Eurydice (Opera)

Subterms

    Latest story

    88 Shares189 Views

    Love, Trust and Heartbreak on Two Stages

    by

    The musical “Hadestown” and the opera “Eurydice” aim to offer new twists on a Greek myth. But when it comes to their heroine, they only go so far.When Orpheus turned around to look at Eurydice during the closing performance of Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice” at the Metropolitan Opera, the audience’s collective gasp seemed to shake the grand theater. I recalled another time I heard such a gasp: from the character of Eurydice near the end of “Doubt Comes In,” a song in the Broadway musical “Hadestown.” Then, too, the audience gasped along with her.A lifelong classics nerd, I was surprised both times by the reaction: Does the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice really require a spoiler alert?The myth has been kicking around for over two millenniums, after all. Orpheus, the greatest musician of all, marries Eurydice, who dies when she’s bitten by a snake on their wedding day. He descends to the underworld, where the god of the dead offers him another chance at love: He can leave with Eurydice, but only if he walks ahead and never turns around. Here’s that spoiler: Orpheus looks, and Eurydice is damned to Hades forever.For such an old — and short — story, the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is still frequently told and adapted, much like that of another famous ill-fated couple, Romeo and Juliet. Operatic renditions by Monteverdi and others date back to the early 1600s. Renowned filmmakers like Jean Cocteau created their own narratives in the 20th century.In 1922, Rainer Maria Rilke used the tragic story as a launchpad for his deeply ruminative 55-poem cycle “Sonnets to Orpheus.” Countless other poets have followed suit, many revising the myth to give its sad dead wife a voice — perhaps in a contemporary vernacular, as in Carol Ann Duffy’s “Eurydice,” or in the measured verse and elevated diction of A.E. Stallings’ “Eurydice’s Footnote.”And of course there’s Ruhl herself, who created a revisionist mythology in her 2003 play “Eurydice,” which she adopted into the opera’s libretto.Modern-day adaptations like “Hadestown” and “Eurydice” reveal more than just the imaginations of their creators; they reflect a gender politics that gets to the core of how men and women are mythologized, who has agency and whose stories are most valued.Morley, as Eurydice, surrounded by the dead.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLet’s face it: Orpheus has always been the star of the myth. Eurydice is simply the young bride. She has no background and no future; she only serves as the vehicle of tragedy for Orpheus.Both “Hadestown” and “Eurydice” interrogate that starring role. In both, Orpheus remains a genius musician who, though in love with Eurydice, is preoccupied with his art above all. Her death is a touch of bad luck — you never know when a venomous snake will slither underfoot on your wedding day. But both adaptations draw a line of causality from Orpheus’s behavior to Eurydice’s death.Perhaps, the productions suggest, Orpheus was the original slacker musician boyfriend, so concerned with his next big hit that he neglected the love who inspired his best work. But Eurydice doesn’t merely get dragged down into the underworld; in both versions she’s tempted by the offer of something she wants.In Aucoin and Ruhl’s “Eurydice,” the new bride wanders off from her own wedding party. She’s bored and missing her dead father, who has been secretly trying to write to his beloved daughter from the underworld. In comes Hades, the ruler of that realm, as sleazy as a back-alley hustler, to manipulate her grief; he baits her with one of her father’s letters.In Anais Mitchell’s “Hadestown,” the seduction is twofold: financial and sexual. Orpheus and Eurydice are trapped in some otherworldly version of the Depression era. In the lurid “Hey, Little Songbird,” Hades draws in Eurydice with promises of security and comfort, while undermining Orpheus, mocking him as a starving artist: “He’s some kind of poet and he’s penniless?