To Hell and back
Christoph Willibald Gluck: Orfeo ed Euridice, 24 January 2009.
I previously wrote ‘The Met Live in HD goes from strength to strength’. With the latest transmission this has suffered a setback, both technically and in production. Noted in my review of La Rondine was an occasional lack of synchronisation of voice and vision. This time it was worse and one had to resort to reading the subtitles to avoid total irritation and distraction; the sound quality of the voices had also deteriorated which made it difficult to judge the true quality of the singers.
I previously wrote ‘The Met Live in HD goes from strength to strength’. With the latest transmission this has suffered a setback, both technically and in production. Noted in my review of La Rondine was an occasional lack of synchronisation of voice and vision. This time it was worse and one had to resort to reading the subtitles to avoid total irritation and distraction; the sound quality of the voices had also deteriorated which made it difficult to judge the true quality of the singers.
A scene from Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice” with Stephanie Blythe as Orfeo and Danielle de Niese as Euridice
Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera
Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera
Rumoured to be caused by a problem with the satellite link, it is one that requires urgent solution to recover the superb quality of the early transmissions. Unless this is resolved, the attraction of this new way of experiencing opera, the novelty already waning a bit with familiarity, will soon fade.
The performance in question was of the original Viennese version, in Italian, of Orfeo ed Euridice, by Gluck with his early collaborator, librettist Raniero de’Calzabigi, breaking with the formal corset of opera seria. The opera was first performed in 1762 by the castrato Guadagni. It was revised and translated for Paris in 1774 for tenor as Orfée et Eurydice. This has additional music, including the Dance of the Blessed Spirits, with famous flute solo, notably absent on this occasion.
The score is often performed in the arrangement by Berlioz, as on the treasured recording by Kathleen Ferrier and by WNO in Oxford in 2000 with Katarina Karnéus. An eagerly-awaited performance by Alexander Young was once cancelled through indisposition when we were already seated in the Apollo Theatre but just in time to move to the Regal Cinema for Orson Welles’ Othello!
The conductor was James Levine with a small but modern orchestra. Introducing the opera to the cinema audience, he claimed that it was the earliest opera in the repertoire of major opera houses. Where has the Met been the last twenty years? What about Monteverdi, Handel, Rameau?
This production (a revival from 2007 with countertenor David Daniels) was the responsibility of Mark Morris, also the choreographer. It is one of those productions where the director has his own agenda, distorting the creation of composer and librettist. Whether trying to impose a spurious universality on the opera or attempting to give it contemporary relevance by setting it in modern dress or, in this case, both, the result is an almost complete detachment of the staging from the words and music; it is as if one is experiencing two different works at the same time.
Thus, instead of nymphs and shepherds, furies, blessed spirits, we have a chorus dressed as historical characters (we are told) confined to the Met’s three-tiered stage gallery (seen before in La Damnation de Faust); instead of elegant baroque corps de ballet, we have dancers in informal modern dress. One is reminded of Bernstein’s West Side Story, an image enhanced by the path to the underworld being in the form of a tenement-style fire escape, lowered from above.
It is difficult to say which is the less forgivable – that this was deliberate or it was not. Fortunately Gluck’s music is robust enough to withstand such treatment but why should the director work against and not with the composer? If universality is there it will be implicit in the words and music. To seek to make it explicit upsets the artistic balance.
It was a relief to find the musical and dramatic high point of the opera is spared directorial interference. The scene where Orfeo leads Euridice back towards earth, not allowed to look at her nor explain why, was played naturally, causing us to suspend disbelief and grip our seats at the heart-breaking poignancy of their predicament, until Amor relieves the tension by relenting and restoring Euridice. This was well done.
The singers were Stephanie Blythe as Orfeo, Danielle de Niese, Euridice, and Heidi Grant Murphy as a matronly but ironic Amor amusingly portrayed. De Niese (remembered for her Cleopatra and Poppea at Glyndebourne) was worth the journey to the underworld, (even though in this production she had already been cremated – another silly detail).
But the opera belongs to Orfeo. Blythe’s performance received rave reviews as ‘an Orfeo for the Ages’, comparing the opening to that of Sutherland in Lucia di Lammermoor. Her voice is what one used to call contralto; for some reason they are all now mezzos. Blythe certainly has a powerful and rich lower register and the build to sustain its deep resonances (not for her Deborah Voigt’s little black dress – Divas).
In the cinema her transition to her upper register did not sound so seamless as it apparently did to the theatre audience, perhaps due to inadequate sound reproduction. In close-up, her unconvincing pretence at strumming a rather tatty guitar rather than plucking a lute (or should it be a harp – sources vary) was an added distraction. One must conclude that this was a production for the opera-house not the cinema.
