berg. In fact, these great progressives sought to abolish or transform most of the very clichés I have tried to re-establish, and my return to these clichés was not meant as a superseding of their now conventionalised reforms (such as the leitmotif systems of Wagner and Berg).

Gluck’s desire to reform opera continues to speak to us today; indeed in an era in which ‘opera’ often seems to be as much about big business, corporate entertainment, and provision of social standing to uncomprehending and, more to the important, uninterested bourgeois audiences, they seem more necessary than ever. Who could argue in principle against these words from the preface to Alceste, penned by his librettist, Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, but nevertheless very much Gluck’s own?

I have striven to restrict music to its true office of serving poetry by means of expression and by following the situations of the story, without interrupting the action or stifling it with a useless superfluity of ornaments; and I believe that it should do this in the same way as telling colours affect a correct and well-ordered drawing, by a well-assorted contrast of light and shade which serves to animate the figures without altering the contours. Thus I did not wish to arrest an actor in the greatest heat of dialogue in order to wait for a tiresome ritornello … nor to wait while the orchestra gives him time to recover his breath for a cadenza. … I have sought to abolish all the abuses against which good sense and reason have long cried out in vain.

Yet they would be in vain were it not for the greatness of the result. As the Preface continues a little later, ‘Furthermore, I believed that my greatest labour should be devoted to seeking a beautiful simplicity.’ That is a perfectly justified aspiration, though in a sense far more open to question; it perhaps holds the key, or at least a key, to the hold that Gluck’s musical drama continues to exert upon us. One can hardly help but think of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Classicism at the same time: his lauding of the Apollo Belvedere, for instance. Winckelmann’s ‘Noble simplicity and calm greatness’, or Gluck-Calzabigi’s ‘beautiful simplicity’, which in whatever form is anything but simplistic, and which enters into an extraordinary alchemy with the drama, serves to create something extending far beyond the sum of the parts: indeed a proper understanding of the Gesamtkunstwerk as something whose meaning lies beyond the merely agglomerative.

Rarely, then, does Gluck’s invention strike one as extraordinary simply as notes on the page; they often appear commonplace. Yet Attic tragedy seems once again to live: not as recreation, but as renewal, just indeed as in Wagner’s still more ambitious project. Iphigénie en Tauride, probably Gluck’s greatest work, stands as perhaps the greatest single opera between Purcell and Mozart; Schiller, no less, owned that he had never been moved by ‘such pure and beautiful music’. The rigour of the æsthetic is not absolute; even here, Gluck ‘borrows’ not only from earlier works of his own, but also from Bach’s Mass in B minor. (Handel’s operas, whatever the wonders of individual arias, are unsatisfactory on the basis of a far more fundamental dramatic flaw than borrowing.) Absolute purity would doubtless be undesirable. Yet it concentrates Gluck’s mind and ours – we might also say Gluck’s emotions and ours, for, once again in Wagnerian style, they become one – upon the drama: not, it must be stressed, to be understood as the libretto, then ‘set’ to music, but rather as a new whole, a new work, which yet again, thinking this time of Hans Sachs, seems also venerable in the best sense.  ‘Es klang so alt und war doch so neu!’

Gluck’s radicalism, as that might suggest, is not merely recreative. Listen, for instance, to the orchestral storm at the opening of the second Iphigénie opera (following the minuet, ‘Le calme’). Both real and representative of the heroine’s inner demons, it almost beckons an age of psychoanalysis. Its orchestration born of a lavish French tradition – above all, Rameau – the tempest climaxes as Iphigénie, joined by her priestesses, implores the gods to aid them. Gluck not only sets the scene for the drama – as, in the Alceste preface, he had said it should – but plunges us right into it. Louis Petit de Bachaumount wrote, in his Mémoires secrets, of the premiere: ‘The opera was much applauded; it is a new genre. It is really a tragedy … in the Greek style.’

Might our opera houses not at least allow us the possibility to judge that success once again for ourselves? I have never spoken to anyone remotely interested in opera who did not regret Gluck’s scandalous absence. Barrie Kosky’s visceral Abu Ghraib production for Berlin’s Komische Oper proved an exemplar in this respect. So too, has Riccardo Muti’s persistent advocacy for the composer. Without Gluck’s example, Mozart would not have written Idomeneo in the way he did; but there, alas, is another work more often honoured in its lack of a hearing. If ever an anniversary celebration were needed, it might be this, for far more is at stake than Gluck’s works in themselves. A house that would stage them would show that it was once again, or even for the first time, taking musical drama seriously.

