The ballets of 'Caballero Gluck' at the Liceu by Jordi Savall

Prior to the intervention of the Ballet de l'Opéra national du Capitole de Toulouse in the Barcelona coliseum, maestro Jordi Savall undertook the interpretation of a suite of passages extracted from Christoph W. Gluck's Iphigenia in Aulis, among which, of course, the overture, considered by Richard Wagner as the starting point of a compositional revolution. Both in terms of form and the expressiveness of the materials, which oscillate between the impossible search for balance and a taste for gallantry: a Classicism that in its most sensual aspect can be approximated to Rococo, even while becoming increasingly alien to the possible worlds and the mathematical infinity of the Baroque. Although seemingly antithetical, Rococo and Romanticism challenge each other in their condition as extremes, symptomatically participating in the binomial that brings together the beautiful and the sinister ---as Eugenio Trías explored---, illustrated in the Age of Enlightenment by works such as Fragonard's The Swing (1767) and Füssli's The Nightmare (1781).

The instrumental reading of the work in suite format ---dedicated to that tragic figure, who according to the gods must be sacrificed by her father to ensure the success of the military campaign--- undoubtedly sounded convincing: powerful in its interpretation with period instruments, which allowed for agile attacks in the inflections and incisive due to their undulled sonority, especially raw in the ringing of the brass, whose vibration could be felt in the first rows of the stalls: a truth that emanates from the score not only in a metaphysical or allegorical sense, but as a jolt, as energy that incites more movement, internal or external. From vehemence or even from a softness that can be crueler than stridency.

Let us consider Gluck's own Chè faro senza Euridice?, a cantabile theme par excellence that anyone may have experienced in their very personal variation as a result of the loss of what is (believed to be) most valuable and thus incalculable, like the life of a loved one. The voice vests the singer with ontological authority, as absolutely true even if the world did not exist, a world that in fact ceases to exist in ancient terms, is transfigured (Lars von Trier masterfully presented this in Dancer in the Dark).

Even if with his self-affirmation the singer becomes aware of the rift that splits him, that consciousness is largely restorative to the same extent that it constitutes him. Hoffmann puts into Gluck's mouth an appreciation that illustrates this cosmogonic discovery: "Perhaps the almost forgotten theme of a little song that one sings differently was the first proper thought, and that embryo, laboriously nourished with the help of external forces, eventually transforms into a giant that devours everything around it and converts it into marrow and blood."

The Knight Gluck

"Surrounded by old masters like Handel or Gluck, I often forget what oppresses me, and only when I wake up in the morning do the painful worries return," E. T. A. Hoffmann, a contemporary writer of Beethoven, a declared music lover and a composer himself, wrote to a friend. Musical art, like dream activity —which he recreated in his literary fantasies— is for the romantic mentality a realm in which denied or unsatisfied reality emerges, as well as the wound that marks existence with fire, enabling a kind of connection with oneself that compensates for the daily disappointments, or at least makes them more bearable. Hoffmann dedicated a namesake story to "the knight Gluck," in which he fantasizes about an encounter —incomprehensible according to temporal logic— with the creator of scores as influential for romanticism as the aforementioned opera or the ballet Don Juan.

The expansive gesturality of the dancers of the Ballet de l'Opéra national du Capitole astonishingly alters space-time already in the compilation of passages from his opera Semiramis

The tension between the fate that awaits a particular individual —Iphigenia as Antigone, Prometheus as Oedipus, Orpheus as Eurydice— and the universality of human destiny, those converted into true archetypes, is significantly dramatized in Gluck's work.Tension resolved in its very vehiculation, with the sensible-intelligible form of an art that transcends space-time precisely by the subject of aesthetic experience being transfigured in it.The sensual abstraction of music is concretized with dance, which also, without words, makes visible some of its semantic possibilities, as could be seen with the free interpretation of the plots of Semiramis and Don Juan: "Very few are those who awaken from sleep, rise and ascend through that realm, thus reaching the truth; that is the great moment! The contact with the eternal, with the inexpressible!".

Semiramis

That rapture is described without disguise in mystical tones by Hoffmann/Gluck, as an experience of ineffable elevation, whose understanding can only be approached parabolically, by being participants ---if not protagonists--- of the movements that the effort to transcend provokes. The mystery and magic of dance lies in that transformation of energies, which seem to feed back into each other; the physical dimension, of bodies generating movement, and the invisible, vibration from beyond that becomes real by also striking the sensitive strings of our soul. The broad gestures of the dancers of the Ballet de l'Opéra national du Capitole astonishingly alter spacetime already in that compilation of passages from Semiramis, which allude to the exploits of the Assyrian queen, based on a work by Voltaire. In the Liceu's version, we approach the dialectic between concreteness and abstraction, that tension that movement resolves.

