A Greek Hero With Many Faces
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It is little wonder that composers and librettists have been drawn to Orpheus. The Greek hero, who could charm the wild beasts with his playing on the lyre and whose spirited strumming saved Jason and the Argonauts from the toxic songs of the Sirens, is the mythical master of both poetry and music. Besides, the story of his pursuit of his dead wife Eurydice across the Styx to bring her back to life is packed with a suitably operatic mix of romance and drama.
Just how differently Orpheus has been portrayed is the theme of this year’s Glimmerglass Opera festival in Cooperstown, where four varied accounts are on display. Lillian Groag has taken Gluck’s 1762 “Orphée et Eurydice” in Berlioz’s 1859 spare version, which sheds the many extraneous musical accretions by Handel, J.C. Bach, and Sacchini that were added by producers in the intervening century. The archaeological set, by John Conklin, follows Berlioz’s lead, with Palladian columns and pediments as if observed by Piranesi, and sets the pace for a near flawless rendition, both elegant and straightforward.
From the opening, where Eurydice, sung by Amanda Pabyan, is struck dead by an asp while dancing, the production takes a laudably conventional straight route. Michael Maniaci’s steady Orpheus is a lovelorn widower in search of his dead spouse, taking careful steps between a deranged chorus in purgatory before reaching a fiery hell. The rescue goes wrong, as the myth dictates, but all is well in the end as L’Amour (Brenda Rae), with angelic wings, provides a Hollywood ending, reuniting the lovers and saving Orpheus from what the myth demands: recourse to a life of pederasty.
A strict neoclassical approach might have tempted Christopher Alden in his account of Monteverdi’s 1607 “L’Orfeo,” but, to the consternation of many of Glimmerglass’s more conventional patrons, he chooses instead to place the action in a Michelangelo Antonioni world, where louche young modern-day partygoers drape themselves around on sofas and armchairs as if high on drugs. Paul Steinberg’s minimal set conjures up a subterranean loft with enormous wood-clad concrete beams holding at bay the conventional world, a form of hell on earth.
If some of the audience finds what they see hard to swallow, they need only shut their eyes to immerse themselves in the sumptuous music and memorable singing, in particular the soft, seductive voice of Michael Slattery as Orfeo. From the start, Orfeo plays sexual games with his Eurydice, forcing her against a wall and penetrating her behind a sofa. When she dies, she is chained to the same wall with duct tape, pinned like a butterfly, as her husband mellifluously pines, barely separated from her in hell by a flimsy length of tape, like a police line.
In this production, it is Mr. Slattery as Orfeo whose desperate plight engages the emotions, and in his anguished, sensual singing, pumping away with his feet to Monteverdi’s plaintive beat, he sets the tone for a dazzling, daring production that will linger in the memory. Mr. Alden shows what can be done to meld the ancient and the modern in the sort of fresh, youthful production that provides a welcome and overdue antidote to the tired and workaday ideas of traditional opera directors.
If Mr. Slattery brings the spirit of Antonioni to the Glimmerglass stage, Sam Helfrich is obliged take into account Jean Cocteau’s 1949 film “Orphée,” whose screenplay in French provides the libretto for Philip Glass’s 1993 opera of the same name. Philip Cutlip’s Orphée is a French poet, spurned by the fashionable set for being too popular, who must follow his mundane wife (Caroline Worra) through a looking glass to hell to effect her rescue. The tangled plot involves murders by a motor accident commissioned by a jealous aristocratic patroness (Lisa Saffer), helmeted biker assassins, bent policemen, a diabolical kangaroo court, a compliant reporter, and much else, including at least one visual joke: A passing glazier, who comes to restore the broken mirror, wears a coat dubbed “Philip’s Glass.”
The result is the unlikely hit of the Glimmerglass season, endlessly gripping and musically involving. Designer Andrew Lieberman drops the height of the proscenium, making the opera appear to be in CinemaScope, and, combined with the modern French interiors, invokingthemurderousworld of Claude Chabrol. The anxious soundtrack provided by Mr. Glass’s repetitive, insistent score, however, also evokes the stabbing strings of Bernard Herrmann against which Alfred Hitchcock set his studies in high-class homicide.
The mandatory popular opera of this summer’s quartet is Offenbach’s “Orpheus in the Underworld,” whose music, particularly what has become known as “The Can-Can,” will be familiar to most.
Offenbach’s twist was to have Eurydice all too keen to abandon her tedious musical husband for the more exciting delights of hell. Here, the libretto, by Ludovic Halévy and Hector Crémieux, is in English, which might have offered the chance to rework the 1858 French jokes into something approaching humor. Alas, there is little lightness of spirit in Eric Einhorn’s leaden, lumbering production, which too often relies upon attempts to shock rather than wit to speed the action. Perhaps 30 years ago the sight of a leather clad dominatrix or a Lolita tart would provoke an embarrassed titter; not so today.