It was not for nothing that Orfeo ed Euridice featured in the projected first season of Pierre Boulez’s reformed Paris opera (which, of course, never happened). As his would-be collaborator, Jean Vilar, noted, ‘Too often, lyrical art has been limited to the art of singing, or even of simple vocal performance, and has become the victim of its own “literary drowsiness”. Lyrical art must rediscover its true identity as authentic musical theatre.’ The projected opening operatic season – 1970-1, there was also to have been a preliminary, concert seasion, including the mouthwatering idea of Boulez conducting the Monteverdi Vespers – was to have offered Les Troyens, Pelléas, Gluck’s Orfeo, Moses und Aron (its first French performance!), Don Giovanni, and a new work by Berio. The conductors were to have been Boulez, Colin Davis, and Georg Szell. Alas politics, as so often, intervened.

Nor was it for nothing that, just before those plans were tentatively drawn up with Vilar and Maurice Béjart, Boulez had condemned the existing Paris Opéra as being ‘covered in dust and merde,’ and suggested that the Red Guards be brought on scene to let some blood. Gluck might seem an unlikely candidate for such a role – but not to anyone who actually listens to either Iphigénie.

Performances of the Year 2008

This is the first full year in which I have been reviewing concert and opera performances for my blog. Many, though by no means all, of those performances I also reviewed for Seen and Heard. Last week, my editor asked me to select three reviews as S&H Performances of the Year; they should be posted early in the New Year. It was no easy task selecting just three, although there was a sense in which the performances nevertheless selected themselves. I attended more performances than those reviewed there and posted something on every one of them here. Not only because there are more from which to choose but also in order to point to a wider field of achievement, I have chosen twelve performances of the year. This selection of twelve still leaves a good number unmentioned; when making distinctions between performances, one can all too readily forget just how high the general standard of professional music-making is. Anyway, here are the final twelve, in no order other than the chronological, each with a link to its review:

Piano sonatas by Beethoven. Daniel Barenboim, 17 February 2008. (I could readily have chosen all three of the Barenboim Beethoven recitals I attended; they are all reviewed here.)
Nash Inventions: works by Turnage, Birtwistle, MacMillan, Goehr, and Colin Matthews. Nash Ensemble, 12 March 2008.
Gluck: Iphigénie en Tauride. Komische Oper, Berlin, Paul Goodwin/Barrie Kosky, 21 March 2008.
Works by Bach, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Scharoun Ensemble/Pierre Boulez, 18 April 2008.
Works for piano duet/duo: Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Debussy. Richard Goode and Jonathan Biss, 31 May 2008.
Alfred Brendel’s final London piano recital: works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, 27 June 2008.
Henze: The Bassarids. Munich Opera Festival, Marc Albrecht/Christof Loy, 19 July 2008.
Songs by Schubert, Britten, and Strauss. Jonas Kaufmann, Helmut Deutsch, 22 July 2008.
Strauss: Ariadne auf Naxos. Munich Opera Festival, Kent Nagano/Robert Carsen, 24 July 2008.
Wagner: Parsifal. Bayreuth Festival, Daniele Gatti/Stefan Herheim, 6 August 2008.
Works by Messiaen, Harvey, and Varèse. BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Ilan Volkov, 19 August 2008.
Szymanowski: King Roger. Mariinsky Opera, Valery Gergiev/Mariusz Treliński, 27 August 2008.

Iphigénie en Tauride, Komische Oper, Berlin, 21 March 2008

Komische Oper Berlin
(sung in German, as Iphigenia in Tauris)

Iphigenia – Geraldine McGreevy
Orestes – Kevin Greenlaw
Pylades – Peter Lodahl
Thoas – Jens Larsen
A Greek woman – Karen Rettinghaus
Diana – Erika Roos
A Priestess – Mirika Wagner
A Scythian – Matthias Spenke

Barrie Kosky (producer)
Klaus Grünberg (designs)
Alfred Mayerhofer (costumes)
Werner Hintze (dramaturgy)
Franck Evin (lighting)

Orchestra and Chorus of the Komische Oper Berlin
Daniel Mayr (chorus master)
Paul Goodwin (conductor)

Handel is notoriously said to have declared that his cook knew more about counterpoint than Gluck did. This may or may not be so: I am not sure that we know anything about the cook’s contrapuntal skills and it is true that Gluck’s art is rarely contrapuntal in nature. That said, whatever the musical beauties of Handel’s operas, themselves hardly overflowing with contrapuntal devices – his oratorios are another matter – Gluck’s reform operas, which Handel could not in any case have known, are vastly superior as musical dramas. Gluck may not be the greatest of composers considered in a purely musical sense, but as a musical dramatist he is one of the greatest – as Berlioz and Wagner both recognised. The problem has been that opportunities to appreciate this in the theatre, at least in remotely satisfactory conditions, have been few and far between. With this extraordinary production, the Komische Oper may have helped to change that.

