Gluck

1812 · 41214 — Berlin: Schlesinger's Buch= und Musikhandlung Unter den Linden No. 34. PN 50 1812. Oblong folio. Contemporary dark brown mottled calf-backed marbled boards with oval label titled in manuscript to upper. 1f. recto title verso blank 3 "Personen" and incipits 4-123 i blank pp. <br /> <br /> Provenance<br /> Noted American harpsichordist Louis Bagger 1926-2024<br /> <br /> Binding worn rubbed and bumped. Very occasional minor soiling to blank lower margins; occasional minor showthrough; small stains to title with small circular publisher's handstamp to inner margin. Hopkinson 46Ca. <br /> <br /> Gluck's work is a tragedy in four acts to a libretto by Nicolas-François Guillard after Guymond de la Touche's Iphigénie en Tauride itself based on Euripides's work of the same name. <br /> <br /> "Iphigénie en Tauride was the crowning achievement of Gluck's career a result of the combination of his lifelong experience as an opera composer and a libretto which is arguably the best he ever set." Jeremy Hayes in Grove Music Online<br /> <br /> It was first performed in Paris at the Opéra on 18 May 1779 "with excellent singers; Rosalie Lavasseur sang Iphigénie Larrivée Oreste Legros Pylade and Moreau Thoas. . The opera had a great success immediately and even Grimm wrote of it - I do not know whether this is melody but perhaps it is something better. When I hear Iphigénie I forget I am at the opera; I seem to be listening to a Greek tragedy with music by Lekain and Mlle Clarion. It was the crowning point of Gluck's career. Guillard had provided an excellent libretto more classical than Goethe's poem less Christian and more ruthless; and Gluck had seized on the contrast between Scythians and Greeks upon the perfectly dramatic figures of Iphigenia and Orestes and had produced a work which both re-created a part of Greek tragedy and at the same time foretold a new world." Cooper: Gluck p. 258. Schlesinger's Buch= und Musikhandlung, Unter den Linden No. 34. [PN 50] unknown