THE ANCIENT CONTEXT OF THE IPHIGENIA STORY

Variants

Whenever artists return to the Greek myths, they always do so in total freedom. No tale from ancient mythology is incontrovertibly defined, and Greek writers themselves differ considerably from each other when handling their ancient stories. The three great writers of tragedy, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, each have their own vision of Electra. And although the figure of Antigone by modern writers Jean Anouilh and Bertolt Brecht certainly draws on Sophocles’ work, these French and German dramaturges come up with different emphases.

For Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride (1779), the librettist Nicolas-François Guillard also allowed himself a free hand in giving the ancient story his own tragic interpretation. He called on the similarly titled 1757 work by tragic poet Claude Guimond de La Touche who himself, with borrowings from predecessors, differed on numerous points from the Iphigeneia in Tauris of Euripides, written in 414-412 BCE.

A curse on the House of Atreus

The background to ancient and later treatments of the figure of Iphigenia is the saga of the Palace of Mycenae. In the opera’s first act, Iphigenia’s dream alludes to what has gone wrong with the dynasty. King Agamemnon had to sacrifice his daughter before he could sail to Troy, due to an old curse on the family of King Atreus, the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus. Atreus and his brother Thyestes contested each other for power in Mycenae, and during a banquet Atreus served up his brother’s own children for him to eat. That crime went even further than Tantalus (the man condemned to be eternally tormented in the underworld).

The Furies harass in the upperworld those who have brought down a curse on themselves for a serious crime, especially one within the family

To test the gods’ omniscience, at table he had served up for them his own son Pelops. The gods punished Tantalus, brought Pelops back to life, but put a curse on his sons, Atreus and Thyestes. Thus, out of the mists of time loomed a curse from the gods that weighed on the House of Atreus. This curse becomes under Agamemnon a chain of bitterness, vengeance and murder within the family.

A chain of vengeance

Agamemnon leads the Greek expedition against Troy, but the fleet assembled in Aulis cannot set sail because of a lull in the wind induced by Artemis, the goddess of hunting (Diana in Gluck). She is seriously offended by Agamemnon: he killed a deer that was dedicated to her. The soothsayer Calchas makes clear that he must sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia if he wishes to sail. Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide covers this episode.

The loss of her daughter through the fault of her husband prompts Queen Clytemnestra to take revenge. Because murder within the family must be avenged with blood. Together with her lover Aigisthus, she murders Agamemnon on his return from Troy. Mother avenges daughter’s death by murdering father; so son must avenge father’s death by murdering mother. Orestes kills Clytemnestra and becomes a drifter pursued by the Furies. These goddesses of revenge from Erebus, the underworld, harass in the upperworld those who have brought down a curse on themselves for a serious crime, especially one within the family. They continue to remind a murderer of his crime. Orestes is finally acquitted by an Athens court. The goddesses of revenge are henceforth called Eumenides, the Well-Wishers. Aeschylus’ extraordinary trilogy, the Oresteia, relates the entire family drama in which the chain of vengeance is finally broken. In Gluck’s Scene four, Act two, the ‘black’ Eumenides, despite the favourable name, are still the terrifying creatures avenging nature and the scorned gods, and circle menacingly around Orestes.

The voice of the dead

Director Rafael R. Villalobos gives a voice to two figures who play no role in Gluck’s opera, since they have already been murdered. Before the opera proper, Agamemnon takes leave of Clytemnestra as the fleet is about to sail. Between Acts two and three, Clytemnestra herself speaks to her daughter Electra. Now that the mother is under the delusion that Orestes is dead, she finally finds peace without regret for her husband’s murder. While Orestes and Iphigenia find each other amongst the Taurians, their sister Electra remains at the palace in Mycenae. She is mentioned a number of times in conversation between Iphigenia and Orestes.

Gluck and Euripides

When Iphigenia is sacrificed by her father in Aulis, the goddess Diana (Artemis) takes pity on the girl and saves her to serve as a priestess in her faraway sanctuary ‘amongst the Taurians’ on the south coast of Crimea, the peninsula between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Tauride/Tauris does not exist as such; the word derives from the name of the people who were a part of the immense kingdom of the Scythians. The historian Herodotus says of the Taurians: ‘They sacrifice to the Virgin all those shipwrecked, and the Greeks whom they capture at sea.’ (Histories 4.103) These offerings to Artemis, daughter of Leto and Apollo, occur on the orders of the brutal Thoas, king of the Taurians. With Gluck, it is Iphigenia herself who must perform the cruel rite.

After their arrival on the Crimean coast, Orestes and his friend Pylades are soon standing before her. Pylades is Orestes’ cousin. When Agamemnon left for Troy and his wife Clytemnestra invited her lover Aegisthus into her home, she sent little Orestes to Strofius, King of Phocis. He was married to Agamemnon’s sister, and Orestes grew up there together with Pylades who became a loyal friend. Pylades is involved in Orestes’ plan to kill his mother and it is he who, in Aeschylus’ The Libation Bearers, when there is a final hesitation, urges that they carry out the murder.

The friendship between Orestes and Pylades takes on a tragic intensity for Gluck, with the agonising choice of who will in the end be sacrificed. Another significant difference with Euripides is Iphigenia’s ‘bloodthirsty priesthood’ that in the opera reaches a dramatic climax, when the audience, but not Iphigenia, knows that it is her own brother who stands before her. Recognition between brother and sister comes only very late with Gluck. Together with the considerably embellished evocation of Orestes’ close friendship with Pylades, this contributes to Iphigénie en Tauride’s intense arc of tension.