Alceste at Nationaltheater Mannheim

»Nothing is more beautiful than to die for someone you love.« As this is spoken by an oracle, that the dying king Admete can only be saved if someone is willing to give the ultimate sacrifice, his wife Alceste decides to take it upon herself for him. As the population happily celebrates the rescue of the king, Alceste anxiously prepares herself to die. Admete is in despair and wants to follow his wife into death. Suddenly the hero Hercules arrives at the court, and decides to help. He forces the gods of the underworld to release their victims.

Nine years after the Viennese world premiere of his most important reform opera Alceste, Christoph Willibald Gluck reworked his opera in 1776 into a new, french version of the subject for Paris performances. He tightened the dramaturgy of the first two acts, and focused stronger on the two leading characters and their opponents, the gods, adding special scenic effects, and also the character of Hercules, who appeared already in the original text by Euripides. Gluck’s Alceste is an apotheosis of sacrificial love between married partners, determined by deep human distress, strength, virtue, and passionate feelings. It remained in the repertoire of the Paris opera for over forty years.