/Give him your hand, he’ll give you his hand-to-mouth./He’ll write you a poem when the power’s out.”But the pressure goes further; in Patrick Page’s beguiling performance, Hades is explicitly predatory, exploiting Eurydice’s feelings of displacement and neglect in her relationship.That each of the two Eurydices actively makes a choice, as opposed to being passively buffeted by fate, is telling. But the result in both cases is still tragic.Whether it’s via a gradual transformation, as in “Hadestown,” or an abrupt change, as in “Eurydice,” our heroine loses her sense of self. In the underworld of “Hadestown,” Eurydice joins Hades’s army of souls, forgetting her identity like the deceased around her. Her counterpart in “Eurydice” also forgets Orpheus, her own name and even how to read; she meets her dead father but is unable to recognize him at first.Reeve Carney, foreground center, and Eva Noblezada, far right, as Orpheus and Eurydice in the Broadway musical “Hadestown.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI’ve already told you the spoiler, that the myth ends in death. Opera has an easier time going there; it’s difficult for a musical to pull off a somber ending — the upbeat finale that practically demands a standing ovation feels so much more typical for the form.And yet “Hadestown” bravely, if self-consciously, resolves that way, announcing that the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is an “old song” and “a sad song, but we sing it anyway.”“Eurydice” commits more explosively to woe in its stellar third act, after two acts of tedious exposition. Orpheus, Eurydice and Eurydice’s father all end up in the underworld together, but they find no peace. Eurydice’s father, having lost all hope of reuniting with his daughter after her husband arrives to save her, takes another dip into the Styx, causing him to die a final death. Eurydice, having lost both her husband and father twice, follows her father into oblivion.So the grand tragedy of the piece isn’t contingent on Orpheus’s inconvenient rubbernecking and the implications about trust (though that’s in there too); it’s the ways death has riven these relationships. In trying to outmaneuver their mortality and reconnect with one another, Orpheus, Eurydice and Eurydice’s father each arrive at an oblivion more desolate and lonely than what they’d known before.For all I appreciate about the way both productions offer Eurydice more agency, I do think they give her short shrift.“Hadestown” sticks to the plot of the classic, with some twists and embellishments. But in performance, the musical positions her as the more interesting half of the couple. As played by Eva Noblezada, she is a plucky, streetwise heroine — “no stranger to the world,” as one lyric goes. She may love a juvenile dreamer lost in his own head (Reeve Carney, with a beardless falsetto). But she’s practical; she’ll do what it takes to survive in a world of gross inequality, where Hades is an industrial fat cat and artists and workers are largely servile. If her death becomes the focal point over her character, that may be more the myth’s fault than the musical’s.“Eurydice” allows its heroine the power to decide: head back with her husband, or remain in the underworld with her father. She chooses to call to Orpheus — in effect separating from him and reuniting with her father.But even with this often intriguing revision, the opera still defines Eurydice solely by her relationship to men. Take the scene of their marriage proposal: Orpheus slyly ties a red string around Eurydice’s ring finger, and suggests using her to create his art — quite literally, making an instrument from the strands of her hair. She laments her father’s absence at the wedding itself, because, she claims, she was married to her father first. She doesn’t seem to exist outside of these men.When Eurydice dies the second time, vanishing without a trace, it’s as though she’s a figment of Orpheus’s imagination, more an archetype than anything else — the ill-fated lover, the tragic dead wife, another muse.Still gone at the turn of a head. More

