Descending into L'Orfeo

Orpheus loves Eurydice. Eurydice doesn't love Orpheus. He pines and finally, he woes her. On their wedding day, she's gathering flowers and stumbles into a nest of vipers, and like all dead Greeks, Eurydice descends into Hell. But Orpheus, no quitter he, suffers from the force of such denial of her death that he goes to the portal of Hell, where, having no money, he charms free passage by singing Charon a song. Down in the land of the dead, Orpheus softens the heart of Persephone,* who persuades Hades to allow Eurydice to go with Orpheus back up to earth, provided he can prevent himself from looking at her on the way up. As in all stories with an impossible object, Orpheus fails.

The variations of the Orpheus myth are legion, especially when it comes to Orpheus's big blunder. According to Plato, Orpheus was right to doubt that Eurydice accompanied him back to earth -- Hades had actually sent something back with him that sounded like Eurydice, but it wasn't actually the real thing. Virgil's completely unsympathetic telling has Orpheus actually making it back to earth without turning around. But then he forgets that Eurydice has two more steps to go and loses her just at the moment she comes into the sunlight. And in Aeschylus, Orpheus's OWN death is about as bad as it gets. First, he's torn to pieces, and then, if that weren't bad enough, his decapitated head, floating gently down the river Hebrus, keeps ... on ... singing. GAG!



And let's not forget the variations on the ending. Though Joseph Kerman famously (well, if you're a musicologist, famously) found Monteverdi's ending a bit Hollywood (Orpheus and his Dad, Apollo, ascend to heaven to some of the most mechanical and undramatic music Monteverdi ever composed) but Gluck's he thinks is just downright offensive (Orpheus, having in a strange twist decided to commit suicide over his wife's death, is suddenly told that the whole thing was a fake and Eurydice simply wakes up).

Christopher Alden's staging of L'Orfeo (the Monteverdi version, the earlier version) works for me. But if you get online and look for reviews of past productions at Glimmerglass and Leeds, they're all scathing. People hated the production. Even people I know and love hated it. And believe me, I understand why. Christopher is avant-garde to the nines. His characters smoke and drink cocktails on stage; they wear sexy outfits; and probably worst of all, there's oftentimes not much of a relationship between the libretto and his dramatic conception. Sometimes, there's almost none. Forget what you thought you knew about important climactic moments. The arrival of the messenger who informs Orfeo that Euridice has died? Nah, she doesn't arrive. She's been sitting on the sidelines right in the same room with Orfeo. She didn't even see it happen. And Orfeo's ascent to heaven? Yeah, actually, he's just gonna sit brooding pathetically in a chair center stage, until the last blackout. Oh, and Euridice is on stage with him. I mean, she's dead but ... she's still there.

Christopher paints in broad strokes. It's the difference between plot, what happens blow-by-blow (which, in this opera, we already know and DON'T need to be reminded of) and drama. And by drama I mean stuff happening. You're sitting on a park bench and two people are having a strangely animated conversation. You can't hear the words, but you're watching anyway. It's drama. There's a car crash. It looks horrible. You try to look away, but you can't: it's drama. I've gone to a lot of theater in the last couple of months where I didn't understand a word, and couldn't have described the plot to you if you'd hung a brownie sundae on a string in front of me and begged me to. But drama is the STUFF, people! You don't need language. It's better with, obviously. But that's not where the tension or the electricity or the bodies or the tears are, and to all you libretto people out there I'm sorry that I'm a slobbering disciple of Joseph Kerman but that's how it is with me.

So, what happens if you take plot out of Orfeo and add drama?

Well, Act I of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo basically boils down to a bunch of people hanging out together in a really weird looking room having a really weird looking party. Like all parties that are worth their weight, there are some drinks, and partial nudity. Period costumes are boring; here it's more like half and half: half Greek, and half something else. Renaissance ruffs, leopard print tights, biker gear, army-navy supply store paraphernalia ...



So far so good. Now, Orfeo loves Euridice. But isn't it a little strange that he had to pursue her for so long? And isn't it a little strange that after refusing him for so long Euridice would suddenly just ... change her mind? So why don't we just state the obvious. Orfeo is a complete obsessive! He should've gotten over her a LONG time ago! And Euridice has problems. In fact, she's depressed. It's not a healthy relationship.


In Act II Euridice leaves to hang out with her friends while Orfeo stays with the boys for awhile. It's a bachelor party. Everybody gets tipsy, they take off some clothes. And then the messenger shows up with bad news.


But come on. We all know this play. Euridice doesn't actually have to die; how boring. Better yet, let's duct tape her to the wall and call that "Dead" and then draw one enormous line down the center of the stage and call one side "Hell" and the other side "Not Hell." Orfeo can't cross the line.



And he pulls out a hoodie so he won't be tempted to look at anybody.


Anyway, you see how things begin to get a little out of hand. And of course there's more. Apollo walks around the entire show with a microphone pointed at Orfeo to record everything he sings, bootlegging all of the big musical moments. When Orfeo puts Caronte to sleep, the cast cheers and paper dollars start falling out of the sky like he'd won the lottery.

The difference between me and the other REAL reviewers out there is that I see no harm in these things. Moreover, I challenge YOU to come up with a challenging reading of a billion year old myth, one that engages with the same old basic tale and wrestles something strange and unexpected out of it. It's an experiment, people. It won't hurt you. Who wants to see the same sappy story again? Give me opera that goes out on a limb, or give me the death of opera. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: it WILL happen.




*Incidentally, it's a pretty a good thing that Persephone happened to be serving her yearly six-month sentence down in Hell when Orpheus arrived with his sob story. But wait a minute. If Persephone is in Hell, and you can ask Edith Hamilton if you don't believe me, then it has to be winter upstairs. But if it had been winter when Orpheus and Eurydice tied the knot they wouldn't have been zipping around in flowering fields waiting to run right into a big, fat snake den. Has anyone ever noticed this? PERSEPHONE SHOULDN'T EVEN BE THERE! HA HA, OVID!

**Lest the excellency of the photographs I post here deceive you, these are not mine, but George Mott's, taken during preparations for the opera at Glimmerglass in 2007. You can see more pictures of the opera on Christopher's website, which is where I found them.