Aucoin, Matthew (1990- )

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      The Emails Behind the Opera ‘Eurydice’

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      For several years, the composer Matthew Aucoin corresponded with Sarah Ruhl about how to adapt her play into the Met Opera’s latest premiere.In 2015, the composer Matthew Aucoin emailed the playwright Sarah Ruhl to ask whether she would be interested in working with him on a new opera inspired by the Orpheus myth.Instead they ended up adapting her 2003 play “Eurydice” — a yearning, fanciful treatment of the Orpheus story in which Eurydice is reunited with her dead father in the underworld. The result premiered at Los Angeles Opera in February 2020, and arrives at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday, directed by Mary Zimmerman and conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin.Aucoin and Ruhl wrote to each other for several years about turning the poetry of her play into a libretto, building character through music, and understanding the strengths and limitations of opera. They recently looked back at those messages and discussed them in a joint interview. These are edited excerpts from their correspondence and their present-day reflections.SEPT. 29, 2015, 10:45 A.M.Dear Sarah,Hi — my name’s Matt Aucoin. Your plays “Eurydice” and “The Clean House” recently reduced me to a blubbering awe-struck wreck. And then I happened to read an interview with you in which you said, “Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him.” I thought, “I really want to make a great, horrible opera with this person.”Pardon my forwardness — and my ignorance, for not knowing your work until now! — but I’m overwhelmed by your lucid musicality. I sensed instantly that you’re a poet — not in any highfalutin’ sense, but in a more practical one: It’s clear that you wrote (and write) poetry, and that poetry is a native tongue for you.Oh, about “longing looks back”: I have the same gene as every composer EVER, and I need to write an Orpheus opera.Might you be interested in creating one together?SEPT. 29, 2015, 11:59 A.M.Dear Matt,Thank you so much for the kind words about my plays. I also read an article about you and was struck by a phrase someone wrote about you — language becoming music, and music becoming language. I’m interested in that nexus, too. It’s true I used to write and still dabble in poetry, and it’s true I’d love to collaborate on an opera sometime. I listened to a very small clip of your music on your website and found it quite beautiful; I’d love to listen to more.I feel it might be awkward for me to retread the Orpheus territory from his point of view having already written “Eurydice.” My gut is that I’m more interested in adapting “Eurydice” into a musical piece. But it’s silly for me to make any pronouncements in an email without first talking. So let’s meet and talk.MATTHEW AUCOIN I had a separate Orpheus opera in mind that was entirely different, that was in a way an expansion of my piece “The Orphic Moment” — much darker, much more twisted. It took a meeting or two for me to be like, you know what, adapting “Eurydice” makes more sense. I tried to inject a bunch of my ideas into “Eurydice”; then I felt that the skeleton of the play was so strong that it resisted the foreign energy. So I very quickly decided that we could create a more unified world if we stuck to the play.SARAH RUHL I don’t remember it taking you very long to say, “Yes, let’s do that.” Always you were trying to make Orpheus more complex, since that was your way in. But Eurydice was so present for me as a character, and it wouldn’t make sense to retread the material from his perspective.AUCOIN I think the core of this piece, for me, is: What would you say to someone you lost if you could meet them again in this other space?RUHL It’s myth as container, as vehicle — rather than myth for myth’s sake.OCT. 15, 2015Some thoughts …Opera as magical realism: I think we should indulge our every magical-realist impulse in this piece. I tend to think opera works better when its creators embrace this quality, since it’s probably inescapable: If opera is real, its realism is magical. (It just doesn’t work when people try to house train it or to convince the audience that opera is no weirder or scarier or more surreal than, like, a sitcom.)