    More stories

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      ‘I Savor Everything’: A Soprano’s Star Turn at the Met Opera

      by

      Erin Morley, a fixture at the Met for over a decade, is now singing the title role in “Eurydice.”The soprano Erin Morley is no stranger to the Metropolitan Opera, where she has been a fixture for over a decade. But until now she has never been the face of the company.That changed in recent weeks, as her likeness — blown up to the size of buses and billboards — has promoted her star turn in “Eurydice,” which had its Met premiere on Tuesday.“I feel like I’ll never get used to seeing my face on a billboard,” Morley, 41, said in an interview on Wednesday morning. “It’s definitely been strange to walk by it every day on my way to rehearsal.”Morley sings the title role in the opera, composed by Matthew Aucoin and with a libretto by Sarah Ruhl based on her 2003 play. Eurydice is the heart of this retelling of the classic myth, which premiered at Los Angeles Opera in early 2020. In Ruhl’s conception, she is reunited with her dead father in the underworld and feels ambivalent (at best) about her relationship with history’s greatest musician; she contends with those uncertain feelings in the work’s most substantial aria, “This is what it is to love an artist.”Morley descending to the underworld in a rainy elevator in Mary Zimmerman’s production of “Eurydice.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPeter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, referred to that aria during a speech at the party that followed the premiere. Introducing the cast with generous superlatives, he said: “She’s singing ‘what it means to love an artist.’ But we are learning what it means to love her, the incomparable Erin Morley.”Since her 2008 Met debut, in the anonymous role of a madrigalist in Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut,” Morley has become a scene stealer — comical and absolutely precise in the musical stratosphere as Olympia in Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann”; alluring even while singing offstage as the Forest Bird in Wagner’s “Siegfried”; and a full-bodied lyrical force holding her own alongside Renée Fleming and Elina Garanca as Sophie in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier.” For the Met’s livestreamed At-Home Gala early in the pandemic, she memorably accompanied herself on piano in the bel canto showpiece “Chacun le sait,” from Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment.”In an interview, Gelb said that the Met has “a big stake” in her future. Within the next four seasons, she will sing eight different roles, including Pamina in a new staging of Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” and a leading part in a Baroque pastiche the company is developing.Just before the show started on opening night, Morley and some dancers practiced a lift.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesWaiting backstage for her cue to enter.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesMorley and Nathan Berg, who plays Eurydice’s father, visible on monitors backstage.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesWith Orpheus (Joshua Hopkins, far right) and his double (Jakub Jozef Orlinski) in the background, Eurydice reclines in the beach scene that opens the opera.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesBut first “Eurydice,” which continues at the Met through Dec. 16 and will be broadcast in cinemas on Dec. 4. Still riding the high of opening night, she spoke about preparing for the role, weathering the pandemic and returning to the Met. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.What has your relationship with contemporary opera been?I did a lot of new music when I was in college. I had a lot of composer friends and loved learning their stuff. Since then I’ve done contemporary music but not premieres, and certainly not an opera premiere. A lot of my colleagues have done more new opera than I have. I’ve seen their experience, and how much it fuels them, and I didn’t really get it until now. This is the most exciting thing I’ve ever been a part of.How did the pressure of something new differ from the standard repertory?Both situations have a certain amount of gravity to them. But with this, I felt a sort of responsibility: I’m the first to bring this to the Met, and I’m offering a sort of baseline for people to look at for the years to come.Obviously, there are huge challenges in learning a new piece because there’s no reference for it, and it takes exponentially more time. The first time I talked with Matt was two and a half years ago. He writes very mathematical rhythms. I’ve never had my musicianship so thoroughly questioned; there were days when I felt like I spent 20 minutes on two measures. Part of that is that he writes with the intent of achieving some sort of natural speech rhythms. It comes out sounding quite nice, but it’s time-consuming.Morley has her costume and makeup touched up backstage by Marian Torre, left, and Riyo Mitsui.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesA fixture at the Met since 2008, she is taking on a title role there for the first time.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesShe reenters the stage from below, her feet painted a sooty black.Kirsten Luce for The New York Times“There are huge challenges in learning a new piece,” she said, “because there’s no reference for it.”Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesYou’ve been singing with the Met for a while, but how does it feel to be on posters and playbills?I started with the Met in their young artist program. Coming out of that, it’s a hard bridge to fully fledged professional, and the Met offered me a lot of those bridges. It’s kind of beautiful and satisfying to take your audience on a journey with you, and know that the people who saw me in “Eurydice” also saw me in “Manon Lescaut.”Seeing the billboards, I feel a certain responsibility to carry the show, to bring people into the theater and celebrate this moment that the Met is having. Sometimes that’s a lot to take on. But it really fueled me put that much more energy into it.A real highlight of the Met’s At-Home Gala was you accompanying yourself.It was satisfying and beautiful to be able to revisit my identity as a pianist. I was an accompanist for quite a while, and I didn’t realized how much I’d missed that. It was, however, dissatisfying to not be collaborating with anyone. It was extremely exciting to watch and be a part of that experience, but it was so sad to just be alone.We were all so nervous that day. My husband took our kids to the park when I went on, because there was nowhere to go. They came back after I finished, and my daughter said, “Mom, you missed a note.” Which I had.Morley takes in the applause at her curtain call after the show.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesEmbracing a castmate after the curtain fell, with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, at left.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesBut you seemed so carefree, not nervous at all. And you landed that — what is the high note in “Chacun le sait”?It’s a high F at the end. This is why I’m a performer. I respond to adrenaline pretty well. I was really high on nerves that day. And I had missed that. I missed adrenaline so much during the pandemic that I went skydiving. I remember feeling after it was over: It was the exact same experience as having a performance onstage at the Met.What was it like returning, finally, to the Met?About a year ago I did a photo shoot in the Met for Town & Country with Angel Blue, Isabel Leonard and Peter. And it was totally eerie to be in the building with all the lights off and nobody there. It was just so profoundly depressing.Then coming into the house for my first “Eurydice” rehearsal — it was almost too much for my heart to hold. It was a beautiful reunion, but it was also tinged with a little sadness because we’ve all been through so much. Everybody seems changed; I give 10 percent, 20 percent more to my projects now because I just don’t know if I’m ever going to have it again. It was so hard to lose it during the pandemic, that I savor everything so much more now. More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Review: The Met Opera’s ‘Eurydice’ Tries to Raise the Dead

