Performance Review

Orpheus and Eurydice

Once frequently performed, Gluck's Orfeo ed Eurydice has slipped from the operatic repertory and from popular consciousness in recent years, a victim perhaps of its ethereal beauty and a happy ending that has seemed, in postwar thinking, too obviously to be wish fulfillment. Whereas it was once the oldest opera to enter the repertory, this version of the Orpheus legend has been nudged aside by Monteverdi's more dramatic Orfeo of a century and a half earlier. But Gluck's version, containing more consistently beautiful music than almost any other opera one can think of, here proves to be unexpectedly congenial to the 1990s and clearly still has much to say about the themes of love, loss, and remembrance.

The mythic Orpheus was able to charm beasts and bring the dead back into life through the power of music. In this new production directed by the American choreographer Martha Clarke, Orpheus, a grieving figure in a black overcoat, boasts the powerful voice of the American countertenor, Michael Chance. Hector Berlioz had revised the opera in the nineteenth century to turn over the role of Orpheus to a female contralto voice, but this production shrewdly reverts to the original version of 1762, written for a castrato and now astonishingly recreated by Chance, who has sufficient technique and heft in his soprano to simulate the power of the castrati. Just to hear Chance's first sung line ("Eurydice!") was to alert the audience to the presence of an unusual and powerful artist.

Because the opera centers on Orpheus' grieving for the lost Eurydice, the opera has been criticized as being insufficiently dramatic. Hence the invitation, one suspects, to Martha Clarke to choreograph a scenario depicting the grief of Orpheus and the restless unfulfillment of the dead souls in the underworld. Those familiar with Clarke's work in New York (such as Vienna Lusthaus and Miracolo d'Amore) would recognize her signature features, such as anguished writhing and graceful dancing within a circle. Because the persistent theme of her dances is the inevitability of frustration and loss, [End Page 513] Clarke seems an inspired choice. While Clarke's mourners, who wander aimlessly among a field of rocks and boulders on the stage of the London Coliseum, wear black overcoats, the spirits of the dead writhe and slither nude among the rocks. In a gesture reminiscent of Gustav Doré's illustrations of Dante's Inferno, the dead heap up rocks as a poignant gesture of spiritual futility. Paul Pyant's evocatively harsh and cold side lighting effectively captures the dismal remoteness of the underworld.

By the logic of the production, Lesley Garrett, a house favorite at the English National Opera, should have appeared nude when she is reclaimed from the dead (and indeed she was ushered in by a set of nude dancers), but she appeared like Orpheus in a black overcoat. Unaware of the conditions set upon her release from death back into life, Garrett's Eurydice upbraids Orpheus for not embracing or even looking at her in the opera's most deeply emotional moment, and of course when the distraught Orpheus does look at her, she is promptly reclaimed by death. Because the opera was first performed in Vienna on the emperor's name day, an unhappy ending faithful to the myth was unthinkable, so Gluck and his librettist Ranieri de'Calzabigi had to contrive an improbable second recovery for Eurydice. Clarke persuasively accompanied this subsequent reuniting of the lover with a set of dances (with the dancers now back in their overcoats) and the enthusiastic congratulation of the lovers by the chorus, who had hitherto been isolated in the side boxes. The backdrop for John Conklin's set was now a slide of the famous temple in Petra, Jordan.

Under Jane Glover's incisive conducting, the performance had great musical power; she was particularly alert to the need to find contrast in the frequent repeated sections in the score (as in the famous "Dance of the Blessed Spirits") and found Verdian eloquence in expressive ritardandi, as when the grieving Orpheus lingered over the word "answer" (in the poet Anne Ridler's sensitive new translation). The most memorable point in the production was neither the prevailing mood of grief nor the evocative movements of the nude dancers, but the power of Chance's voice, particularly his emotive singing of the opera's most famous aria, "Che faro senza, Eurydice?" in which the simple eloquence of the melody asserts Gluck's theme of the power of music to charm even the dead. Decked out in unpersuasively tiny wings, Helen Williams sang convincingly as the sympathetic goddess Amor, who twice intervenes on behalf of Orpheus.

As director/choreographer, Clarke's primary sympathies seem to lie with the dancers, which is hardly surprising. But that does not excuse her choice to banish the chorus until they come onstage for the finale. Like a Greek chorus, this opera's chorus needs to be onstage to share the lamentation of Orpheus, and the neglect of the chorus was the production's most glaring weakness. One of the strengths of this company is its historic commitment to opera in English; yet this was one of those unfortunate evenings when relatively little of the sung English was audible. By entrusting the production to Martha Clarke, the English Opera opted for a powerful meditation on grief and recovery, but it did not quite trust Gluck's work, with its great poignance and beauty, to speak for itself.

Byron Nelson
West Virginia University

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