About Alceste

Given Robert Bass’s criteria for selecting operas for The Collegiate Chorale to perform, Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Alceste, the last opera-in-concert he planned before his death last year, is an ideal choice. Bob looked for works in which the chorus stands out because of the exceptional excellence of its music (as in Fidelio), or because it becomes a prominent character in the drama (as in Nabucco). And the spotlight of history has rarely shone so directly on an operatic chorus as it does in Alceste.
Premiered in an Italian version in Vienna in 1767, the work is the second of Gluck’s so-called “reform operas,” following Orfeo ed Euridice (1762). In these operas he and his librettist, Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, set out to correct what they saw as the excesses of Italian opera seria in its decadence. More and more, these operas focused on florid and static da capo arias, structured with an A section, a B section, and then a return of the A section, during which the singers engaged in ornamentation as elaborate, spectacular, and prolonged as possible (“musical gargling” Calzabigi called it), designed to display their vocal agility. In the composer’s opinion, these arias stopped the drama dead in its tracks while the singer showed off.
Gluck wished instead to concentrate on evoking fundamental emotions through a story told in a simple, natural, and straightforward manner. And so for Alceste, he and Calzabigi refined the Greek myth of Alcestis down to its essential actions, stripped of subplots, complications, or digressions. The gods have said that King Admetus must die unless someone will volunteer to die for him. Without his knowledge, his wife Alcestis takes his place. When he discovers this, he travels to the underworld to rescue her by dying himself, and the gods are so moved by their mutual devotion that they restore both to life.
To tell this story, Gluck developed a flexible dramatic form in which formal arias appeared only in situations—for instance lamentations, narratives, or pleas—where a character would naturally express himself intensely and at length. The story was carried by less rigidly structured arias, recitative, and most notably, the chorus, which Gluck planned to restore to the prominent role it had enjoyed in Classical Greek tragedy. Thus the chorus of citizens of Thessaly begins the opera by breaking into the end of the overture with an anguished cry: “Gods, return to us our king.” Throughout the scenes that follow, they are woven into the fabric of the story, as they comment, panic, comfort, celebrate, mourn, and pray.
Most of the third act takes place in the underworld, where the Thessalian citizenry, understandably, does not appear. And at one time, the librettist intended to close the opera without reintroducing them, ending with an intimate scene showcasing only the reunited Alcestis and Admetus. Gluck objected. “The chorus,” he wrote, “have played an active role in the first two acts. It is their story. . . . Yet in the third act they are forgotten and seen no more. I insist that the opera cannot finish until these poor people have been consoled.” And so the opera ends, as it began, with the chorus.
In the scenes set in the underworld, moreover, where the Thessalians are not present, the chorus still plays a pivotal role as the infernal deities who insist that either Admetus or his wife must die. The music for these gods of death has a character very different from the people’s choruses. Written entirely in three parts, for alto, tenor, and bass (apparently there are no infernal sopranos) they are in rhythmical unison, with a very limited range. The first chorus consists entirely of one note—an F—repeated insistently. Early audiences found these choruses somewhat puzzling, perhaps a sign of failed imagination. But Gluck had specific, dramatic reasons for what he did. “The infernal gods are not devils,” he explained; “we regard them as ministers of destiny; they are not swayed by any peculiar passion; they are impassive. Alcestis and Admetus are a matter of indifference to them. . . . In order to delineate this special impassivity of theirs, I thought I could not do better than to deprive them of all accent, reserving for the orchestra the task of painting all that is terrible in their announcement.”
Today the idea that the orchestra and the singers might have different agendas may not seem so revolutionary, but a famous story about Gluck’s last great reform opera, Iphigénie en Tauride, shows how new and unsettling it could be to musicians of the time. During a rehearsal, as the character Orestes began to sing, “Calm returns to my heart,” the orchestra found itself playing music that was decidedly not calm. Assuming this was a copying error, they stopped, but Gluck urged them on, explaining, “He killed his mother! He’s lying.”
In 1770, under the patronage of his former pupil Marie Antoinette, Gluck determined to introduce his operatic reforms to France. After the success of a French revision of Orfeo, he decided to produce a new version of Alceste, heavily revised with the help of the French librettist Leblanc Du Roullett. This version, premiered in 1775, is the one virtually always performed today.
As was almost inevitable in the volatile operatic world of the time, Gluck’s reforms precipitated an opera war. The two sides arrayed themselves behind Gluck or the then-popular Italian composer Piccini. Passions ran high, occasionally even leading to physical violence. Benjamin Franklin, who came to France as ambassador for the brand-new United States, wrote mockingly that the French must “certainly live under a wise, just and mild government” if they could find nothing more important to fight about than “the perfections and imperfections of foreign music.”
This battle was largely a publicity creation—Gluck and Piccini were personally on friendly terms. But although Gluck dismissed the excesses of the opera-war fanatics, he took his actual reforms as seriously as any of them. Working on the revision of Alceste, he wrote, “This opera excites me to frenzy whenever I hear it. My nerves are at full stretch, and I am enthralled from the first word to the last.” With Alceste even more than with Orfée, Gluck believed, he had accomplished what he had set out to do. He wrote to Du Roullett with a lack of modesty characteristic of him, “Alceste is a perfect tragedy, and I do not think it often fails of its full perfection.”
The opera was only a qualified success when it opened, but Gluck took this in stride, realizing that it would take the public time to come to an understanding of what he was attempting. “Alceste,” he told a friend, “is not the kind of work to give momentary pleasure or to please because it is new. I declare that it will please as much two hundred years hence, for I have grounded it in nature, which does not change with every passing fashion.” Two hundred and thirty years later, The Collegiate Chorale is pleased to offer New York audiences a chance to confirm his prediction.

-- Janet Pascal