      by

      The composer Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s teeming, wearying adaptation of her play is a contemporary vision of the Orpheus myth.What does it sound like when you’re dead?“There are strange high-pitched noises,” a character in Sarah Ruhl’s play “Eurydice” writes to his daughter, who is still in the land of the living, “like a teakettle always boiling over.”Slippery, curdling tones, as if you were hearing sour milk being poured, score our first visit to the underworld in Ruhl and the composer Matthew Aucoin’s teeming, wearying adaptation of the 2003 play, which had its Metropolitan Opera premiere on Tuesday.Ruhl and Aucoin’s ambition, to offer a contemporary vision of the story of Orpheus and his attempt to rescue his wife from oblivion, resonates to the very origins of this art form. Jacopo Peri’s “Euridice,” from 1600, is the earliest surviving opera, and Claudio Monteverdi’s “Orfeo,” written a few years later, is the earliest still regularly performed. Orpheus operas clutter the next four centuries; Luigi Rossi’s gorgeous 1647 version had a rare production at the Juilliard School earlier this month.In Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s opera, the recently dead are overseen by three stones (from left, Chad Shelton, Ronnita Miller and Stacey Tappan).Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt’s not surprising that a tale about the greatest musician in history, a man who could make the very stones weep when he performed, keeps appealing to his descendants. The scenario offers composers a wedding party, a tragic death, an evocation of what lies beyond, an attempt at resurrection, a plangent lament — opportunities to shine, and to place themselves in a grand tradition.Aucoin, 31, doesn’t shy from taking on this lineage. His score is massive and assertive, but agile; it keeps moving, endlessly eclectic, but unified by a muscular grip on the pace, and played with tireless vitality by the Met Orchestra under the company’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.The sheer scale of Aucoin’s music is luxurious, but it never luxuriates for long, always rushing on to the next, different thing — as if, for all its splendor, it was afraid of losing our attention. A pummeling restlessness that evokes John Adams shares the manuscript with softly glistening bells; a riff on elevator-music bossa nova, with batteries of raucous percussion.The dancing at Orpheus and Eurydice’s wedding, a hint of pop music glimpsed through ominous shadows, is a little jewel. Hades, the god of the underworld who tempts her to her destruction, is a screechingly high tenor (here Barry Banks, relishing the extremity).Morley, with Hopkins, is the focus far more than in most operas about the Orpheus myth.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOrpheus (the baritone Joshua Hopkins) has a double (the countertenor Jakub Jozef Orlinski, in his Met debut). Down in hell, the recently dead are overseen by a trio of those weeping stones (Ronnita Miller, Chad Shelton and Stacey Tappan, all vivid). Unlike in most Orpheus operas, the main aria here goes to Eurydice (the soprano Erin Morley), gently bemoaning the pain of loving an artist: “Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.” Near the end, an effusion of Puccinian warmth yields to yet more punchy percussion, then a fanfaring pastiche of the Handelian Baroque before the work’s grimly quiet conclusion. A chorus chants offstage.It’s all a lot; it can feel like too much. Plain-spoken yet poetic, Ruhl’s play is the kind in which a scene is devoted simply to Eurydice’s father creating a room for her out of string — about the most heartbreakingly delicate act you can imagine. But Aucoin gives the sequence an orchestral accompaniment of Wagnerian grandeur, rising to a pitched climax, as if the father had just built Valhalla.And not long before that passage comes a similarly jarring instrumental interlude with the bruising intensity of something out of Berg’s “Wozzeck.” Later, as Orpheus emerges from the underworld — instructed, sigh, not to look back at his wife, who’s following him — a cacophony of drumming and brass makes the moment feel less appropriately dramatic than simply bullied.Opera feeds on too-muchness, of course, and the Orpheus myth is