If Gluck’s reforms are in many ways a prelude to Wagner – note the number of times Gluck is cited in Wagner’s Opera and Drama – then this production took seriously the claim of Iphigénie en Tauride to be considered as a Gesamtkunstwerk. (This connection was perhaps heightened by the fine German translation, credited to Bettina Bartz and Werner Hintze. I recalled the Gluck-Wagner Iphigenie in Aulis, and much to my surprise barely registered the loss of Nicolas-François Guillard’s original text.) Production and musical performance – melded into a single act, without a tension-breaking interval – clearly worked in tandem. Barrie Kosky, as a fascinating programme interview made clear, is clearly that rare thing: a producer with musical understanding. He was therefore fully able to work in the spirit of the celebrated, landmark preface to Alceste, ascribed to Gluck but actually penned by his librettist, Ranieri Calazbigi:

I have striven to restrict music to its true office of serving poetry by means of expression and by following the situations of the story, without interrupting the action or stifling it with a useless superfluity of ornaments; and I believe that it should do this in the same way as telling colours affect a correct and well-ordered drawing, by a well-assorted contrast of light and shade which serves to animate the figures without altering the contours. Thus I did not wish to arrest an actor in the greatest heat of dialogue in order to wait for a tiresome ritornello … nor to wait while the orchestra gives him time to recover his breath for a cadenza. … I have sought to abolish all the abuses against which good sense and reason have long cried out in vain. … Furthermore, I believed that my greatest labour should be devoted to seeking a beautiful simplicity …

Beauty, simplicity, ‘naturalness’, reason, and above all dramatic truth are the order of the day. Style and idea are identical; or at least such is the claim.

This is not to claim that there was anything unadventurous about Kosky’s production; nothing could be further from the case. From the moment the curtain rose, we knew that we should be in for a rough ride: our first sight was that of a prisoner hanging upside down, swinging from the ceiling. After the brief minuet, ‘Le calme,’ Gluck plunged us straight into the drama by an orchestral storm, both real and representative of Iphigenia’s inner demons from her dream: psychoanalysis almost beckoned. (The ghosts of Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, and others would appear later on, observing and sometimes participating as elderly men and women, the frailty and degeneration of their bodies powerfully highlighted in their underwear.) Louis Petit de Bachaumount had written of the première in his Mémoires secrets: ‘The opera was much applauded; it is a new genre. It is really a tragedy … in the Greek style.’ Gluck, it seemed, had discovered the ever-elusive ‘secret of the ancients’. If so, it was renewal rather than restoration, and so it also proved in Berlin. Welcome to the Abu Ghraib of Tauris, in which Iphigenia and her priestess are compelled under threat of death – visited summarily upon those who demur – by Thoas’s regime to accomplish many of its murders. The Scythian-American soldiers, kitted out in costume designer Alfred Mayrhofer’s camouflage fatigues, prefer to spend their time in more inventive forms of violence, such as the ‘degrading’ torture – is there a non-degrading form? – of the newly arrived Orestes and Pylades, hooded, stripped to their underwear, urinated upon, with cigarette butts forced up their anuses. Other soldiers take photographs for private or public consumption. (Now where have we heard of that before?) This then was an urgent drama for today, and Gluck’s music – often seen as being purely Classical, whatever that might mean – was more than equal to the task of its expression, not least in the Scythians’ menacing choruses. Yes, they could sing as well as act.

This went for the rest of the cast too. The tyrant himself was given an almost – but not quite – larger-than-life treatment by Jens Larsen. His participation in and incitement of the orgy of violence was truly shocking. Geraldine McGreevy in the title-role perhaps sounded a little shrill at times, but hers was a powerful music portrayal. One felt almost infinite compassion for her and for her predicament. As her brother, Kevin Greenlaw was also very fine; his baritone and stage presence seemed ideally matched. Peter Lodahl was perhaps the best of all as Pylades. His is a beautiful tenor indeed, whose tones tugged on the heart-strings, but this was always at the service of the drama, never preening. There was a touching, simple innocence at the heart of his portrayal, which was just what Gluck – and the production – required. The homoerotic nature of his relationship with Orestes was apparent – how could it not be? – without being emphasised, for this production had other concerns. At the musical helm was Paul Goodwin, who presided over an urgent, which is not to say unduly frenetic, account of the score. Here, and this was surely encouraged by the production, there was no question of treating Classical music with kid gloves; this was Calzabigi’s music restored to its ‘true office’. Yet this was not a restriction but an opportunity to explore profound psychological depths. Every section of the orchestra was on top form in the opening storm, its driving strings and furious woodwind having their roots in Rameau but blazing a trail towards Berlioz. This continued relentlessly, not least in Gluck’s richly orchestrated recitatives, until the deus ex machina of Diana. If I went out of my way to find something at which to cavil, I might opt for this. She did not appear on stage, which is fair enough, but her voice sounded amplified. This sounded not so much other-wordly as crude. No matter: this remained a visceral account of a great opera.