Fire, sacrifice, <i>Iphigénie</i>

Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide (1774), his first opera written for the French stage, never settled on an ending. In order to analyse the historical conditions of this musical reluctance, this argument reads the opera's literary source, Jean Racine's Iphigénie, developing a three-fold link: to the fireworks that followed the first performance of Racine's tragedy in 1674 in the garden of Versailles, to the discovery in 1774 by Joseph Priestley of oxygen and related developments in the poetics of fire, and to changes in the political culture of sacrifice and so necessarily in the ends of tragedy. Racine's cosmic storm around a sacrificial pyre that auto-ignites, the self-immolation of the monarch created by the garden festival, and this opera which now ends with a chorus of soldier-workers crowned as kings all point to music's fabled ability to predict and determine the political, a danger recognized by governments from the Greek city-state to the present. In the course of a revolution that had been precisely figured in Gluck's music, Iphigénie the victim becomes the young queen who had been Gluck's singing pupil in Vienna, Marie-Antoinette