Alceste

“The king must die today, unless someone else sacrifices themselves for him.” It is the oracle of Apollo who utters this simple, terrible sentence in the fourth scene of the first act of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s tragédie-opéra Alceste. Once the pronouncement has faded away and the people and the court have fled, one person remains: Alceste. The wife of King Admète will sacrifice herself. She will die for him. The story of the Queen of Pherai’s sacrifice has been told and interpreted in countless ways over the 2,500 years since Euripides’ tragedy Alcestis. Does Alceste die out of pure love, as the libretto of Gluck’s opera suggests? Does she submit to a patriarchal order? Or is the decision to take control of her own life and decide for herself what is worth dying for rather an act of self-empowerment? Milo Rau’s artistic work is always situated within the context of the political realities and conflicts of our time. The question of sacrifice as the surrender of one’s own life leads the artist to Ukraine: against the backdrop of the brutal war – the fourth anniversary of which fell during the production’s preparation – the decision to give one’s life takes on a new perspective. In close collaboration with conductor Titus Engel and various Ukrainian artists, Rau thus creates a new Alceste for our time, one that addresses not only the theme of sacrifice but also the second major subject of the work and the myth: the possibility of life’s triumph over death.