Sculpture, Music, Text: Winckelmann, Herder and Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride

SIMON RICHTER Sculpture, Music, Text: Winckelmann, Herder and Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride AU too often has the importance of the plastic arts been stressed and the importance of music been ignored in discussions of die deutsche Klassik. ON the evening of April 6, 1779, fti the amateur theater of the court of Weimar, the first version of a play by the thirty-year-old Johann Wolfgang Goethe was performed. It was caUed Iphigenie auf Tauris and featured the author himself in the role of Orestes. Some five weeks later, on May 18, 1779, the sixty-five-year-old Johann WiUibald Gluck was in Paris to see the premiere of his Iphigénie en Tauride. The opera met with great acclaim and seemed once and for aU to vindicate Gluck's reforms and to settle the Parisian debate between French and Italian opera, between Gluckists and Picftinists. Both Goethe's play and Gluck's opera were based on Euripides' tragedy by the same name. Given not only the chronological and material, but also the cultural coincidence of these two pieces (Gluck, after aU, spoke German as his first language and Uved in Vienna), one might expect that it would be difficult to discuss the one without the other. In fact, nothing is further from the truth. Scholars of Uterature bUthely talk about Goethe's Iphigenie as an exemplar of German Classicism, noting that Goethe reworked his eariier prose version into classical meter while he was sojourning in Rome and Italy. They certainly take note of the relevance of Greek sculpture and other antiquities Goethe encountered in Italy; they may even refer to Racine's version of Euripides' play. They do not mention that Goethe's play was overshadowed by Gluck's opera until weU into the 19th century. As Hans Schnoor writes: "Tatsache ist, daß Glucks taurische 'Iphigenie' dem Schauspiel Goethes ein Jahrhundert lang im Wege gestanden hat."2 Indeed, I have yet to find a work of üterary scholarship that makes the connection to Gluck and the world of music at aU. 158 Simon Richter To a cultured person of the eighteenth century this would have been extremely surprising. As historians of music attest, between 1699 and 1799 no less than 42 operas bearing the name of Iphigenia (either at AuUs or on Tauris) were composed.3 Greek myths and tragedies were the preferred subject of eighteenth-century opera, and for good reason. Ever since the camerata, people were convinced that Greek tragedy had been sung and that the closest modern approximation to this, the highest of arts and human achievement, was the dramatic opera. Goethe also beUeved this, as did his Weimar friends and coUeagues: Johann Gottfried Herder, Christoph Martin Wieland, and Friedrich Schüler, to mention a few. Herder and Wieland both wrote texts for dramatical musical performance, the former a "Brutus" and "PhUoctetes," the latter an "Alceste," whüe Schüler claimed in a letter to Körner that Gluck's Iphigénie afforded him "einen unendüchen Genuß .. . , noch nie hat eine Musik mich so rein und schön bewegt als diese."4 To contemporary scholars of Uterature, however, eighteenth-century opera is more of an embarrassment, analogous to the late reaUzation by art historians that the blindingly white statues of Greek antiquity were once painted. The ideal of German Classicism cherished by scholars simply has no place for the incongruous image of toga-clad opera singers reenacting scenes of Greek mythology, even if, as research can show, this was an earnest conviction of the very classicists they celebrate. Their embarrassment is not eased by the fact that so Utile of this opera repertory has endured . Historians of music, on the other hand, have far less at stake in this matter, and do not hesitate to mention the existence of Goethe's Iphigenie . But, in the same breath, most point out that there is no direct connection between the works of Goethe and Gluck, and insist that the appropriate cultural and inteUectual background for Gluck's Iphigénie is the Parisian opera scene and the raging debate regarding the superiority of French or ItaUanate opera and aU that entaüs.5 For my part...