The nation mourns and fears for its security. Admetos, the popular King, is lying on his death bed. What will happen after his death is uncertain. What is certain is that foreign armies and enemy rulers are waiting to pounce. When the crowd in the temple makes a daring final effort to bid the gods for mercy, the oracle sets the people a test which will determine everything: the King’s life will be spared if someone else takes his place. Who is prepared to give up their own life for that of the King?
Writing ‘Alceste’ in 1767, Christoph Willibald Gluck used Euripides’ tragedy as the basis for an uncompromising composition. During the course of the 18th century, late baroque opera had developed into an empty spectacle for castrato virtuosi and star singers. Gluck, by contrast, made drama central to his work, giving the genre a new degree of sharpness and clarity. Over 100 years after Claudio Monteverdi, Christoph Willibald Gluck became the second great composer to reinvent European opera. Gluck’s reform operas are products of the European Enlightenment and were written in times of great social and political turnaround. The ancien régime was coming to an end and the bourgeoisie was gaining power and influence. Gluck was one of the first composers to give the new consciousness and sentiments of the bourgeoisie a musical voice. While gods and mythological creatures lie at the centre of Baroque opera, Gluck chooses a woman of flesh and blood as his protagonist: a woman who is free to determine her own destiny.
It was René Jacobs, who suggested to Johan Simons that they should realise a new production of this rarely performed Italian version of ‘Alceste’ together. The world-famous baroque conductor, who conducted a highly successful production of Haydn’s ‘Creation’ for the Ruhrtriennale last year, finds some sections of Gluck’s highly dramatic opera “even better than Euripides”. “Words can only express about 60% of what Alceste feels inside,” says Jacobs, “but Gluck has placed orchestral motifs in between the sung lines which tell us far more about the character of the heroine.”
