Time as Dramaturgy: Staging Gluck Across Two Worlds

Il Parnaso confuso & La corona at the Valletta Early Opera Festival

Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Il Parnaso confuso and La corona, composed separately in 1765 for the Habsburg court, occupy a curious position within his output. Shaped by the expectations of courtly entertainment, they sit at a point of tension between inherited operatic convention and the emerging clarity of Gluck’s reformist instinct. Their music already gestures toward a more direct, expressive language, while remaining shaped by the dramaturgical structures of Pietro Metastasio, and bound by their original context to a world of display, ceremony, and artifice.

In approaching these works for the Valletta Early Opera Festival, the question was not how to modernise them, but how to reveal their internal logic. Although conceived independently, the two operas suggested an unexpected continuity: a movement from playful performance toward moral action. Rather than treating them as discrete works, I sought to stage them as successive states of the same world, revealed through time.

This approach found a natural counterpart in the intimate scale of Teatru Manoel. Built in 1732 and closely aligned in scale with the court theatre at Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, the space allows for a direct relationship between performer and audience. The sense of proximity restores something of the conditions for which these works were conceived, while also sharpening the clarity of their dramatic language.

Both works were written for four female voices as court serenatas to be performed by the Habsburg archduchesses. This concentration of female presence, unusual in its focus, became a starting point for the staging. It prompted a broader consideration of historical moments in which women occupy a more visibly active or self-determined position within social structures, and in which their agency aligns with the thematic concerns of the operas themselves. The question, then, was not only where to place these works in time, but when their particular configuration of voices and relationships might most clearly resonate.

This led to the decision to relocate both operas within the setting of an English country manor across two distinct moments of the twentieth century.

Il Parnaso confuso unfolds in the 1920s, within a culture of display, leisure, and aesthetic experimentation. The drawing room becomes a site in which mythology and social ritual intersect: a space for performance, courtship, and the stylisation of identity. The wedding at the centre of the opera finds a natural parallel in the social world of the period, while the figures of Apollo and the Muses emerge as participants in a culture defined by artifice, elegance, and play.

Each of the Muses was associated with a distinct aesthetic language drawn from the shifting fashions of the 1920s. Their identities were articulated through references to Salomania, the Egyptian Revival, and Japonisme, each embodying a different mode of stylisation and cultural projection. These visual codes did not function as historical quotation, but as extensions of the opera’s own theatricality: forms of self-presentation in which identity is constructed, performed, and displayed. In this way, costume becomes not merely decorative, but dramaturgical, reinforcing a world in which surface and performance are inseparable.

Here, myth does not stand apart from reality, but is absorbed into it. The characters operate simultaneously as social figures and mythological archetypes, allowing the opera’s shifting allegiances and playful contradictions to unfold within a recognisable human framework. The boundary between sincerity and performance remains deliberately unstable.

By contrast, La corona is situated in the 1940s, as the same manor is transformed by the pressures of war. The atmosphere of leisure is replaced by one of purpose, as the house becomes aligned with the structures of wartime service. Atalanta, Asteria, and Meleagra are positioned within the Auxiliary Territorial Service, while Climene is associated with the British Red Cross. The world is no longer organised around display, but around contribution.

In this context, the role of Meleagro was reconceived as Meleagra, allowing the central relationship of the opera to be understood through a sapphic lens. Emerging from the social reality of the setting rather than imposed upon it, this shift clarifies the emotional dynamics of the work, aligning the relationship between Atalanta and Meleagra with the opera’s broader movement toward clarity of action. Framed as a relationship between a younger woman and a more experienced figure, it acquires an additional layer of asymmetry, which further sharpens the stakes of Atalanta’s eventual refusal, and the emotional devastation experienced by Meleagra.

The mythological framework is correspondingly reoriented. The hunt for the Calydonian boar, rather than existing as a distant heroic narrative, resonates as a metaphor for collective struggle, refracted through the experience of the Second World War. The fusion of myth and social realism allows the stakes of the opera to be understood in immediate human terms.

