Scenes from ‘Orfeo ed Euridice’ and ‘Iphigénie en Tauride’

Program notes

About the Work

The programme moves from Rameau to his great successor in the reform of serious opera, Christoph Willibald Gluck, with scenes from two of his masterpieces. Orfeo ed Euridice (Vienna, 1762) was the work that launched his operatic revolution: the ancient myth of Orpheus descending to the underworld to reclaim his dead wife, told with a ‘beautiful simplicity’ that swept away the clutter of Baroque opera in favour of directness and feeling. Iphigénie en Tauride (Paris, 1779) was the crowning achievement of his reforms: a taut, continuous music-drama, the orchestra active throughout, arias flowing into recitative without a break, the music wedded at every moment to the unfolding tragedy.

Gluck’s genius was for nobility and emotional truth conveyed with the simplest means; a single, perfectly shaped melody can carry overwhelming weight. From these operas come some of the most moving pages in all eighteenth-century music: Orpheus’s lament for his lost Eurydice, the serene ‘Dance of the Blessed Spirits’ with its famous flute solo, the storm and anguish of Iphigénie. Sung here by soprano and baritone with the orchestra, they form the emotional core of Pichon’s journey through French-flavoured Baroque and Classical opera, heard between the Rameau sequences.

What to Listen For

Listen for Gluck’s hallmark: noble simplicity. Where Rameau dazzles with colour and dance, Gluck moves us with directness: pure, beautifully shaped melodies that go straight to the heart, with nothing superfluous. The most famous example is the radiant ‘Dance of the Blessed Spirits’ from Orfeo, with its serene, consoling flute solo evoking the Elysian Fields; listen for its heavenly calm.

In the vocal scenes, listen for how the music serves the drama: Orpheus’s grief made almost unbearably plain and affecting (the great lament ‘Che farò senza Euridice’), and the taut, continuous tension of Iphigénie en Tauride, where the orchestra storms and broods and the singing flows seamlessly out of it. Notice how the orchestra and (where used) chorus carry the drama, and how Gluck achieves overwhelming emotion through restraint rather than display. Set against the kaleidoscopic brilliance of Rameau, this is opera distilled to its essence.