Two things about Gluck’s “Orpheus and Eurydice,” his 1762 opera, are not only the power and beauty of its melodies but also the sensation in a listener that the 260-year-old work is surprisingly modern.
In its original Viennese edition at San Francisco Opera through Dec. 1, the opera comes across, however, as a somewhat Disneyesque story. Eurydice dies twice and is twice revived, even though Orpheus, in the libretto by Ranieri de Calzabigi, is warned not to look at her (we don’t know why) after she first returns to the living in the Underworld. Nagged by Eurydice, who laments that he no longer cares for her, Orpheus casts his eyes back at her. She dies once more.
Once again enter Amore, the goddess of love, as the opera nears an end. Struck by Orpheus’ suffering and deep love for his wife, she grants Eurydice the breath of life, saying love triumphs over all. Orpheus is overjoyed but seemingly no wiser. He and his true love go on with their lives.
And the curtain comes down on a treacly revision of the Greek myth, one in which Eurydice, who, in the ancient story dies from a venomous snake bite, goes down a second time and stays down. Then Orpheus, apparently not the sharpest tool in the tool box, unable to adhere to Amore’s demand and escaping the Underworld, catches hell from a community of women for looking back at her.
That sounds like a much better story — certainly a more realistic one — than the one Calzabigi concocted. To be fair, he was writing in an era of widely distributed sentimental novels favored in the 18th century by a large middle-class public. He was retelling the Orpheus and Eurydice story through his own lens, as countless other artists, musical and visual, have done over the centuries.
Yet, as the audience streamed out of the War Memorial Opera House, this new production, performed in San Francisco for only the second time in 63 years and sung in Italian with English supertitles, arrives in the Bay Area when a little bit of love — certainly thoughts of love — in a crazy, mixed-up world, with plenty of headline-making hate to go around, is very much needed.
Director Matthew Ozawa envisioned the story as a journey through “stages of grief,” as he notes in the program, with Orpheus the protagonist in an archetypical Greek story of a hero’s journey through love and loss.
Ozawa explores the couple’s relationship through dance, a major component of the production.
At the outset, Polish countertenor Jakub Jozef Orlinski, as Orpheus, clad in a vermillion robe, puts on a respectable demonstration of break dancing, more or less going head over heels, literally flipped out with love and grief over Eurydice and her death. The music, led with great economy by Irish conductor Peter Whelan, enhances the dance scene and others, which included three couples, clad in flowing red and blue Roman-style robes, to represent distinct phases in the lovers’ journey over this 90-minute, no-intermission opera.
As choreographed by Rena Butler, his dancing is a visual treat, at times startling, that matches his countertenor voice, a falsetto, the high notes like those of a contralto or mezzo-soprano.
Orlinski and the couples dance on an undulating and rotating stage periodically lighted by Alexander V. Nichols’ projections showing images of neurons and neural pathways from actual brain scans. As Ozawa explained in the program, the colorful scans symbolized the human mind, the dance the couples’ shared memory, and Gluck’s music the emotional landscape of Orpheus and Eurydice’s struggle to reconnect.
Early on in the opera, Amore, portrayed by American soprano Nicole Heaston, literally drops down from above on a swing. Dressed in a dandelion-yellow gown, part of a large curtain-like cut of cloth, she tells Orpheus she can revive Eurydice on the condition that he not look at her until they’ve reached the land of the living.
He agrees and approaches Hades, where a 40-member cast of choristers, wearing shrouds as the Furies and lost souls, try to deny his entrance. His charming singing, however, persuades them to grant safe passage and access to Eurydice.
Upon awakening, Chinese soprano Meigui Zhang, as Eurydice, singing in a light and bright lyric voice, is led out of the Underworld by Orpheus. She longs to have her husband look at her. He doesn’t, of course, and, coming across as a cold fish to her, Zhang suggests that another death would be preferable.
Against Amore’s orders, he looks at her, and she dies, and Orlinski sweetly and poignantly sings the opera’s key tune, “Che faro senza Eurydice?” (What will I do without Eurydice?) Orpheus wants to join his wife in death, but Amore, with Heaston in poignant vocal form, nixes that idea and revives Eurydice — again, with that Disney magic that the original Greeks knew nothing about — and the chorus dances in a happy reunion between the couple, singing about the triumph of love and faith as faux fall leaves drop to the stage.
As good as this production is, an operagoer may still wonder what it would sound like performed with period instruments, the ones used during Gluck’s lifetime, yielding the timbres, balances and articulations for which he wrote.
IF YOU GO
“Orpheus and Eurydice”
San Francisco Opera
7:30 p.m. Saturday
and 7:30 p.m. Dec. 1
War Memorial Opera House
301 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco
Tickets: $26 to $408
Opera for the Bay tickets: $10
(415) 864-3330
www.sfopera.com
