Iphigénie en Tauride

Iphigénie en Tauride (Iphigenia in Tauris) is a 1779 opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck in four acts. It was his fifth opera for the French stage. The libretto was written by Nicolas-François Guillard.

With Iphigénie, Gluck took his operatic reform to its logical conclusion. The recitatives are shorter and they are récitatif accompagné (i.e. the strings and perhaps other instruments are playing, not just continuo accompaniment). The normal dance movements that one finds in the French tragédie en musique are almost entirely absent. The drama is ultimately based on the play Iphigenia in Tauris by the ancient Greek dramatist Euripides which deals with stories concerning the family of Agamemnon in the aftermath of the Trojan War.

Iphigénie en Tauride was first performed on 18 May 1779 by the Paris Opéra at the second Salle du Palais-Royal and was a great success. Some think that the head of the Paris Opéra, Devismes, had attempted to stoke up the rivalry between Gluck and Niccolò Piccinni, an Italian composer also resident in the French capital, by asking them both to set an opera on the subject of Iphigenia in Tauris. In the event, Piccinni's Iphigénie en Tauride was not premiered until January 1781 and did not enjoy the popularity that Gluck's work did.

In 1781 Gluck produced a German version of the opera, Iphigenia in Tauris, for the visit of the Russian Grand Duke Paul to Vienna, with the libretto translated and adapted by Johann Baptist von Alxinger in collaboration with the composer. Among the major changes was the transposition of the role of Oreste from baritone to tenor and the replacement of the final chorus of Act 2 with an instrumental movement. The revised version was the only opera Gluck wrote in his native German, and his last work for the stage. Styled “a tragic Singspiel”, it was staged on 23 October 1781 at the Nationalhoftheater, as the emperor Joseph II had had the Burgtheater renamed after dismissing the Italian singers and their orchestra in 1776 and installing German actors in the theatre. When the meagre results achieved by the new Singspiel programmes led the emperor to back down, getting an Italian opera buffa company recruited again and engaging Lorenzo da Ponte as his theatre poet, the latter was charged to prepare an Italian translation of Gluck’s opera, which was staged in the restored Burgtheater, on 14 December 1783. According to Irish tenor Michael Kelly's "reminiscences" this production, too, was personally supervised by Gluck. The German edition was revived in Berlin at the former Königliches Nationaltheater in the Gendarmenmarkt on 24 February 1795, while Da Ponte’s translation was chosen for the London first performance at the King's Theatre on 7 April 1796. The original French version eventually proved to be one of Gluck’s most popular composition in Paris: “it was billed on 35 dates in 1779, and it went on to enjoy more than four hundred representations in 1781-93, 1797-1808, 1812-18, 1821-23, 1826-28, and 1829. It was mounted at the Châtelet (1868), the Renaissance (1899), and the Opéra-Comique (1900). It was brought to the stage of the present opera house in Paris on 27 June 1931 with the aid of the Wagner Society of Amsterdam and with Pierre Monteux conducting the orchestra”.

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