— MattAUCOIN In opera, all speech is dream speech. That’s a law of nature on Planet Opera. Simply because everything is sung, what’s communicated will tend to have a dreamlike or surreal quality, no matter how much you might want it to sound like “Seinfeld.”RUHL I love what you say about dream speech. I’ve been wanting to write a piece about the idea that art is a dream we have together. When we’re sleeping, we dream alone at night. Art becomes an incredible vehicle in which we can have the same dream at the same time, while awake.APRIL 29, 2016It occurs to me that Orpheus has no parents; his lineage is disputed and totally confusing. I’m sensing that one difference between O + E is that even though Eurydice’s father is dead, she was deeply close to him, whereas Orpheus was always an orphan.We might see him first happily singing to himself, and then expressing his pre-wedding anxieties: He’s torn between his love for Eurydice and his overwhelming need to make music; he’s not sure where he came from; he’s never felt 100 percent human; and he’s unsure if he can give and accept the love he feels so powerfully for Eurydice.— MattAUCOIN I think there are two implied love triangles in the “Eurydice” dramaturgy. Eurydice is torn between her connection to her father and her relationship to Orpheus. And Orpheus is also kind of torn between Eurydice and music itself. I think that’s where the idea of the double [adding a countertenor’s halo of sound to the baritone role] came from.JULY 19, 2016, 7:43 P.M.I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Hades. The main thing, from my perspective, is that he’s a sociopath. He has a total lack of interiority and yet he is alone. Sounds like hell to me. So he feeds off Orpheus and Eurydice, both of whom have (if anything) too much interior life; they’re too likely to withdraw into their own worlds, and he knows that. He’s a parasite who sinks his teeth into Eurydice’s intellect and Orpheus’s music.I think it’s important that Hades’s lines are simple and direct — and emotionally wrong, awkward and unnatural, but in a way that’s unsettling rather than comical. I think the repetitions of “interesting” risk being a little too funny, especially when they’re sung.— MattJULY 19, 2016, 8:51 P.M.Do we care that we somewhat lose his absurdity (“It was delivered to my elegant high-rise apartment by mistake”)? The question about humor is maybe a larger question tonally about the piece. I use humor in the play to deflect and deepen the tragedy — it could be that doesn’t play the same in an operatic piece. I don’t want to totally excise the humor, but in the nasty man it just might not be singable.— SarahJULY 20, 2016, 4:20 P.M.I definitely want to keep the humor!!! I just think Hades needs to be dangerous — dangerously deadpan, at first. Which could be funny in its own right. For me the absurdity emerges when we see his gigantic empty loft. But at first, I’d love him to be eerily nondescript.— MattRUHL I’m so happy that Matt has been able to rhythmicize lines and retain their humor.AUCOIN The challenge with Hades is that it lies at an extreme of the male voice, but he should also sound quite deadpan. The music is absurdly high, but I wanted to create the sense that for him it’s completely normal.RUHL I love this idea that Hades is impersonating a person. And I think it’s wonderful how you figured that out in the singing of it.AUCOIN It’s a matter of rhythm and range. Hades’s music is the exact opposite of proper, correct text setting. When he says “How interesting,” he sings the word “how” on a high D flat for an entire bar. And in certain sections, every syllable is accented in this horrible way. It’s not human.JAN. 31, 2017I think what we are going for is condensing stage time, while distending mythic time … if that makes ANY sense!— SarahRUHL It takes longer to sing than to speak, so everything has to be shorter. But you want the mythic scope of it to still feel big. It’s a bit of a puzzle. How much can you feel like time is moving slowly in the underworld without actually subjecting the audience to a kind of slowness that they don’t want to be subjected to?AUG. 8, 2019FATHEREurydice is gone.This is a second death for me.I wonder about cutting “This is a second death for me.” It’s a little self-pitying. Might be more moving just: “Eurydice is gone. How do you remember to forget?”— SarahAUCOIN This is part of a longer scene where Eurydice’s father remembers the directions to his childhood home. In an early version of the score, he sang those directions very slowly, and it felt totally wrong — like moving through molasses. Sarah, Mary and I all independently came to the conclusion that he had to speak these lines, not sing them. The words carry so much emotion that, unusually for opera, song proved superfluous.RUHL I had the experience in writing the play as well. I had written a soliloquy that I would describe as an operatic soliloquy; it was poeticized and emotional. And it felt all wrong for who he was as a person.AUCOIN I think the shape of the drama is so devastating.RUHL The ending is very sad. I hope it gives people catharsis after this two years of not being able to grieve with others. I’ve watched two funerals on Zoom. It’s hard for me to have a good cry on Zoom; I’m not with other people, and I feel self-conscious with people watching me cry on video. It’s not that I’m inviting people to come and cry at “Eurydice” — but in a way, I am. More

