Orpheus & Eurydice
Music by Christoph Willibald Gluck
Seattle Opera's Tagney Jones Hall
January 12, 2022 online
Seattle Opera presented a shortened version of Christoph Willibald Gluck's opera Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) in the intimate Tagney Jones Hall for those lucky enough to see the sold-out performances in January, and streamed it for the rest of us to watch at home in February.
The cast for the streamed performance, led by Christopher Ainslie as Orpheus, Ariana Wehr as Eurydice, and Sharleen Joynt as Amore, was excellent. They were supported by three dancers, a small chorus, and ten members of the Seattle Symphony, conducted by Stephen Stubbs, the director of Pacific Music Works and a famous early music scholar and musician. The orchestra sat alongside the stage in view of the audience — a very appropriate visual presence for an opera about the power of music.
The myth of Orpheus, son of Apollo and demigod of music, has been made into more than 70 operas over the last five centuries, but Gluck's remains the most popular. When Orpheus's wife, Eurydice, dies from snakebite on their wedding day, he falls into such despair that he wants to kill himself and join her in the underworld. Amore, the god of love, appears and offers him a chance to bring Eurydice back from the underworld — as long as he doesn't look at her until they've returned to the light.
Orpheus uses his music to charm the demons and spirits into allowing him to passage to the underworld, but when he finds Eurydice, she insists that he look at her. He succumbs, and she dies. In Gluck's opera, and many other versions of the myth, Amore returns and revives Eurydice after all, in a gesture called the Triumph of Love. This production, however, has left out the conclusion as written, eliminating a good deal of beautiful music and leaving the viewer with an unresolved ending.
Ainslie, a countertenor with a virile, powerful voice, sang Orpheus with conviction and understated elegance. Joynt, as the playful Amore, used her confident soprano and a charming stage presence to move Orpheus from despair to hope. I was sorry that the truncated ending of this production deprived Joynt of one of her biggest moments.
Wehr's Eurydice had little to do in the first part of the opera (since Eurydice is already dead), and in most productions of this work Eurydice doesn't even appear until Act 2. But Director Chía Patiño had the problematic idea of inserting a dream sequence into the middle of the opening funeral cortege, in which Eurydice rises from her bier and dances a tango with Orpheus. Not only was the tango a jarring anachronism, but Wehr was made to dance in spike heels and an overdone dress you might see at an Elvis wedding in Las Vegas. Wehr has a truly delightful smile, but it was the wrong time and the wrong place to look ecstatic, and Orpheus was unconvincing as he tried to execute tango moves to funereal music. That misstep was redeemed later, however, when Wehr sang her big aria in the underworld with power and passion.
One of the most successful aspects of this production was the lighting design by Robert Aguilar and video projection design by S Katy Tucker. In a small area with no fly space, the illusions, made possible by lights and projected images, created a strange and weirdly beautiful underworld. Donald Byrd's choreography was equally effective, making three dancers represent an entire army of gyrating otherness. Liesel Alice Gatcheco's costumes for the three dancers, with their serpentine sleeves, were powerful embodiments of desperation.
I was moved and fascinated by this production almost to the end — except there was no end that resembled an actual conclusion. I was startled when Orpheus just walked out of the underworld, saying, in effect, "See you later," and then the cast entered the stage to take their bows. It was very abrupt in terms of the action, and a big letdown in terms of the plot, to find out that love doesn't triumph over death after all.
I guess it's the pandemic ending, or the cynical 21st-century ending. At any rate, I still think that love triumphs over death — and that music, as Shakespeare says in Twelfth Night, is the food of love.