Atalanta’s moral clarity, in this light, is grounded not in romantic resolution but in her commitment to service. Her rejection of Meleagra’s declaration of love does not diminish the emotional force of the work, but intensifies it, allowing the opera to conclude in a state that remains open rather than resolved. What had previously been enacted as play returns as consequence.

The visual language of the production was conceived in close dialogue with the design team, with material itself functioning as an extension of the dramaturgy. The set, designed by Anthony Bonnici, remained constant across both operas: a country manor constructed from gauze-like fabric, its translucent walls revealing corridors and adjoining rooms beyond the central space. This permeability allowed the world to feel both contained and porous, with figures able to observe, enter, and withdraw from the action in a manner that reinforced the shifting boundary between public and private life.

Across this shared architectural framework, the costumes, designed by Luke Azzopardi, articulated the passage of time through their changing relationship to fabric. In Il Parnaso confuso, fabric appears in abundance—expressive, decorative, and excessive. The world is one of visual indulgence, in which material becomes an extension of performance itself, echoing the culture of display that defines the 1920s setting.

In La corona, this relationship is fundamentally altered. Fabric becomes functional, stripped of ornament and redirected toward utility. The presence of uniforms establishes a new visual order, while plain white cloth is repurposed within the action as bandages, torn and applied in response to injury. What had previously signified aesthetic pleasure is now reconfigured as a means of care and survival. This transformation of material mirrors the broader shift within the two operas, as a world of play gives way to one shaped by necessity and consequence.

A further continuity between the two operas was established through the presence of three supporting male performers, who remained on stage across both works. In Il Parnaso confuso, they appeared as butlers within the drawing room, initially positioned at the periphery of the action. Gradually, they were drawn into the performative world of Apollo and the Muses, their roles shifting from observers to participants, and ultimately to lovers. Their presence grounded the opera within a recognisable social structure, while also allowing the boundaries between service, performance, and desire to dissolve.

In La corona, these same figures returned, transformed by time, as wounded soldiers. The world that had once permitted play now bore its consequences. Where they had previously facilitated performance, they now carried its aftermath in their bodies. This continuity allowed the two operas to be understood not as separate entities, but as successive states of a single world, in which roles, identities, and physical presence are reshaped by the pressures of history.

From the outset, the production was shaped in close alignment with the musical direction of Giulio Prandi and Giacomo Biagi, and the playing of the Arianna Art Ensemble. Their approach to Gluck’s score was rooted in historically informed performance and responsive to the immediacy of the theatrical moment. This supported a reading in which clarity of expression takes precedence over ornament, allowing the dramatic shifts between the two operas to register with particular acuity.

In the intimate acoustic of Teatru Manoel, this relationship between music and action becomes especially direct. The proximity between ensemble, performers, and audience restores a sense of scale appropriate to the works’ original context, while also heightening their expressive impact. In this setting, the music does not accompany the staging, but exists in dialogue with it, each informing the other in the moment.

Time, in this production, operates not as a backdrop, but as a structuring force. The shift from the 1920s to the 1940s does not simply relocate the action, but reveals a latent trajectory within the works themselves, moving from display to decision, from artifice to consequence, and from performance to action. The intimate scale of Teatru Manoel further intensifies this progression, allowing these transformations to unfold in close proximity to the audience, where shifts in physical presence, material, and purpose, whether in the movement of bodies or the transformation of fabric, can be directly perceived.

To stage these operas, then, was not to impose a contemporary frame, but to trace a line through them, allowing time to act upon the world they inhabit and, in doing so, to make visible the clarity already embedded within Gluck’s music and Metastasio’s dramaturgy. What emerges is not a reinvention, but a reorientation, a way of seeing these works as part of a continuum in which meaning is not fixed, but revealed through change. ■

Il Parnaso confuso & La corona (1765) was directed by Brett Nicholas Brown, with design by Anthony Bonnici, costume by Luke Azzopardi, lighting by Moritz Zavan Stoeckle, choreography by Simon Riccardi-Zani, and performed by the Arianna Art Ensemble under the musical direction of Giulio Prandi and Giacomo Biagi. Presented by Festivals Malta at the Valletta Early Opera Festival, Malta.

This essay forms part of an ongoing reflection on directing practice.