The opera Iphigenie en Tauride is not a work one encounters often — not like Carmen or Madame Butterfly, Tosca or Don Giovanni. Perhaps it should be. New York’s Metropolitan Opera first plucked the opera, composed by Christoph Gluck in 1779, from relative obscurity in 2007, and it was such a hit they’ve brought it back for this year’s season. A film of the performance is being screened at all Cinema Nouveaus until Friday, as part of the Met’s HD Live series.
Watch the trailer
It’s based on the Euripides play set in the aftermath of the Trojan War. Briefly, Agamemnon attempts to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenie, for favourable winds to send his ships to pillage Troy. The god Diana saves her for an even worse fate: high priestess in Diana’s temple in Taurus, where her main task is performing human sacrifices. In Act I, 15 years later, she is confronted with two Greeks, shipwrecked in Taurus, to sacrifice. One of them — as the audience knows, but she does not — is her brother. It’s a typical opera plot — lots of passion and blood.
Gluck believed in “beautiful simplicity” — music focused on the action, no frills, no art for art’s sake. He would probably be appalled at the staging, where dancers — dressed, for some reason, as Russian peasants — waft around to “illustrate” the text.
But the music is magnificent, and so are the voices — quite extraordinary, as both mezzo soprano Susan Graham and the legendary tenor Placido Domingo — now singing a baritone role — had head colds during the filming. Domingo is getting on a bit — he’s just turned 70 — but has been quoted as saying “if I rest, I rust”. And in an interview during the film’s intermission, Graham points out that mezzo-sopranos almost never get leading roles — they’re usually the sister or the boyfriend — so she’s thrilled to be singing Iphigenie.
The interviews and slices of life shown during intermissions — this one includes a makeup artist pouring fake blood over tenor Paul Groves — are among the highlights of the Met Opera HD Live series, now in its fourth season.
Each opera is usually screened for a week. On the schedule for the rest of the season, with its starting dates, are:
Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (April 8)
Rossini’s comic opera Le Comte Ory (May 6)
Strauss’s Capriccio (May 20)
Verdi’s Il Trovatore (May 27)
Wagner’s Die Walkure (June 10).
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