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SEEN
AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL OPERA REVIEW
Gluck, Iphigénie en Tauride:
Soloists, Orchestra and Chorus of the Komische Oper,
Berlin. Conductor: Paul Goodwin. Komische Oper,
Berlin. 21.3.2008 (MB)
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.
(Sung in German, as Iphigenia in Tauris)
Cast :
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
Production:
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. He 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:
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.
Mark Berry