OPERA - IPHIGENIE - RODNEY GILFRY

Iphigénie en Tauride (Iphigeneia in Tauris) is an 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 (ie. the strings and perhaps other instruments are playing, not just continuo accompaniment). The normal dance movements that one finds in the French Tragédie are almost entirely absent. The drama is based on the play Iphigeneia in Tauris by the ancient Greek dramatist Euripides which deals with Greek mythological stories concerning the family of Agamemnon in the aftermath of the Trojan War.

The borrowings Gluck made in this, his last significant opera, are numerous, and many scholars feel that they constitute a "summing up" of the artistic ideals he pursued throughout his career as a composer. Most of the reused music is his own, culled from his earlier, Italian-language operas or from his ballet Semiramis (1765). The Act II music for the Furies, for example, adapts music from Gluck's ballet. In at least one case, however, an aria in Iphigénie en Tauride is actually Gluck borrowing from himself borrowing from Johann Sebastian Bach; the Act IV number for Iphigenia, "Je t'implore et je tremble," is a parody of "Perchè, se tanti siete" from Gluck's Antigono, which in turn uses material from the Gigue of the Partita no. 1 in B Flat (BWV 825) by Bach.