life-or-death stuff, not undeserving of big, fervent music. But given Ruhl’s winsome treatment, the resulting sensation is of Aucoin’s music swamping the story, rather than guiding and being guided by it. You take in the plot, but feel too overwhelmed to feel.A surfeit of scoring was also a problem in Aucoin’s last opera, the turgid “Crossing” (2015), about Walt Whitman during the Civil War. He wrote that libretto; thanks to Ruhl’s lucidity, “Eurydice,” first heard in February 2020 at Los Angeles Opera, is a clearer, stronger work. Her play, written a few years after her father’s death, added a twist, grafting onto the traditional myth a story about a parent and child grieving their distance.Hades (Barry Banks, relishing the part’s screechingly high tenor range) tempts Eurydice to her doom.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis structure puts much more focus than usual on Eurydice, the conjunction of these romantic and familial strands. But at the Met there is a misty blank at the center of the work: Morley, in a role that dominates the music and action, has a voice that is poised and precise — and so slender as to be almost inaudible for much of the opera. (Aucoin’s dense scoring doesn’t help, but she has problems being heard even in transparent moments.) There are artists with small instruments that nevertheless penetrate the vast Met; Morley’s does only in its highest notes.As a result, we never feel sufficiently compelled by her; it’s a reminder that the emotional impact of operatic characters emerges from singers’ vocal presences. It is easy to like this Eurydice, her presence sweet yet unsentimental, but it is hard to care about her as much as we must. Her love for Orpheus, her recognition of her father (the sober bass-baritone Nathan Berg), her fear and her maturation — we know these things are happening, but none of them really come to life.Aucoin and Ruhl have interpolated some unnecessary cuteness into a play already tipping toward twee. At the gates of hell, the stones instruct Orpheus not to sing there “unless you sing in a dead language” — so Hopkins and Orlinski duly start intoning Latin, in a parody of medieval plainchant.The countertenor double feels like the kind of idea that gets embraced at a brainstorming session. It’s true, the sound of Orlinski’s luminous voice making a halo around Hopkins’s robust lower lines can be quite pretty.But it’s a muddle figuring out what the double is doing onstage, particularly in Mary Zimmerman’s production, which gives him tiny angel wings but also has him often appear shirtless and brooding. Is he Orpheus’s trainer? His id? His creative side? A clever musical effect ends up clogging the drama. (Coincidentally, Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the Met’s season, also included a baritone’s high-pitched double, but with clearer dramaturgy: a boy soprano representing the main character’s younger self.)Zimmerman’s blandly fantastical “Eurydice” staging efficiently depicts the action — the elevator down to hell; the shower that makes the dead forget their lives; the looming, pocked walls of the underworld — but lacks magic and sparkle. (The stones, monumentally caked gray beings, are charming; Ana Kuzmanic is the costume designer.) One relief: The text is projected as it’s sung onto Daniel Ostling’s set, letting the audience focus fully on the action.“Eurydice” is most moving as a symbol of a shift in the Met’s artistic priorities. If you had said just a few years ago that the company’s music director would be conducting two recent American operas — this and “Fire” — in two months, no one would have believed you. Pandemic reshuffling made that happen, but Nézet-Séguin said in a recent interview that the past year and a half has left him newly committed to maintaining that pace and personally leading a pair of contemporary works each season.Brett Dean and Matthew Jocelyn’s eerie 2017 adaptation of “Hamlet” arrives in the spring. Premieres by Kevin Puts, Missy Mazzoli, Mason Bates, Jeanine Tesori and others are on the horizon, as are overlooked works of the past few decades, like Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.”What a time to be on this side of the underworld.EurydiceThrough Dec. 16 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in Theater