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      in Music

      Juilliard Stages an Orpheus Rarity From Opera’s Early Days

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      For over four centuries, the Orpheus myth has inspired opera composers. One was Luigi Rossi, whose 1647 retelling deserves more attention.What became known as opera originated in Florence, Italy, during late-16th-century equivalents of college dorm bull sessions.At the time, that cultured city was a hotbed of artistic experimentation. A group of composers, poets, singers, intellectuals and royal patrons formed a club for discussions that eventually led to an idea: to create a new hybrid of music and theater in the manner of Greek tragedies, which they believed had been written as sung-through dramas.There was striking consensus about the ideal subject for the first attempts at this art form: the mythological Orpheus whose songs had the power to entrance nature, soothe souls and even conquer death. When his wife, Eurydice, dies from a snake bite right after their wedding, the grief-stricken, resolute Orpheus descends to the underworld, charms Pluto himself, and receives conditional permission to lead Eurydice back to earth and back to life.The earliest surviving opera, by the composer and singer Jacopo Peri, titled “Euridice” after its heroine, was introduced in Florence in 1600. Two years later, Peri’s ruthlessly ambitious rival Giulio Caccini presented his own “Euridice,” purposely employing the same libretto (by Ottavio Rinuccini) and rushing his piece into publication before Peri had a chance. In 1607, Claudio Monteverdi, then working for the Duke of Mantua, presented the first truly great surviving opera, “L’Orfeo.”In the four centuries since that milestone, Orpheus has continued to claim the imaginations of composers. The latest is Matthew Aucoin, whose “Eurydice,” based on the 2003 play by Sarah Ruhl, premiered at the Los Angeles Opera early last year and opens at the Metropolitan Opera on Nov. 23.There are at least 75 known operas offering various takes on the Orpheus myth: later in the 17th century, from Matthew Locke in England, Charpentier and Lully in France and Reinhard Keiser in Germany, then from Telemann, Benda and Haydn in the 1700s. When Gluck decided, in the 1760s, that the time had come to reform and elevate the opera genre, which had become too flashy, what did he come up with? “Orfeo ed Euridice,” naturally.From left, Kevin Ray, Raehann Bryce-Davis and Stacey Tappan in Matthew Aucoin’s “Eurydice” at the Los Angeles Opera. The work opens at the Metropolitan Opera on Nov. 23.Emily Berl for The New York TimesInterest in the myth fell off somewhat during the 19th century. In fact, the great Orpheus work from that era was Offenbach’s delightfully witty and irreverent operetta “Orpheus in the Underworld,” which pokes fun at the obsession. But the subject came roaring back in the 20th century, especially the later decades, with major works by, among others, Hans Werner Henze, Harrison Birtwistle and Philip Glass. It’s extended to Broadway as well, in the musical “Hadestown.”Only a handful of Orpheus operas have entered the active repertoire. Among the overlooked works is Luigi Rossi’s “L’Orfeo,” which premiered in Paris in 1647, and is now receiving a splendidly performed and inventively staged production by Juilliard Opera and Juilliard415, the school’s early music ensemble, at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater.Rossi, who had enjoyed a thriving, if tumultuous career in Rome, relocated to Paris, where, under the sponsorship of Cardinal Mazarin, he was tasked with introducing French audiences to Italian opera. The result was his near-epic take on the Orpheus myth, presented in a reportedly spectacular production.In line with common practices of Baroque opera, the conductor Avi Stein, who drew spirited and stylish playing from a 16-piece ensemble, consulting with the director, Mary Birnbaum, trimmed and adapted Rossi’s score for the Juilliard production. The work’s more than two dozen characters were reduced here to a cast of 14 excellent young singers, some taking two or three roles. The original prologue and epilogue, allegorical paeans to the young Louis XIV, were replaced with shorter vocal pieces from Rossi’s catalog. With the score cut by about a third, the running time offered some two hours of engaging, often splendidly beautiful music.In this version of the tale, Orfeo and Euridice become pawns in the hands of capricious godly and allegorical characters: Venus and Amore, Pluto and Proserpina and personifications of Jealousy and Suspicion. There is also Augure, a diviner who can sense the future, and from the start the omens look forbidding for the newlyweds.Richard Pittsinger, left, as Orfeo and Roset as Euridice in the Juilliard production.Rosalie O’ConnorStill, their essential love, despite threats from outside and their own doubts and insecurities, come through beautifully thanks to the winning singing and youthful bearing of the tenor Richard Pittsinger as Orfeo and the soprano Julie Roset as Euridice. In this telling, Orfeo has a rival, Aristeo (the charismatic mezzo-soprano Xenia Puskarz Thomas), who has been struck by Cupid and desperately fallen in love with Euridice. In a bold interpretive touch, this production presents Aristeo as a woman. That tweak, as executed here, was no glib nod to sexual politics, but an intriguing reading of the erotic confusions that swirl within the characters and throughout this entire opera.Although the story unfolds in stretches of melodically enhanced recitative, Rossi’s score is unusually rich with vocal duets, trios and ensembles, arias and choruses with catchy tunes, orchestral ritornellos and dances galore (charming choreographic gestures by Jeffrey Page). Why is this wonderful opera not presented more often?Aucoin’s “Eurydice” — like Ruhl’s play, which she adapted into the opera’s libretto — tells the myth from the woman’s perspective. And in this fantastical modern-day version, there are tensions between the couple from the start. Eurydice loves Orpheus but gets impatient with his self-absorbed fixation on music. He doesn’t share her passion for books and words. In an intriguing nod to mythology, Orpheus is presented as two characters: an everyday guy and a spirit double who appears when the young man’s questing nature comes to the fore.When Eurydice dies, she embarks on a soul-searching journey in the underworld. That might seem like a leap from the original myth. But it is actually a crisis that many Orpheus adaptations have plumbed — especially, to my surprise and delight, the one by Rossi.L’OrfeoThrough Sunday at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; juilliard.edu. More