IT IS ONE of the best Greek myths: the story of the man who almost brings his wife back from the dead. Orpheus and Eurydice have bequeathed us an unforgettable drama of amorous failure. A man, given a second chance at keeping his true love, blows it for good.
Through the ages, composers, artists and writers—Monteverdi, Gluck, Offenbach, Ingres and Rodin, Jean Cocteau, Jean Anouilh and Tennessee Williams—have repeatedly mined the narrative for its implacability, its mix of desire and loss. The doomed pair even made it into Arcade Fire’s “Reflektor”, an acclaimed 2013 rock album. The cover shows Rodin’s exquisite 1893 sculpture of the two figures.
The myth’s literary foundation lies in works by Latin poets Virgil and Ovid. Orpheus, whose music overpowers all who hear it, is an Argonaut. His wife is Eurydice; pursued by a lustful son of Apollo, she steps on a snake and its poisoned bite kills her. Inconsolable, Orpheus enters the underworld and propitiates the dead with his lyre in hopes of retrieving Eurydice. Persephone and Hades, guardians of the underworld, agree to release her on one condition: when leading her out of the underworld Orpheus must not look at her. If he does, he will lose her again. But, on reaching the sunlight, he falters, and glances back. Eurydice dies for a second and final time. It is a pre-Christian fable of resurrection, minus, in most versions, the salvation found in the New Testament. Retold, it ends—or should end—badly.
A new production of Christoph Willibald Gluck's opera “Orphée et Eurydice” is being staged at the Royal Opera House. In this production the orchestra, the English Baroque Soloists conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, remain on stage the whole time. The choir—Gluck gave the chorus some of the opera’s most ravishing music—double as the shades of the underworld.
Through the first two acts Orpheus, played by the mellifluous Peruvian tenor, Juan Diego Flórez, is in despair. He is burdened by what he knows will be an almost impossible rule, placed on him by Amour (who, in Gluck's opera, displaced Persephone and Hades), played by Amanda Forsythe, an American soprano, in an eye-popping gold lamé trouser-suit.
At the start of Act 3, Eurydice (Lucy Crowe) claws at Orpheus; he stubbornly averts his gaze while they duet intimately about love. Eurydice, persistent in her incomprehension, is here the painful embodiment of (as a critic once put it) “a flirtatious, even irritating woman”. Yet it is highly compelling, the drama heightened by the taunting, expressive dancers of the Hofesh Schechter Company (Mr Shechter co-directs with John Fulljames). When Orpheus finally takes her in a full embrace, Eurydice expires in a pool of light.
Gluck, however, used the opera form to celebrate the triumph of love. Music, he proposed, could defeat death. When she hears Orpheus’s famous aria, “Che farò senza Euridice”, Amour allows the heroine to arise. The couple are reunited once again. Art turns this version of the myth into a morality tale: opera, this one at least, insists that life must continue.
In most productions, however, the couple are entirely fallible: Orpheus brilliant but flawed, an alpha male whose weakness is also his strength, wanting impatiently to be certain that his wife is as unswerving in her loyalty as he is in his quest of rescue, but unable to resist that forbidden peek. Eurydice can be equally vexing. She is often a nymph-like innocent, but sometimes—particularly in some modern renderings, including Anouilh’s play “Eurydice” (1942) and Cocteau’s film “Orphée” (1950)—not without blame. In both the latter, she is coquettish. In Tennessee Williams’s play “Orpheus Descending” (1957), Lady (Eurydice) presents the preening guitar-player Val (Orpheus) with her turbulent past, and is sexually needy. She is less damsel in distress, than experienced spouse who knows her own worth.
Now touring is a slapstick adaptation by Little Bulb Theatre, which played at Covent Garden’s Linbury Studio just as the Gluck opened. This version is a sort of edgy contemporary critique of the 18th-century masterpiece, in which the febrile lovers have become exuberant Parisian jokers. Orpheus is jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and Eurydice an Edith Piaf figure. In a recent version of the story on Radio 4, two much darker, connected plays, by Simon Armitage and Linda Marshall Griffiths, re-imagine Orpheus as a drug-addicted busker, Zak, saved by a botanist, Sanna. Sanna helps transform his untapped harp-playing gifts into a world-beating music phenomenon, but perishes from jealousy at his success. Here the story is brought emphatically into the 21st century.
Orpheus and Eurydice’s disaster has universal resonance; at any point in history its popularity, however twisted, turned and changed, is guaranteed. The best of Greek myths deals with what no one can escape from: the bonds of love and the inevitability of death.
