It’s a tale familiar from Virgil and Ovid. The beautiful Eurydice, newly married to the musician Orpheus, is killed by a snakebite. Overcome with grief, Orpheus descends to Hades to bring her back to life. With his magic lyre, he gains permission to take her home, if he will not look at her until they’ve returned to Earth. But he cannot resist a glance, at which point she’s snatched back to an eternity in Hades.
Christoph Willibald Gluck’s opera Orpheus and Eurydice, which got its first Dallas Opera performance Friday night at the Winspear Opera House, takes some liberties with the tale, including a happy ending that doesn’t appear in the Roman myths.
The opera is performed here in the original 1762 Italian version (with English supertitles), as opposed to subsequent revisions by Gluck, Berlioz and others. Sheared of some dances and repeats, it clocks in at 75 minutes, with no intermission.
A new staging, designed as well as directed by Joachim Schamberger, reimagines the story as a modern drama of a different kind of loss.
In a chintz-walled room, decorated with a Roman mosaic of Orpheus and a Corot painting of the lovers, the two principal characters are portrayed as well into AARP eligibility. On a hospital bed, Eurydice is lost in a haze — and sometimes rage — of dementia. As worried family gather round, slides of happier times, in settings familiar to Dallas observers, cycle by on a projection screen.
Amore, the god of love, appears as a winged, pink-clad cupid, to direct Orpheus to the lost Eurydice — in this case, to penetrate her tortured mind. In bringing her back to life, he must neither look at her nor explain the conditions of her release.
On shifting scrims, his journey is dramatized with stream-of-consciousness images from the past and throbbing nerve synapses. Black-robed Furies scurry around. But Orpheus’ magic lyre imparts calm, and in an imagined Elysium he finds Eurydice happily gliding back and forth on a swing. Schamberger’s projections and Driscoll Otto’s lighting work magic.
Eurydice is confused and frustrated — and angered — by Orpheus’ required remoteness. When he no longer can resist looking at her, he loses her again. But, to put a happy ending on the story, Amore announces Eurydice’s definitive return to life, and a final chorus celebrates love’s triumph. (Darkening the theater before the chorus was a misjudgment, making the audience think the opera was over.)
Born halfway between Handel and Mozart, Gluck revolutionized opera by rejecting the florid vocalism typical of the baroque period in favor of what John Eliot Gardiner has called “music of extraordinary purity, directness and concision.” In Orpheus, Gluck did however retain the baroque convention of asg the leading male role to a castrato, a man with high boyish voice preserved by early castration.
Castrati having mercifully disappeared in modern times, Orpheus can be sung by a countertenor (singing in falsetto) or a mezzo-soprano in male drag. Costumed by Tommy Bourgeois and gray-wigged by David Zimmerman, English countertenor Hugh Cutting looks like a clerk in a county office but sings like a god.
If you think of countertenors as hooty or breathy, Cutting’s potent, enamel-finished tone and vivid expression will be a most pleasant surprise. His voice easily filling the Winspear Opera House, he is very much the tragic but determined lover.
Eurydice is a vocal nonentity until Act 3, although Madison Leonard makes her first-act appearance, wracked with dementia, darkly unsettling. An exquisite Gilda in the Dallas Opera’s 2022 Rigoletto, she delivers her shifting emotions in and out of the underworld with a gleaming, glowing soprano. Amber Norelai is a perky Amore with bright, shiny tones to match.
The staging is simplified by dispensing with actual dancing, although blessed spirits glide gracefully in the Elysian scene, and by keeping the sonorous chorus, prepared by Paolo Bressan, in the pit.
Music director Emmanuel Villaume vividly characterizes the music, from threatening to soothing, and on opening night the Dallas Opera Orchestra gave him every nuance around an underlying rhythmic urgency.
Inspired by Schamberger’s experience with his father’s descent into dementia, this is not the Orpheus-Eurydice story we have known. But, incorporating allusions to the ancient myth, it’s a parallel drama of loss increasingly familiar as people live longer.
Not without flashes of humor — the opening-night audience was audibly amused by some of the projected Dallas scenes — it’s an impressive theatrical and musical experience.
Details
Repeats at 2 p.m. Feb. 9 and 7:30 p.m. Feb. 12 and 15 at the Winspear Opera House, 2403 Flora St., Dallas. $19 to $389. 214-443-1000, dallasopera.org.
