Corona Schröter as Iphigenie and Johann Wolfgang Goethe as Orest in the premiere of Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris in Ettersburg, 1779

According to a recent press release from Seattle Opera, the company will work with the Metropolitan Opera for the first time to co-produce Gluck's Ipigénie en Tauride. Met Maniac has known about the inclusion of the opera in the Met's 2007-2008 rep for a little while now, but moments before Seattle Opera put its press release on the website, I was emailed one that reveals an important detail that was not on Met Maniac's cast list: Plácido Domingo will make what I presume to be another role debut—the baritone role of Orestes. And shit, Susan Graham as Iphigénie. We get Nuccia Focile (actually still singing?) and a bunch of people you've never heard of.

The last time the Met performed the opera was in 1917, at that time with Melanie Kurt and all sung in German (oh, the tongues that have bathed this story—Euripides in Greek, Goethe in German, Guillard in French, and Da Ponte in Italian.

Believe it or not, the German works, although certain phrases require the addition of pickup notes or the halving or dotting of a rhythm to accommodate extra syllables, which, in some ways, disrupts the stately evenness in the original score. Wanna hear Fritz Wunderlich and Hermann Prey duetting in German? Of course you don't, but it's contextually relevant, so I'm forcing it on you.

Iphigénie en Tauride was Gluck's penultimate opera, and despite his having fully developed an entirely revolutionary model of opera, he was, by this point, borrowing from himself. In fact (and I didn't even know this till recently), in Act IV, he gets three-times referential. According to Wikipedia:

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.

Maria Callas as Gluck's Ifigenia in Tauride at La Scala, 1957

I worked through a few recordings of this, but one potentially exciting performance by Crespin at Buenos Aires in 1964 sadly goes a little sour in pitch—her voice was huge, but all the sub-glottal pressure being exerted pulled the pitch down (like Tebaldi, but starting even lower in the scale). A 2006 Paris Opera production starring Susan Graham (the Met's upcoming Iphi) left me feeling like someone was dunking my head underwater, primarily because Graham has gotten raspy, breathy, and tired by the time this aria rolls around, and she sings in a mix that people like to call "creamy" or whatever, but honestly, it's only a symptom of her lack of core in the sound. That's cute, but this aria (as with a lot of Gluck) lies around the upper passagio, and it will knock any singer who isn't letting the work be done on the folds themselves straight on her ass. My saving grace was—as it so often is—Maria. If you managed to sit through hours of Gluck and are well acquainted with this aria, then good for you child. For the rest of you with lives, I'm skipping you to the good part.

It's a deceptively simple piece. Callas manages it superbly and even makes it thrilling, thanks partially to the merciful cut, but mostly to Callas's resourcefulness. She keeps the sound relatively bright to allow it to cut through the orchestration. A lot of women singing Gluck seem to be into beefing up the middle and top to match the thicker accompaniment, but this thinking is backwards. Callas knows that the less like the orchestra she sounds, the easier it will be on her. That's not to say I'm not a sucker for Eileen Farrell or Helen Traubel singing "Divinités du Styx," but both of them like to load up like Crespin, and their pitch suffers for it, too. Callas makes it sounds easy and maintains crisp diction, allowing me to forget about the fact of the singer and concentrate on the drama—something I'm sure Gluck would've loved.

I'm not worried about the production at all. In fact, I'm nearly wetting my pants for it. The director at both Seattle and the Met will be the brilliant Stephen Wadsworth (New York audiences remember him from Fleming's Rodelinda), and thank God, it'll be a traditional setting. The music is, to modern ears, essentially boring. I honestly don't know what it will take to bring Gluck to life in a vivid way, but it looks like there might be some trouble with the heroines. Susan Graham's blousy mezzo will put people straight to sleep if Wadsworth doesn't give her something compelling to work with. Nuccia Focile is sort of all over the place and always has been, but she's generally done enough things right in the past to have just the right balance of richness and clarity that the role demands. I'm especially excited that Seattle Opera is trying something new. Gluck has even more potential for failure than baroque does (and Speight Jenkins doesn't care for baroque; is it the age of the content, the da capo arias, the showiness?). Jenkins is putting a lot of faith in the production team. And rightly so? They've brought the company numerous successes in the past, and hell—if it's good enough for the Met! I'd love to know to what degree it is a true partnership—who had the idea first, who's tagging along. No matter what the case, though, I think the collab is the beginning of a very good thing.

This Friday: the "loofahtorio" of Mackris v. O'Reilly that La Cieca mentioned some time ago. Saturday: the prima of our Don Giovanni. And Sunday: the alternate cast of the same. I won't be able to do this without a drink or two, and I just got some nice, big rolling papers, so things will be okay, if you know what I mean.

Every year, the newspaper where I work, The Stranger, holds what it calls its Strangercrombie, an auction whose proceeds in their entirety go for charity—to the hunger-relief agency Northwest Harvest. This year, there are 100-something packages to bid on, ranging from fashion to shopping sprees to dildos and butt plugs to vacation packages, plus tons of arts-related items.

My favorite this year is the auction of esteemed New Yorker music critic Alex Ross's iPod (The Rest Is Noise needs no introduction, I'm sure). The iPod comes preloaded with music chosen by Ross and divided into very meticulously curated playlists programmed by Ross's own fingers (wherever those have been)!

From our Slog:

The first playlist is called Silence and includes Stravinsky’s Pater Noster, Morton Feldman’s Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety, and a chunk of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time…

The second playlist is called The Twentieth Century and includes Ives, Schoenberg, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Gershwin (from Porgy and Bess), Pärt, Björk, the Györgys (Ligeti and Kurtág), and a few other diacritic-enhanced names.

The third playlist is dedicated to Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and the fourth to Bob Dylan. If I were a selfish man, I’d exclude these details to make the package less interesting and improve my chances of being able to afford it. I make this sacrifice for you.

Two things:

1. The auctions are open to anyone who is capable of using eBay.
2. Because the proceeds go to charity, if you win, your purchase is tax-deductible.

For any auction, just click the Bid Now! link to be taken to the eBay listing.

In Your Face, 2006. (2'54)
Digital video by Patrick Dyer.
Soundtrack a manipulation of "Deh! torna mio bene" (Proch Variations), as sung by Beverly Hoch.

Dyer sure knows how to VVORK it, non?