I suppose this is Gluck's best-known opera after Orfeo ed Euridice, but I had never seen it and I wasn't all that excited about seeing it, due to my somewhat muted response to most of the other Gluck I've seen. But I did! And I'm glad of it! So there!
This is of course from Euripides, from whence also Handel's Admeto. The king, Admeto, is dying, and can only be saved if someone else sacrifices their life in his place. Who will do it? None but his wife Alceste. So she pledges to do just that, and Ademto gets better, but they are both heartbroken by her impending demise. But then Apollo comes down and says that because of how much they love each other, Alceste is saved. That's the original Italian version, that I saw. The biggest difference from the original play, as well as the Handel opera, is that Hercules--who saves Alceste from death in those versions--does not figure here. Which is clearly the right choice, given the tone that Gluck is trying to strike. The whole point of it is that Alceste is saved because of the strength of the couple's love. If instead she's saved because of the strength of Hercules...it sort of dulls the impact, doesn't it? But for whatever reason, when Gluck extensively revised it years later for a translation into French, guess what? Hercules is BACK, baby! Yeah! Yeah? Yeah.
Well actually, I loved this. It's definitely become my favorite Gluck opera. The depth of Alceste's and Ademto's love for each other is...well, quite possibly more vividly conveyed than love in any other opera I can name. Very impressive. And not a dry eye in the house while they're mourning, even though you know a happy ending (really, the purest deus ex machina) is coming. Excellent production from the Teatro La Fenice, also: very clean, minimalist design with checkered floor tiles, a low staircase, and a few columns and arches in the background. Ideal for conveying the drama, I would say.
Seeing this made me want to seek out more Gluck. Before, I'd never really made an effort to see what's available, and now that I have, I'm kind of shocked to see that I've basically seen everything that's available, apart from a few low-quality, unsubtitled videos on youtube. That's five, for the record, out of a total of forty-nine--kind of shocking that there wouldn't be more available from as important a composer as Gluck, even granting that his early works--when I guess he was more a straightforwardly-baroque composer--are considered of less interest. Which candidate is running on the pro-Gluck platform? I am a single-issue voter on this, so I need to know before I cast my ballot.
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