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Christoph Willibald Gluck or von Gluck (I tell you, they don't make middle names like Willibald any more) was a great composer of opera in the mid-late 18th century. There's been something of a run of his work at the Metropolitan opera of late. Mark Morris staged his most famous opera, "Orpheus and Eurydice" ("Orfeo ed Euridice"), at the Met in May, and now, just recently, there has been a run of performances of a new production of his last opera, "Iphigénie en Tauride," or "Iphigenia on the Island of Taurus."

The Iphigénie production was a big hit, at least it was for me. It was quite wonderful standing around at intermission, talking to friends, all of whom were just high from the experience of this opera and this performance. It was just one of those communal experiences. Now why is Iphigénie so terrific and what is it all about? I mean, it's his last opera from 1779, so you sense the whiff of the French Revolution only ten years off in the air. It's an austere, intense, tragic opera, and even though he recycled bits and pieces from his grab-bag of earlier compositions, it has an amazing coherence and force.

There's also the issue of Gluck's larger place in the history of music. The influence he exerted on German romantic opera, and in particular on [Richard] Wagner, who cited him constantly as an influence, and on Richard Strauss. Wagner did a concert version of "Iphegenie en Aulide," who [Otto] Klemperer, among others, recorded which is just great, if you can get ahold of it. And Strauss made a whole German version of "Iphigénie en Tauride" in German, which Cabiet and people in Portugal in 1961 recorded and it's kicking around on a pirate disc. But the current fashion, of course, is for original instruments or at least an austere performing style; the Met didn't use original instruments, but Louis Langrée, who's now the musical director of Mostly Mozart and who's a really good specialist in 18th century music, conducted the score with real intensity.

At the very beginning, I thought it sounded a little thinn and wished for the fattened up Strauss orchestration, but Langrée certainly convinced one quickly that his approach made plenty of sense. The reason that Wagner was so fascinated by Gluck is that Gluck rejected what he regarded the the flipperies of opera in Vienna and Paris in favor of a sterner, stronger, more serious kind of music in which the recitative was almost as important as the arias, and it all fused together into what Wagner would call a music drama.

Now, there are people who have problems with Gluck. Andrew Porter, for one, constantly ran him down as clumsy, as awkward, but for me, and for many others, the ruggedness and the strength and the sort of (it's hard to talk about "morality" in music given the misuse of music towards immoral ends over the centuries), but there's sort of a morality in Gluck's music that is pretty intense.

The Met production of "Iphigénie en Tauride" was a coproduction with the Seattle Opera, but it was initiated by Peter Gelb, who then got Speight Jenkins to essentially put it on with a different cast and to essentially serve as a warm-up for the Met. Now, the oddity of the Met's was that you had a mezzo-soprano singing a soprano role and a baritone singing a tenor role. It was a soprano and a baritone in Seattle (the wonderful Nuccia Focile sang Iphigénie).

But of course in this case, it was Susan Graham, who has the high notes, and is a major singer (and of course in those days, there wasn't the same distinction between sopranos and mezzo-sopranos, so I don't think Gluck would have objected). There's something of an all-American wholesomeness about Susan Graham that didn't quite settle in with the crazed, death-obsessed Grecian princess lost in a barbaric land. [Placido] Domingo, of course, has always had a baritonal tenor and had a little trouble with his high notes and has been singing baritone roles, and he was terrific. I mean, it was just fine, even if his duets with the tenor were a little too "tenorial." The contrast just wasn't there.

But what was beautiful about this production besides the opera and the music performance was Stephen Wadsworth's quite terrific conception and stage direction, abetted by Thomas Lynch as designer and his light designer, Neil Peter Jampolis, and a choreographer Daniel Pelzig, who hasn't made much of a name for himself as a choreographer, but contributed fascinating choral movement. In sum, it was a terrific performance, and one would like to think it will establish a run of Gluck performances, in the same way that Monteverdi and Handel have been reivived in recent decades.

This is John Rockwell for Rockwell Matters.