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Potential for emotions and conflict "Damnably humane" between ethos and pathos

Christoph Willibald Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride

The world premiere in Paris of Christoph Willibald Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride on 18 May 1779 was the greatest success of his life. He had doggedly fought for this victory in the conflict of public opinion with an impressive series of reform operas. Henceforth Gluck was regarded as the first opera composer to have delved into the "mystery of antiquity", which meant the ancient Greeks. However, there were largely divergent views on the nature of this mystery. Friedrich Schiller, for instance, who was commissioned by Goethe in 1800 to supervise a production of Iphigenia in Weimar, confessed: "I have never been moved by such pure and beautiful music as this". In Schiller's view Gluck's music conveys a tamed emotionality, apparently in such a way that it resounds with Winckelmann's classicism in "noble simplicity and silent grandeur". Unlike E. T. A. Hoffmann who, in 1809 in his fantastic story of Ritter Gluck, was swept away by the pathos of Gluck's musical language. "Everything that can express hatred, love, despondency, rage in their strongest characteristics, he powerfully compressed into sounds."

At first sight Hoffmann's perception of Gluck's music may seem to be more in accordance with the affiliated opera subjects than Schiller's view. For instance, the libretto by Nicolas François Guillard indicates a potential for emotions and conflict heading towards multiple emotional shock. The librettist, by referring back via a French play indirectly to Euripides' tragedy Iphigenia in Tauris (around 412 B.C.), shows the title role in the conflict between obedience and conscience. Iphigenia, formerly a helpless victim on the altar to the goddess Diana and only by her mercy taken away to the land of the Scythians to Tauris, is herself now a priestess to Diana and has to slaughter human beings at the behest of Thoas, the blindly superstitious king of the barbarians. She thereby almost unwittingly becomes the murderess of her brother Orestes. This gloomy occurrence more or less prepares the scene where elemental emotions are insistently unfolded: for instance, Iphigenia's grief about the decline of her family destroyed by vindictive murder and the remorse of the matricide Orestes. Only a few counterpoints throw light onto the scenario: for example the heroic and sensitive alliance of friendship between Orestes and his companion Pylades. Even after brother and sister have recognised one another, there is no cause for real jubilation, merely relief. The happy ending is not achieved until after Pylades has killed the murderous Thoas.

Anselm Feuerbach, Iphigenie (1871). (c) Staatsgalerie Stuttgart

Psychoanalytical exploration of the characters

Perhaps it was especially the composer's ability to convey an impression of the emotional state of the protagonists by deep musical investigation that led Hoffmann to his transfigured view of Gluck. In the dream scene of Orestes it becomes clear that Gluck advances towards the psychoanalytical exploration of the characters. While he believes that he has regained tranquillity, the music tells a very different story. Banished to the orchestra, his guilty conscience continues to torture him and the terrifying figures of the goddesses of vengeance emerge from Orestes' mind troubled by nightmares. On awakening from the vision of horror the facial features of his mother merge with those of Iphigenia: a pointer to the subconscious, anticipating his lost sister in the unknown priestess.

The gentle voice of humanity

Similarly the tempestuous music at the beginning of the opera serves the representation in sound of emotional strain. Turbulence in nature's elements reflects how Iphigenia's inner emotions revolt against her bloody office. And she has nothing with which to withstand the pressure bearing down on her except the "gentle voice of humanity", as written in the German libretto for Gluck's version of Iphigenia for Vienna in 1781. However, this ethical instance in Iphigenia's soul is a musical pioneer: precisely the "tone of humanity" so typical of Gluck is what may have touched Schiller. On the other hand, both Gluck's and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Iphigenia have something in common as regards the ethical motor. Whereas in Goethe's play, first performed in 1779 in the prose version, the title hero brings about the turn for the better because of her unconditional love of truth, in the opera it is Iphigenia's pity for the victims. Thus what Goethe wrote about his drama to Schiller in 1802 is also true of Gluck's opera, that it was indeed "quite damnably humane". And it is in the humane element where it is proven that Hoffmann's emotional and Schiller's ethical appreciation of Gluck are merely two sides of a medal.