The mechanical articulation of movements leads to the understanding of the human being as an automaton, as free in its programming as an animal

The exceptionality of the individual is not diluted when forming groups, with movements never entirely stereotyped, against an ever-changing canvas. It is to the credit of choreographer Ángel Rodríguez to know how to articulate the prominence of some and others, implying the presence of a plot in which secrecy coexists with manifestation: the reality of the divine principle in each human being, passively surrendered to the wear and tear of materials, but also, from the awareness of the wound's actualization, open to the possibility of glimpsing light from there. Alongside the free staging of leadershipabsconditusof Queen Semiramis, in the second part one could enjoy a score about the myth of Don Juan, conceived ex profesoto be danced, like ballet.

Don Juan

Gluck's pre-Romantic genius proliferates with thrilling and expansive melodies, with a taste of untimely timelessness. In fact, some of them were practically literally taken up by Mozart for his Don Giovanni, which in turn became a paradigm during Romanticism due to the transgression and intrinsic problematic nature of the character. Assumed as impossibly free, Don Juan's paradoxical impulse precipitates him into the maelstrom of pleasure and destruction that in the Age of Enlightenment will culminate in the sinister counterfigure of the Marquis, responsible for having placed the Kantian categorical imperative at the service of the most particular appetites, despite its universalist aspiration.

The protagonist, surrendering to his veneration from within a wide crinoline, will lift her by extending her legs to a height closer to the stars

In the Liceu's staging, libertinism is initially evoked by the pyramid of undifferentiated bodies that absorbsDon Juan(Alexandre De Oliveira Ferreira, on opening day), reappearing on the other side to orchestrate the compulsive movements and indoctrinate those who must satisfy him between the flowery slits of the lattices.The mechanical articulation of movements leads to the understanding of the human being as an automaton, as free ---or as little--- in its programming as the animal, governed by instincts.Among all the desired women, Marlen Fuerte Castro's Dona Elvira will stand out, with whom he seems to fall in love... a possible redemption approaching through a more genuine affection. The protagonist, surrendering to his veneration from within a wide gonella with crinoline, a favorite habitat ---when not a prison, due to his condition of compulsive return to the matrix--- will elevate her by extending his legs to an almost celestial height.

The dance, choreographed on this occasion by Edward Clug, reiterates the dialectic that contrasts the mass of individuals with the one who claims to be king or governor ---Don Juan--- even above the commendatore: the law of desire, mounted on the back of a stony horse from which he plunges, and with which he will merge at the end under the common veil of appearance. Meanwhile, the dizzying bursts that Mozart will take up to draw his character into the abyss sound. The knight Gluck ---explains Hoffmann in his story--- confesses to being interested in "attending again the performance of my young friend… what was his name…? The whole world is in that opera! In the midst of a crowd of varied and groomed people, spirits from hell appear. All of it is voice and almighty sound… Devils, I mean Don Giovanni!".

Coda

Shamelessly breaking the linearity of time, the precursor ---Gluck--- author of the ballet that inspired his friend ---Mozart--- comes to admire him in a counterintuitive a posteriori in E. T. A. Hoffmann's story (who changed his third name to Amadeus, recognizing himself as his Gluck admirer of the Salzburgian). That truth has the structure of fiction, that through the parable of fantasizing one hits the bullseye of affective reality better is something that not only neuroscience has demonstrated, but that any spectator free of prejudices can verify, even when narrativity is only suggested with such an abstract and concrete art as dance: it invokes a spatiotemporal continuum that is altered in its unfolding, movement ---as we know--- being what transforms one's own reality.

Hoffmann would dedicate another no less fantastical story to the encounter that took place between the two acts of Mozart's Don Giovanni, in a backstage taken from a David Lynch film: a kind of inn, which in turn is confirmed as a theater, with room for operatic performances. There, one of the protagonists of that dramma giocoso ---Donna Anna--- appears to the narrator to tell him: "I have sung to you." To whom, if not? The listener is the one who completes the reality of the vibration, being himself affected. Making a giraffe disappear ---as in La grande bellezza--- or transcending through the elevation of a love that one feels beyond oneself is not magic, but the most human, falsely artificial activity.