Recently, I went to see Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice at the War Memorial Opera House. I deliberately did not read the program and therefore was surprised at how different from other conceptions of the Orpheus myth this performance was. Although program notes are often useful, particularly for stories with which I am less familiar, I believed that the Orpheus myth was familiar enough to not require extra reading.
The first conspicuous element was the balletic component. Out of opera, symphony, and ballet, ballet is easily my least favorite, but here the ballet was well integrated into the music. This brings me to the second element - the repetition. Opera, by its nature, involves much repetition of themes and phrases, but this opera seemed to almost have a surfeit of repetition worthy of a Jesuit education. The first and second elements, however, worked together to create an effective impression of something as ineffable as the singing of the greatest singer who ever lived, whose song entranced implacable chthonic beings; such hyperbole is far easier to write than to render visually,
The third element was the excellent use of color. Orpheus' vived red contrasted with the blacks and greys of the infernal denizens and the yelloe of Love. The shifting colors of the area currently spotlighted enhanced the music and the movement of the performers. I found it a great aid to my deficit of knowledge of reading ballet.
The fourth element was the change in the Orpheus myth from the "canon" (although any casual dive into Orphic texts suggests "anti-canon" might be a better term). The absence of Hades and Persephone was initially jarring/ The inclusion of Love as the divine character marked this as a version more focused on the internal components of the myth than the external. It also provided Orpheus with an ally and advisor, something which was lacking from the more "traditional" version, which I suppose is therefore an externalization of the usually internal components. The potentially successful rescue of Eurydice reminded me of Alcestis, but Eurydice's reluctance to return from the Shadowlands was reminiscent of Izanami and Izanagi; the tale of a bereft husband seeking his departed wife is as least as old as a migration into the Americas. Thus the reduction of the myth to a man, a woman, and their love might be more faithful than a more numerous cast.
