Thread by @david_m_wagner

1/ "Myths & Legends" is a fairly capacious theme: only genre it facially excludes is Verismo. This week we get two by Gluck. Now here's a thing. At the old Met, the one at 39th & B'way, the stage proscenium featured ornate rectangles w the name of a composer on each,

https://twitter.com/MetOpera/status/1374120963571396611

2/ names intended to celebrate the composers of most (obv not all) of the operas you might see within that proscenium. The first and earliest was not Mozart, but not Monteverdi either: it was someone in between them, namely, Gluck. (These plaques were in historical order, natch.)

3/ I don't remember whether there was anyone between Mozart and Verdi (Rossini, perhaps?). Verdi and Wagner of course; Puccini too IIRC, though he was "modern" for the old Met - two of works had their world premieres there (or four if you count IL TRITTICO as three). Gounod may

4/ have been there too, since the old Met was unofficially dubbed the FAUSTspielhaus in its young days, a jab both at Wagner's Bayreuth and at the young Met's penchant for Gounod's FAUST. Anyway, the point here is that these plaques officially promoted Gluck as first in a

5/ regnal line, almost as though he had founded opera. Of course, he didn't: we just had a Handel opera on the webcast last night, and while I'm not sure Monteverdi (earlier than Handel) has ever been performed at the Met, he has been at "across the street," at NYCO. Yet

6/ somehow Gluck was up there on the ol' proscenium ("Prossinio" - sounds like a Handel opera character), sort of leading the pack. Why? - I think bc, no matter how old-fashioned he may sound today, Gluck was actually a revolutionary in his time. Opera has he found it was

7/ the scene of complicated plots about royal intrigues, puncuated by extremely florid arias. Last night's AGRIPPINIA (Handel) is actually a case in point, and it can speak to us today only through the kind of MontyPython-esque staging that Sir David McVicar gave it. ...

8/ (Bass Matthew Rose, who sang Emperor Claudio, said in the interview that this production "is not about being silly, it's about being serious about silly things.") So what did Gluck do? Well for one thing he returned opera to its early 17thc origins, when it consisted largely

9/ of masques about Orpheus, the archetypal musician. Then, in contrast to AGRIPPINA and also to all Handel operas I know at all (I admit I don't know most of them, and I know nothing of Haydn's operas - did you know Haydn wrote operas? Yes - a lot. And they're all dead as

10/ doornails, though Philips released recordings of several of them about 30 yrs ago), Gluck's most famous opera, a return to the Orpheus theme, features a limpidly simple plot, and a strong preference for long melody ("Che faro senza Euridice" is an all-time hit) over

11/ ornamentation. He added ballets to the story, because why shouldn't the Furies, Blessed Souls, etc., all get to dance a bit), and also, I suspect, bc w/o them, ORFEO - already no more than half the length of AGRIPPINA - would not even have half *that.* I'll have more on

12/ "the Gluck revolution" when they show his IPHIGENIA IN TAURIS later this week. For now - here is ORFEO ED EURIDICE is a rather austere production, w Stephanie Blythe as Orfeo, Danielle de Niese as Eurydice, and Heidi Grant Murphy as "Amor," and wd u believe, that's the

13/ *whole cast*! (There were at least 7 principals in AGRIPPINA, and that's not counting minor characters.)

Btw you can perhaps verify the details of the composer plaques atop the old Met proscenium by checking with *older* Met-goers. Not with younger ones, bc there simply

14/ is not anyone younger than me with first-hand memories of the interior of the Old Met. (Its last season was 1965-66. After that, the company moved to Lincoln Center.)