Alceste at Nationaltheater Mannheim

"Nothing is more beautiful than to go for someone you love, to his death." When the oracle speaks, that the dying king Admete can only be saved if another sacrifice for him decides his wife Alceste, this step to do. The nation celebrates the salvation of the king happy; uneasily makes Alceste is ready to die. Admete is desperate and wants to follow her on the road to death. Since the hero Hercule comes to the court and decides to help. He wrestles the gods of the underworld from their victim.

Nine years after the Vienna premiere of his most significant reform opera, Alceste, Christoph Willibald Gluck in 1776 developed a new, French-language version of the substance for Paris. He squared the first two acts dramatically, focused heavily on the two main characters and their counterpart, the gods, added a scenic effects and the figure of Hercule, who also appears in the original text of Euripides. Gluck's Alceste is an apotheosis of the self-sacrificing love husband, marked by deep human vibration, force and glowing feeling. They remained more than 40 years in the repertoire of the Paris Opera.