Structurally, Orfeo ed Euridice is most unusual consisting in almost equal parts of a monologue by Orfeo with extended dances and choruses. Euridice and Amor are minor roles. The problem for the director is to unify the two elements stylistically with the music, not, as here, to introduce extraneous associations. It is a baroque conception with a baroque-conventional happy ending. The only solution is to perform it in baroque style.
Of course this does not necessarily mean baroque costumes and baroque scenery. The vogue for modern settings can work very well, as chronicled in these columns. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. New York! New York! didn’t work at all with or without the portrait gallery.
The performance in question was of the original Viennese version, in Italian, of Orfeo ed Euridice, by Gluck with his early collaborator, librettist Raniero de’Calzabigi, breaking with the formal corset of opera seria. The opera was first performed in 1762 by the castrato Guadagni. It was revised and translated for Paris in 1774 for tenor as Orfée et Eurydice. This has additional music, including the Dance of the Blessed Spirits, with famous flute solo, notably absent on this occasion.
The score is often performed in the arrangement by Berlioz, as on the treasured recording by Kathleen Ferrier and by WNO in Oxford in 2000 with Katarina Karnéus. An eagerly-awaited performance by Alexander Young was once cancelled through indisposition when we were already seated in the Apollo Theatre but just in time to move to the Regal Cinema for Orson Welles’ Othello!
The conductor was James Levine with a small but modern orchestra. Introducing the opera to the cinema audience, he claimed that it was the earliest opera in the repertoire of major opera houses. Where has the Met been the last twenty years? What about Monteverdi, Handel, Rameau?
This production (a revival from 2007 with countertenor David Daniels) was the responsibility of Mark Morris, also the choreographer. It is one of those productions where the director has his own agenda, distorting the creation of composer and librettist. Whether trying to impose a spurious universality on the opera or attempting to give it contemporary relevance by setting it in modern dress or, in this case, both, the result is an almost complete detachment of the staging from the words and music; it is as if one is experiencing two different works at the same time.
Thus, instead of nymphs and shepherds, furies, blessed spirits, we have a chorus dressed as historical characters (we are told) confined to the Met’s three-tiered stage gallery (seen before in La Damnation de Faust); instead of elegant baroque corps de ballet, we have dancers in informal modern dress. One is reminded of Bernstein’s West Side Story, an image enhanced by the path to the underworld being in the form of a tenement-style fire escape, lowered from above.
It is difficult to say which is the less forgivable – that this was deliberate or it was not. Fortunately Gluck’s music is robust enough to withstand such treatment but why should the director work against and not with the composer? If universality is there it will be implicit in the words and music. To seek to make it explicit upsets the artistic balance.
It was a relief to find the musical and dramatic high point of the opera is spared directorial interference. The scene where Orfeo leads Euridice back towards earth, not allowed to look at her nor explain why, was played naturally, causing us to suspend disbelief and grip our seats at the heart-breaking poignancy of their predicament, until Amor relieves the tension by relenting and restoring Euridice. This was well done.
The singers were Stephanie Blythe as Orfeo, Danielle de Niese, Euridice, and Heidi Grant Murphy as a matronly but ironic Amor amusingly portrayed. De Niese (remembered for her Cleopatra and Poppea at Glyndebourne) was worth the journey to the underworld, (even though in this production she had already been cremated – another silly detail).
But the opera belongs to Orfeo. Blythe’s performance received rave reviews as ‘an Orfeo for the Ages’, comparing the opening to that of Sutherland in Lucia di Lammermoor. Her voice is what one used to call contralto; for some reason they are all now mezzos. Blythe certainly has a powerful and rich lower register and the build to sustain its deep resonances (not for her Deborah Voigt’s little black dress – Divas).
In the cinema her transition to her upper register did not sound so seamless as it apparently did to the theatre audience, perhaps due to inadequate sound reproduction. In close-up, her unconvincing pretence at strumming a rather tatty guitar rather than plucking a lute (or should it be a harp – sources vary) was an added distraction. One must conclude that this was a production for the opera-house not the cinema.
Structurally, Orfeo ed Euridice is most unusual consisting in almost equal parts of a monologue by Orfeo with extended dances and choruses. Euridice and Amor are minor roles. The problem for the director is to unify the two elements stylistically with the music, not, as here, to introduce extraneous associations. It is a baroque conception with a baroque-conventional happy ending. The only solution is to perform it in baroque style.
Of course this does not necessarily mean baroque costumes and baroque scenery. The vogue for modern settings can work very well, as chronicled in these columns. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. New York! New York! didn’t work at all with or without the portrait gallery.