Iphigenie in Tauride, Metropolitan Opera HD Live, Feb. 26 2011

A few years ago, Susan Graham sang Iphigenie in a San Francisco Opera production that contributed to my hypothesis that “everything Susan Graham touches turns to gold.” Yesterday she sang the role at the Met, with the extra added advantage of having Placido Domingo as her Orestes. Why is this opera not more popular? Perhaps it takes performers of the stature of Graham and Domingo, but the bottom line was that I and all my friends in attendance were very well pleased.

The four acts of the opera were presented with one intermission, a seamless transition between acts 1 and 2, and acts 3 and 4, and just one set. The main part of the set was a large room, dominated by the sacrificial altar to the right of center and to the right of the altar a very large statue of what I take to be Diana—it was not very well lit, and the camera didn’t spend much time with it. The walls were a dark red, punctuated with a number of sconces with burning flames. In the center of the back wall was a door, carved in high relief, through which all the characters entered and exited the chamber. On the other side of the left wall of the altar room was a smaller, very dark room that looked like a storeroom, with a pile of heavy wooden furniture at the back, but given the shackles attached to the wall, and the prisoners constrained by the shackles, it was a prison cell.

“Where are the arias?” asked my music-major friends attending, with me, our first performance of Die Walküre, oh so many years ago. The same question could apply to this 1781 opera. It was rather Wagnerian, in that the music served the drama rather than the “mistaken vanity of the singers” as Gluck wrote in his preface to his first “reform opera,” Alceste. The music simply flowed from character to character to chorus to character, lacking any set pieces such as Una voce poco fa or Largo al factotum. At one point Domingo had a lengthy part, which he performed wonderfully well, and which would have elicited thunderous applause from the audience if the music had paused—but it didn’t, and the drama simply continued.

The overall effect was rather unusual. The opera gives you no take-aways in the form of memorable tunes, no Una voce poco fas or even a Winterstürme; in that sense I compare it to Palestrina, in that it is music that is wonderful to listen to, at the end you’re very glad you’ve attended, but you can’t really remember any of it. Maybe you can, after enough hearings. Graham and Domingo sang masterfully, as did Paul Groves and Gordon Hawkins in the lesser roles of Pylades and Thoas respectively. This performance is edging toward alpha quality.

Now if I could only get my friends who enjoyed Iphigenie in Tauride so much to come to Wagner with an open mind ...