      The Emails Behind the Opera ‘Eurydice’

      by

      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

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Yannick Nézet-Séguin Is Now New York’s Conductor

      by

      After facing anger during a prolonged labor dispute, the Met Opera’s music director has returned to the podium, emphasizing new work.The set for “Porgy and Bess” had been pushed to the back of the Metropolitan Opera’s stage on a recent Wednesday morning, and in front, lines of chairs and music stands had been set up. The company’s orchestra and chorus were coming together for the first time with the cast of “Eurydice” — a recent adaptation of Sarah Ruhl’s wistful play, with music by Matthew Aucoin — to run through the score in what’s known as a sitzprobe.Inside the vast and almost empty Met auditorium, Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, typed on his laptop near the back of the theater. Ruhl was in the house; Mary Zimmerman, the director of the production, which opens on Tuesday, watched, too. Aucoin dashed around, listening for balances.At breaks, he rushed down the aisle to the pit to confer with the leader of any sitzprobe: the conductor. Here that was Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, who offered the ensemble bits of counsel, sometimes asking for delicacy and transparency (“more French in approach”), sometimes for lyricism (“violas and cellos, you could sing a bit more”).The orchestra flew through one breathless passage in the second act, making a gallop to the final burst. “Ecstatic and chaotic,” said Nézet-Séguin, 46, smiling from the podium. “Is this something we can do?”With the New York Philharmonic’s director a newly declared lame duck, Nézet-Séguin is entering an era as the city’s presiding conductor, the one whose artistic achievements blur into civic stature.Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesChaos has lately dominated: The pandemic shut the Met for a year and a half. During much of that period, its unionized employees — including orchestra musicians and choristers — were furloughed without pay as a stalemate over compensation cuts dragged on.But the response to the company’s return has been ecstatic. And at the center of it all — short and muscular, with close-cropped, bleached-blond hair and a taste for rehearsal athleisure — is Nézet-Séguin. Omnipresent and energetic, he has been one of the central figures in New York’s cultural re-emergence, and certainly the city’s most significant and visible classical musician at a transformative moment.Over Labor Day weekend, shortly after the Met reached a deal with its unions, he conducted Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony — the first notes the company had played together since March 2020 — in front of thousands outside the opera house. Audiences soon returned inside the theater to hear him lead a nationally telecast performance of Verdi’s Requiem, for the 20th anniversary of Sept. 11.Later that month, he began the Met’s season in earnest at the podium for Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” from 2019, the company’s first work by a Black composer. Nine days after that, he reopened Carnegie Hall with the Philadelphia Orchestra, of which he is also the music director, in the first of an astonishing nine dates for him at Carnegie this season. With the New York Philharmonic’s director, Jaap van Zweden, a newly declared lame duck, Nézet-Séguin is entering an era as the city’s presiding conductor, the one whose artistic achievements blur into civic stature.At the Met, he works from the ground-floor office once occupied by James Levine, who ruled the company for decades before being brought down by illness and allegations of sexual misconduct. Those troubles led Nézet-Séguin to ascend to the music directorship in 2018, two years ahead of schedule. Levine — who rarely led contemporary operas, let alone two in two months — died in March.When the Met’s unionized workforce was furloughed during the pandemic, some employees were angry that Nézet-Séguin was not earlier and louder in support.Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesThere has been a major change to the office. At the start of a recent interview there, Nézet-Séguin mimed tearing down a set of bookshelves that had blocked the view of Damrosch Park.“It feels symbolic,” he said. “It is to me. It’s about windows open and the fresh air of our repertoire and approach.”Despite the bright new light and the celebratory spirit of the past month and a half, the pandemic has been a dark period for Nézet-Séguin. During labor struggles, a music director’s position — closely connected to the players, but at the same time part of the administration — is intensely uncomfortable. There were musicians angry that Nézet-Séguin, who did not comment publicly on the negotiations until March, just after the orchestra agreed to begin accepting partial pay, was not earlier and louder in support.“It is a position that is unenviable,” Gelb said in an interview. “And one I hated to see him in. I’m used to catching fire during these disputes, and I hated to see him get it, too. I tried to keep him out of it; it was unfair for him to be in the middle of it. But I was not very good at protecting him.”The experience was unsettling for an artist whose rise to the top of his profession has been swift and sunny, and who is unused to hostility from musicians. (They tend to venerate him: “He’s the greatest conductor I’ve ever worked with,” said Harold Robinson, who is retiring as the Philadelphia Orchestra’s principal bass after 26 years.)“I didn’t know what to expect coming in,” Nézet-Séguin said of the orchestra’s first rehearsal after the furlough ended. “I said very little at the beginning. I said: ‘We lost many people. We lost members of our company. We lost people in our families, our friends.’ And the first notes were Verdi, actually. We just played it through. Let’s put all our emotions in this. And it helped.”Nézet-Séguin leading a rehearsal for the Met premiere of Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice.”Jonathan Tichler/Metropolitan OperaDavid Krauss, the Met’s principal trumpet, said in an interview: “There was some tension in the first half of the first rehearsal back. And by the second half, it was back to business as usual.”Not exactly business as usual. The pandemic, and the calls for racial justice that flared last year, fast-tracked the Met premiere of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” giving it pride of place on one of the highest-profile opening nights in the company’s history. The piece’s success — reviews were positive, four of the eight performances sold out, and the crowds were markedly more diverse than usual — has convinced Nézet-Séguin that works representing the experience of groups often marginalized in the classical canon, including Latinos and L.G.B.T. people, should be fixtures going forward.“This is showing us what we need to do,” he said, “and confirming what I’ve been wanting from Day 1.”But one question is whether, without the burst of publicity that accompanied the Met’s belated presentation of a Black composer’s work, new operas can hold their own at the box office. (To be fair, even classics have struggled to sell in recent years.) Test cases will come: While Nézet-Séguin has his eye on little-done corners of the repertory — he mentioned Gluck, Weber’s “Der Freischütz,” Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt” and Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda” — he has decided that if the choice is between a rarity’s revival and a contemporary piece, the latter will get priority.“It should be at the expense, maybe, of some stuff I had wanted to bring back,” he said.“I had a lot of new pieces planned in the future,” Nézet-Séguin said. “But I was maybe thinking I would do one a year, or skipping some years. And now, no.”Jingyu Lin for The New York Times“We are reassessing all the operas I am going to be conducting,” he added, “because I don’t want this to be the exception, to do ‘Eurydice’ and ‘Fire.’ For me, this should be the norm. I had a lot of new pieces planned in the future. But I was maybe thinking I would do one a year, or skipping some years. And now, no.”Aucoin, the composer of “Eurydice,” said that Nézet-Séguin is a collaborator “to a degree that’s unusual for conductors.”“In the chaotic dance scene in Act I,” he added, “there’s this techno-esque line in the background, and my idea was that it should be only in the very bottom octave, the piano’s left hand and contrabassoons. I wanted it to be a pop song heard from another room. But it wasn’t registering. And he suggested we throw some bass trombone in there, and he was right.”On an early November afternoon in Philadelphia, Nézet-Séguin and his orchestra there presented an installment in the cycle of Beethoven symphonies they are also playing at Carnegie this season.Beethoven’s Second and Eighth framed “Sermon,” a suite of arias and spoken texts about race and struggle organized and performed by the young bass-baritone Davóne Tines. At its center is the calm, luminous sorrow of “Vigil,” written by Igee Dieudonné and Tines in memory of Breonna Taylor.New music can often feel randomly scattered onto an orchestral concert, added merely to give a progressive sheen to fundamentally conservative programming. But the mournful “Sermon” felt at home among the symphonies, both complementing and in tension with them, particularly as they were played by the Philadelphians with such graceful, sweet-not-saccharine polish and élan. Old and new, life and death, coexisted and enhanced one another.“That was the idea,” Nézet-Séguin said of Tines’s piece. “Giving him the space to tell us his story. I’m not a private, private person. I like to speak with you about my art; I like to go on television and share who I am as a person. But it’s not about me becoming more famous so that people give me attention. I’m not shying away from attention, but I want it to be helping the collective. I want to be the person who can help shed light on others.”“I’m not shying away from attention, but I want it to be helping the collective. I want to be the person who can help shed light on others.”Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesAt the end of February, Nézet-Séguin will achieve another repertory milestone at the Met, bringing Verdi’s “Don Carlos” there for the first time in its original French — rather than in the more common Italian, as “Don Carlo.” A few weeks later, as part of what is intended to be an ongoing collaboration between his two American institutions — he also leads the Orchestre Métropolitain of Montreal — he and the Philadelphia Orchestra will give the world premiere of Kevin Puts and Greg Pierce’s opera adaptation of “The Hours” in concert, before it is staged at the Met in a future season.The rebuilding of the Met is far from over. Eleven of its orchestra’s 96 regular full-time members retired or left their jobs during the pandemic. Should all be replaced? In what order? That is for Nézet-Séguin, in large part, to decide. And the company’s financial model, which keeps forcing the need for cuts and brinkmanship with the unions, is no closer to being permanently solved.“I can’t say we’re completely behind what happened last year,” Nézet-Séguin said. “We’re not. But at least these moments — this Verdi, this ‘Fire’ and now this ‘Eurydice’ — are helping everyone focus on what matters to us and how we can function together. And making a difference. It sounds cliché, but trying to make a difference in the world.” More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Juilliard Stages an Orpheus Rarity From Opera’s Early Days

      by

      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