Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride plays the London Coliseum from 6 to 14 November 2026, a short engagement in English National Opera's 2026/27 season.
Gluck spent his career trying to strip opera back. He thought the form had become a display case for singers, and that music should serve the drama rather than interrupt it for applause. The reform operas are exactly that: no ornament for its own sake, no spectacle for its own sake, and recitative that moves. Iphigénie en Tauride, from 1779, was his fifth work for the Paris stage and the summit of it.
The story picks up after Aulis. Iphigenia, saved from her father’s knife, is a priestess in Tauris under orders to sacrifice every stranger who lands. Her brother Orestes lands, pursued by furies for killing their mother. Neither recognises the other. Everything in the piece is compression: four acts, no subplot, and a famous moment where Orestes sings that calm has returned to his heart while the orchestra beneath him says otherwise. Berlioz revered Gluck and championed this piece in particular, which is a useful corrective for anyone who assumes eighteenth-century restraint means an absence of feeling.
English National Opera gives it at the London Coliseum from Friday 6 to Saturday 14 November 2026, sung in English. Nine days is short by the house’s standards, and it alternates with Tosca in the same room through November — Gluck’s austerity and Puccini’s melodrama on consecutive nights on the same stage.