William Burden as Orphée, Davinia RodrÃguez as Eurydice. Photos © Elise Bakketun
The lyre belongs to Orpheus, a mythological demigod whose music has no equal. His wife, Eurydice, is dead, bitten by a poisonous snake, and the inconsolable Orpheus implores the gods to let him join her in the underworld. Enter Amore, goddess of love, to grant his wish but with a big string attached: he cannot look at her, else he will lose her forever.
This cannot end well, right? Sure enough, Orpheus descends into the netherworld and tames the Furies of hell with his lyre whose music is represented by a (barely-audible) replica of an 18th Century harpsichord. He finds Eurydice in the Elysian Fields (not the Champs Elysées of Paris but a greensward that could be Gasworks Park on a sunny Sunday) and sets off to bring her back to the real world.
William Burden's burnished tenor is perhaps a shade too warm for some of the elaborately ornamented passages he's asked to sing in Orpheus (where's Lawrence Brownlee when we really need him?), but there's no denying the heartbreak of his "J'ai perdu mon Eurydice" when the poor girl dies a second time. Davinia Rodriguez doesn't have much to sing beyond the manipulative "Why won't you look at me?" As the cute-but-wise Amore, Julianne Gearhart shows up at key moments on a beach-cruiser bicycle, dressed like like a cross between Shirley Temple and pre-Sesame Street TV host Shari Lewis wielding sock-puppet mortals as if they were Lamb Chop and Charley Horse. Love triumphs, however, when Amore allows Eurydice to return to life a second time.
Heidi Zamora, longtime costumer for Seattle Opera, undertakes her first assignment as lead designer for this production, with a collection of pastel hospital scrubs and togas to complement Orpheus's white leisure suit. Best was imaginative costuming for the Furies of the Underworld; whose efforts to emerge from stretchy body stockings made them look like thrashing, tentacled monsters.
The original set, by Philip Lienau, also shows creativy. Hades is represented by a backdrop that could be the inside of a human body, with muscle tissue and blood vessels. Neural ganglia persue the lovers as they look for the outside world.
Maestro Gary Thor Wedow certainly understands Baroque music; he conducted a fine "Giulio Cesare" (1724) for Seattle Opera five seasons ago, as well as Mozart's "Magic Flute" (1791) last year. I only wish that he'd found a way to put more emphasis on Orpheus's ability to charm his friends and enchant his enemies through music, the way Papageno uses his bells and Tamino plays his flute.
This staging of Orpheus premiered in Paris in 1774 (just 15 years before the French Revolution); it was a rewrite of Gluck's original version presented a decade earlier in Venice. Audiences in Paris expected ballet scenes in addition to arias and recitatives, so Gluck added a French libretto and reworked the score to include several ballets. To a modern audience, much of the dancing, choreographed by Yannis Adoniou, seemed to me--apart from the battle with the Furies--rather aimless.
A footnote: by 1858, the public had tired of Gluck's serious approach and was ready for a full-fledged parody of the Orpheus myth, which Jacques Offenbach happily provided in "Orpheus in the Underworld." What Offenbach's hero encounters in hell is frantic music and lascivious dancing: the infamous Galop Infernal known as the Can Can. Paris was scandalized...and art was once again shocking.
Seattle Opera presents "Orpheus and Eurydice" by Christoph Willibald Gluck, through March 10 at McCaw Hall. Tickets are $25 to $203. Reserve by phone at 206.389.7676 or online at SeattleOpera.org.
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