A Modern Orfeo?

 
Program note
for the Peabody production
 
March 7–8, 2003

The score of Monteverdi’s Orfeo begins with the descent of the muse of Music, and ends with Orpheus being taken up into the heavens by his father Apollo. This production opens with a contemporary wedding interrupted by gunfire, and closes with the wounded hero getting up with difficulty from a wheelchair. Yet this is not intended to be some clever updating. The spirit of the late Renaissance and early Baroque which imbues the music still guides the largest part of the opera. We have merely attempted to frame it, to give it a context.

Orfeo is not a normal tragedy. Eurydice, whose death spurs Orpheus to descend to the Underworld to reclaim her, is a relatively minor character in Monteverdi’s version. She dies not as the result of some character flaw or the machinations of others, but by being bitten by a snake hidden in the grass. Moreover, her death occurs only about a third of the way into the action. This opera is not about death, but about survival — most especially the difficulty of making sense of a death which happens at random, without apparent reason, and of finding a means to go on living after it. In the aftermath of September 11, such questions seem especially germane. Our production merely ups the ante, so to speak. Instead of waiting for death to happen, it begins with one: a sudden calamity in the midst of a wedding — a drive-by shooting, perhaps — a death that has no explanation and will not be given any.

Following this prologue, the opera divides itself into two large sections: Acts I and II, which are set in Arcadia, and Acts III and IV in the Underworld. A much shorter fifth act serves as a kind of epilogue. In our interpretation, each of these sections represents different ways of dealing with grief, all of them unsatisfactory. They appear as visions conjured up in the fevered mind of the hero. Orpheus, wounded in body and in soul, first turns to denial. He imagines himself in an ideal landscape, where it is forever spring, and nymphs and shepherds dance all day. But there is death even in Arcadia; he loses his Eurydice again, and denial is no longer an option. He then turns to a kind of heroic defiance: he will descend to the Underworld, either to win back Eurydice from the dark powers, or to remain there himself. In doing so, he attempts a kind of suicide. But this also fails, and he returns reluctantly to a life lived in a spiritual desert. His final response is to reject human society; if he cannot have Eurydice, he will shun the company of others. At the end, fortunately, the Apollo character tells him that he cannot return to life and yet turn his back on it. Our production ends with an ascent, but not into the heavens. Rather, Orpheus returns to the company of his friends on earth, climbing painfully out of a pit of despair that was at least partly of his own making.

But Orpheus is also an artist: a poet and a singer. There is no experience, even the most tragic, that cannot become the stuff of art. Whether sober, drugged, or in delirium, our Orpheus conjures up the images and even the music that will fill the next couple of hours; in effect, he writes his own opera. Not that this is always a positive act either. As Apollo says at the end, both his joy and his grief seem too intense. He writes parts for himself and his wedding guests, but he cannot seem to bring equivalent life to Eurydice, who remains an idealization rather than the woman he would see if only he opened his everyday eyes. When he is leading her back from the Underworld, he cannot leave her to follow on her own; all he has is the idealization that is fading rapidly in his memory; when he turns to look for confirmation, he loses her. Apollo tells him, in effect, not to live by poetry alone. He closes his book, and we do not know what or when he will write in it again. But what he has written is a masterpiece.

ROGER BRUNYATE