Opera Company's "Orphée et Eurydice' (2nd review)

Love and death are life's two principal businesses. They're intimately related; you might say that one couldn't exist without the other. The Greeks understood this, like most things, as well as anybody, and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is their most lapidary expression of what it is to love and die.

Eurydice is captured by the lords of the underworld—well, it's a fertility sacrifice, but the Greeks were farmers, too— and Orpheus, her musician husband, comes to seek her. The gods consent to this violation of protocol— that is, of the limits of life— but only on condition that the two lovers don't look at each other.

In recent decades, cultural studies have been much preoccupied with the "gaze." We look at each other before we communicate in any other way, and we communicate most fully and immediately through sight. To impose one's gaze is to command, to strip, to demean; to withhold it is, likewise, a sign of contempt, not to say an act of punishment. The first thing that anchors us in the world is the mother's gaze; the last act we perform is to turn to the wall, signifying the rejection of the gaze that is the bond of life.

What will draw Eurydice back to earth is her lover's gaze— the one thing impermissible in the underworld. Thus the gods' prohibition against the gaze of Orpheus isn't arbitrary; it's the barrier between life and death that defines Hades' realm.

What Gluck taught Mozart

The 18th Century was an age of comedy, at least in the fine arts. This suggested that Greek myths serve an ultimately domesticating purpose, not an existential one. Such was the idea behind Ranieri de Calzabigi's libretto for what, in its later and better-known French version, would be Christoph Willibald Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice.

Gluck was the outstanding composer of the mid-18th Century, in the gap between Bach and Handel and the emergence of Haydn and Mozart. This was a fortunate niche, but Gluck was hardly marking time between immortals. He revitalized the conventions of Baroque opera, and created classicism as we know it. Even Mozart is hard to imagine without him: Surely Wolfgang remembered the slashing chords from the scene with the furies in Orphée et Eurydice when he penned the damnation scene in Don Giovanni.

Gluck's underworld is, in Christian terms, a mixture of heaven and hell. The furies who assail Orpheus as he descends into it— clearly a trespasser— are demonic enough, though the Opera Company's black-clad chorus/corps de ballet (more than a few of a certain age, and embonpoint too) could have used more verve.

The same group, now in white, soon returns as the blessed spirits, among whom Eurydice was to be found. In Amanda Miller's choreography, they turned smartly aside at the last moment of approach, exchanging glances without depth and caresses without desire. Among them, Eurydice had learned contentment but almost forgotten pleasure. It was from them that Orpheus had to rescue her.

Head vs. heart

In the crucial fourth act duet, Eurydice begs for Orpheus's gaze as he leads her from the underworld. Her head tells her that Orpheus has braved the powers of death to find her, but her heart asks why her lover keeps his face averted. When she refuses to proceed further, Orpheus must turn to her at last; and in that electric moment, the lovers are condemned.

The Greeks wisely left the matter there, with the distraught Orpheus ultimately to be torn apart by maenads aboveground, a sacrifice himself. In Gluck, however, the gods, satisfied by his prostration and grief— in short, his fidelity— reunite him with Eurydice in a happy ending. Virtue triumphs and, as Orpheus was said to have charmed the beasts with his lyre, so his eroticism is contained in connubial bliss.

Gluck's own music certainly charms, a score perennially delightful and fresh, although the Opera Company's pit musicians are hardly the Met orchestra. Orpheus was originally conceived as a castrato role, and it has been played both by men and women— even a baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Mezzo-soprano Ruxandra Donose, looking a bit like Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria, played and sang feelingly, and Maureen McKay's Eurydice hit all the right notes.

Punk rock gaffe

As the goddess Amor, Elizabeth Reiter was given a punk rocker's wardrobe and attitude, a critical dramatic gaffe (although it amused the audience). Perhaps the gods do make sport of us, as Shakespeare suggested; the Greeks often thought so, too. But they aren't trivial. That Orpheus must avert his gaze isn't an arbitrary handicap, but the recognition of a sacred boundary. Even if, as in Gluck, they relent to affirm the lesser sanctity of the marriage bed, they don't simply jest.

Philippe Amand's bare, angular set was a perfect foil for his lighting effects, which handsomely set off Robert B. Driver's production and underscored its values.

Gluck is far too rarely revived. There may never have been a purer practitioner of the classical form, and it's not only Mozart who is indebted to him, but also Stravinsky. It won't happen except in the ideal theater of the mind, but what a lovely season the whole cycle of Gluck's Greek operas would make.♦


To read another review by AJ Sabatini, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.