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Iphignie en Tauride is an opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck in 4 acts. It was his 5th opera for the French stage. The libretto was had been written by the Nicolas-Franois Guillard. With Iphigenie, Gluck took his operatic reform to its reasonable finish. The recitatives are shorter and they are recitatif accompagne i.e. the strings and maybe other instruments are playing, not just continuo accompaniment. The usual dance movements that one finds in the French Tragedie are approximately entirely absent. The drama is related to the play called Iphigeneia in Tauris by the ancient Greek dramatist Euripides which is concerned with Greek mythological stories concerning the family of Agamemnon in the result of the Trojan War.
The borrowings Gluck made in this, his final dominant opera, are different, and several scholars feel that they make a "summing up" of the artistic ideals he pursued all through his career as a composer. Many of the reused music is his own, gathered from his initial, Italian-language operas or from his ballet Semiramis (in the year 1765). The Act II music for the Furies, for example, uses music from Gluck's ballet. In minimum one case, though, an area in Iphignie en Tauride is actually Gluck borrowing from himself borrowing from Johann Sebastian Bach.
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