Dhe Greek Iphigenia comes from a family, a lineage, in which the cruelest murder was common for generations. The forefather, Tantalos, serves his own son to the gods for supper in order to test their omniscience. The family is then cursed to tear themselves apart in every generation. Brothers murder their fellow brothers, children are slaughtered and served as ragout to their unsuspecting father. The mother kills the husband, who had previously sacrificed his daughter for the fair wind of his warships, which is why she in turn is murdered by her son, who is now pursued by the vengeful spirits.
There is endless killing and revenge in Mycenae – the Greeks were by no means noble simplicity and quiet greatness, but blood was steaming in their cities. Some had to wait for Jacob Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzsche to reach this insight, but Goethe already had it.
Iphigenia is the escapee from the slaughterhouses, the goddess, it is said, kidnapped her in a cloud to the Taurians before she could be sacrificed to the wind. Tauris is an island far away from their homeland, where the Greeks see barbarians, whose king is Thoas. Iphigenia is the exile who wants to go back because life in a foreign country seems like a second death to her.
Tauris becomes a foggy techno cellar
Goethe's play “Iphigenie auf Tauris” incorporates the impulse to end the murder into his language. The piece is a string quintet, a radio play, a musical drama. It hardly has any action, there are no actions, only inactions. Iphigenia has abolished human sacrifice on Tauris, Thoas does not reintroduce it, although his anger that the priestess does not want to give herself to him motivates him to do so. Orestes, Iphigenie's brother, who killed her mother, is on the verge of madness, but does not fall.
All of this appears in continuous speech, the sentences swing like songs – Goethe knew Gluck's opera from 1779 – the solution to the most difficult situation is expected from nothing but communication. Before and after that, nothing more fluid, more delicate and, according to the expression around 1800 for restrained pathos, nothing more heartfelt had been written in the German language. There are people who consider “Faust” to be the ultimate monument of German poetry; at this point we would bring “Iphigenia” from 1787 into play.
Iphigenia wants to go home. That's ungrateful, says Thoas, and he's right. He is waiting for a sign of integration, a sign of acceptance of the circumstances in which Iphigenia now lives. “Can foreigners become our fatherland?” replies Iphigenia, who knows that her own fatherland was full of terror and that the barbarian was more humane than any of her family. Nevertheless, longing remains and the feeling of strangeness remains. She idealizes her homeland. “And my mind doesn’t get used to being here.”
We had to be so detailed about the piece because Ulrich Rasche has now staged it at the Vienna Academy Theater. You could just as easily say: he destroyed it. Because here Iphigenia has to squeeze out: “And it . . . doesn't get used to it. . . my ghost . . . Here.” All the actors speak Goethe’s iambs as if they had to read a text from the teleprompter that is completely incomprehensible to them and that they only know is full of pain and pathos. They don't speak sentences, but rather utter verses. To do this, they rhythmically lift their own feet on the revolving stage, one step per iambic, accompanied by keyboards and drums, which give the impression that Tauris is a dark, foggy techno cellar.
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