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1779 opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck
the opera by Gluck

Iphigénie en Tauride (ifiʒeni ɑ̃ toʁid, 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 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". In 1889 Richard Strauss made a new German arrangement of the work for the publisher Adolph Fürstner, which was later staged in Weimar at the Hoftheater on 9 June 1900, under the Goethe inspired title of Iphigenie auf Tauris. Strauss's version was quite often performed at the beginning of the twentieth century and was also used for the work's première at the Metropolitan Opera in 1916, but is by now rarely heard. conducted by Antonio de Almeida, in performance at the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, Lisbon. It was recently revived at the 2009 Festival della Valle d'Itria at Martina Franca. there was a "memorable" staging at the Teatro alla Scala in 1957, with Nino Sanzogno conducting the orchestra, Luchino Visconti as the director and Maria Callas in the title role.

Scene: The entrance hall of the temple of Diana in Tauris. There is no overture; the opera begins with a short passage evoking calm before turning into a depiction of a great storm at sea. Iphigenia, sister of Orestes, is the high priestess of Diana in the temple of Tauris, having been transported there magically by the goddess when her father Agamemnon attempted to offer her as a sacrifice. Iphigenia and her priestesses beg the gods to protect them from the storm (Grands dieux! soyez nous secourables). Although the storm dies down, Iphigenia remains troubled by a dream she has had, in which she envisioned her mother Clytaemnestra murdering her father, then her brother Orestes killing her mother, and finally her own hand stabbing her brother. She prays to Diana to reunite her with Orestes (Ô toi qui prolongeas mes jours). Thoas, King of Tauris, enters. He too is obsessed with dark thoughts (De noirs pressentiments): the oracles, he tells her, predict doom for him if a single stranger escapes with his life. (The custom of the Scythians, who inhabit Tauris, is to ritually sacrifice any who are shipwrecked on their shores). A chorus of Scythians comes bringing news of two young Greeks who have just been found shipwrecked, demanding their blood (Il nous fallait du sang). After Iphigenia and the priestesses depart, Thoas brings in the Greeks, who turn out to be Orestes and his friend Pylades. After asking them for what purpose they came (they have come to retrieve Diana's statue and return it to Greece, though they do not divulge this), Thoas promises them death and has them taken away.

The ultimate source of the drama was Euripides' tragedy Iphigenia in Tauris. Because of its simplicity and heroic themes this work had a particular appeal for 18th century proponents of Neo classicism and there were several dramatic versions in the late 1700s, the most famous of which is Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris (1787). However, the most important as far as Gluck is concerned – because it formed the basis of Guillard's libretto – is Guimond de la Touche's spoken tragedy, which premiered in Paris on 4 June 1757. De la Touche's play was such a success that it was transferred to Vienna in 1761. It contributed to a vogue for the Tauris story in the city. In 1763 a "reform opera" on the subject by Tommaso Traetta with a libretto by Marco Coltellini, Ifigenia in Tauride, appeared on the Viennese stage. Coltellini's and Traetta's ideas on how to reform opera were similar to Gluck's and Gluck himself conducted the work in 1767. Gluck may have wanted to compose his own reform opera on the Tauris theme but Traetta's opera made this impossible for the time being. Instead, in 1765 Gluck composed a ballet, Sémiramis, which has many points in common with it and he reused some of the music from Sémiramis in Iphigénie en Tauride. It was only after he moved to Paris that Gluck finally had the opportunity to set the Tauris story and then only after he had composed another opera on the Iphigenia theme, Iphigénie en Aulide (1774). Beginning work in 1778, Gluck collaborated closely with the young poet Nicolas François Guillard, who based his libretto on Guimond de la Touche's play. De la Touche's work had been praised for its simplicity, but Gluck and his librettist simplified the drama even further. Their main innovations were to begin the opera with a storm (which would have been more difficult in a spoken drama) and to delay the recognition until the finale. Iphigénie en Tauride was an innovative libretto in the history of opera. Michael Ewans has commented, "Gluck's most radical 'reform opera' even dispenses with a love interest. Romantic interest is peripheral to Greek drama, but Iphigénie en Tauride, 'the first opera without love to exist in our theatres' must be one of the few major operas to forego the theme altogether."