 
A Reform work That Stops Short |
A Reform Work That Stops Short
The problems connected with Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride
"The scope of Gluck's imagination is extraordinary. It takes him far
beyond the boundaries of national music. From the traditions of the Swiss,
the French, and a multitude of other nations he created a music that bears
his own individual stamp. One can go further and say that he looked to
nature for all the tones of true expression and mastered them."
These are the words in which tribute was paid to Gluck by his colleague
Johann Adam Hiller in 1768 and they formed the basis for all future assessments
of the composer. In the reform operas he wrote between the opera seria
entitled Orfeo ed Euridice (Vienna, 1762) and the tragédie lyrique composition
Iphigénie en Tauride (Paris, 1779), Christoph Willibald von Gluck, who
came from the Upper Palatine area of Bavaria, did in fact fuse into one
the best characteristics of the leading opera styles of the eighteenth
century and formed thereby for the ancien régime a musical language of
European dimension which is echoed in Mozart's Idomeneo.
Gluck's reformatory aims
The fact that in the long years before he became a reformer he had mastered the style of the French Opéra comique, combining it with popular Turkish music in such exotic one-act pieces as Le Cinesi (The Chinese) and La Rencontre imprévue (The Unexpected Meeting or The Pilgrim from Mecca), contributed to that universal dimension of Gluck's work referred to by Hiller. In his Opera and Drama (published in 1851) dealing with reform in the theatre, Richard Wagner (like Hector Berlioz, writing at the same time) compliments Gluck on this achievement: "After him the composer is the important person in the opera; the singer has become the medium for carrying out the composer's intention, and that avowed intention is to represent the dramatic content of the libretto by true and correspondingly dramatic expression." But in the same breath Wagner mentions a basic reservation he has. For him Gluck's reformatory enterprise stopped short on the long road to through-composed music drama: "The aria, recitative and dance parts in Gluck's operas, each independent and self-contained, are just as unrelated to one another as they were before him and have almost always been since his time." Wagner set out to remedy this in his 1847 arrangement of Iphigénie en Aulide and Richard Strauss set himself the same task in his 1890 version of Iphigénie en Tauride. In his swan-song for the music theatre, Capriccio, a conversation piece for music written in 1942, Strauss took up the point again. He referred to the quarrel with the Piccinni supporters which Gluck was involuntarily drawn into in Paris, his opponent being the conservative Niccola Piccinni. In the opening scene Strauss starts a discussion about the historical situation, making reference to Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide and the famous unisono beginning of its overture.
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| Photo: Jean Baudrillard, from Jean Baudrillard. On The Horizon Of The Object. Photographs 1985-1998, publ. by Peter Weibel and the Neue Galerie Graz. Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 1999 |
He adds to its D a dissonant triad in E flat minor, thus giving the passage that richness of harmony which legitimates it as a piece of future-orientated music apart altogether from Piccinni.
The Knight Gluck
In his tale Gluck the Knight, dated 1809, E. T. A. Hoffmann had already
used a method of procedure similar to that of Strauss by having an avatar
of the composer, by that time 22 years dead, make his appearance in Berlin
and play parts of his reform opera Armide on the piano. In doing so "he
departed quite a bit from the original, but his transformed music was,
as it were, the Gluck scene again only raised to the power of x". The
answer to the question why great artists who admired Gluck felt the need
to write him into the future, so to speak, is probably connected with
ideological positions. Iphigénie en Tauride appeared in the same year
as Lessing's Nathan the Wise and the first version of Goethe's Iphigenie.
With these two dramas, in which the notion of humanity is defined in terms
of the degree to which liberalness and open-mindedness towards the other,
towards the foreign, predominates, the golden period of German classicism
began. This is represented in Lessing through the characters of the Jew
and the Moslem, in Goethe and Gluck through the relationship between Greeks
and so-called barbarians.
As the Crimea, home of the Scythians, was inhabited in Goethe's time by
Moslems, the analogy with Lessing is obvious, not least as a result of
Gluck's Turkish music.
The rule of tolerance
Whereas Goethe subjects the Greeks who considered themselves to be in possession of a high degree of culture (Iphigenia's brother Orestes and, in particular, his friend Pylades) to an Enlightenment dialectic - something which Schiller described as being "astonishingly modern and non-Greek" - and systematically places them on a lower level than Thoas, the king of the Scythians, who is supposed to be a barbarian, Gluck and his librettist, Nicolas-François Guillard, remain, so to say, in the pre-Enlightenment position of Euripides' Iphigenia. In the opera, just as in the Attic drama, the plan on the part of Orestes and Pylades to steal the Artemis image is never the subject of criticism and the deceitful behaviour of the Greeks remains morally unchallenged in an imperialist view. This gave rise, at least unconsciously, to a bad feeling among alert friends of Gluck in particular. That the composer, in contradistinction to his rival Piccinni, whose Iphigénie en Tauride of 1781 had a libretto that was much closer to Goethe, gave Thoas unbarbaric characteristics, even endowing him with qualities of tragic stature by virtue of his dark presentiments in the first act, is an incontrovertible fact that is present, like Iphigenia's musical stature, right through the work. But the mechanical speed of the scene where Orestes and his sister recognise each other again, the purely incidental manner in which Thoas is liquidated by Pylades and his Greeks, and the justification of the deed through the appearance of the goddess Artemis who frees Orestes from the curse of the House of Atreus, are clear evidence of a lacuna in the development of ideas. What is surely Gluck's most important opera is a reform work that stops short. It does not as yet participate in that Enlightenment dialectic which defines German Idealism in the rule of tolerance for those of a different race, religion or politics. The challenge for the director is to mediate this 'not yet' to today's audiences.