Orfeo ed Euridice

5 things to know about Orfeo ed Euridice

1° A Greek hero

A legendary musician, poet and prophet in ancient Greek religion and myth, Orpheus is credited with composing the Orphic Hymns and the Orphic Argonautica. The major stories about him are centered on his ability to charm all living things and even stones with his music; his attempt to retrieve his wife, Eurydice, from the underworld; and his death at the hands of those who could not hear his divine music. These stories have inspired countless forms of art from antiquity to today, including poetry, film, painting, music and opera. First performed in 1600, Euridice by Jacopo Peri is the earliest surviving opera, and subsequent operatic interpretations include Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice and the 2018 opera by Dick van der Harst, Moneim Adwan and Howard Moody, Orfeo & Majnun.

2° Radical reform

By the mid-18th century, opera seria had developed into meandering works full of complex music, long da capo arias and labyrinthine subplots. Inspired by Francesco Algarotti's Essay on the Opera of 1755 and by French opera of the time, Gluck sought to tackle this trend with an opera of noble simplicity and emotional purity. The result was Orfeo ed Euridice. ‘It’s a reform opera,’ explains conductor Peter Whelan, Artistic Partner of Irish National Opera as well as Artistic Director of the Irish Baroque Orchestra and founding Artistic Director of Ensemble Marsyas.

3° From Vienna to Paris

Orfeo ed Euridice was first performed in Vienna at the Burgtheater in 1762 for the name-day celebrations of the Emperor Francis I, and was revived the following year. But it was in Paris that Gluck and his reform opera were most celebrated. Premiered in 1774 at the second Salle du Palais-Royal, this version, named Orphée et Eurydice, had a French libretto by Pierre-Louis Moline, which was both a translation of and an expansion upon Ranieri de' Calzabigi’s original text. This version of the work also had additional ballet sequences, conforming to the tastes that were prevalent at the time in Paris, and included the long ‘Dance of the Furies’ and the famous ‘Dance of the Blessed Spirits’. The opera was also influential on subsequent German operas, with variations on its plot – an underground rescue-mission in which the hero must control, or conceal, his emotions – to be found in Mozart's The Magic Flute and Wagner's Das Rheingold.

4° Who wears the trousers?

The first person to sing Orfeo in Gluck’s opera was the famous castrato Gaetano Guadagni. French opera almost never used castrati and so for the Paris version of his opera Gluck changed the part to one for high tenor or the so-called haute-contre – the usual voice in French opera for heroic characters. Since the mid-19th century, Orfeo has mostly been sung as a trouser role by contraltos and mezzo-sopranos. ‘There’s two reasons for trouser roles,’ says Sharon Carty, the Irish mezzo-soprano playing Orfeo in this production. ‘One is because the part originally would have been written for a woman – for example, in The Marriage of Figaro, Mozart wrote the part of Cherubino for a soprano, and it would have been accepted at the time that page boys and young men would have been sung by high female voices.’

The other reason, she says, is to replace the many male roles that were written for castrati. ‘Thankfully, we don’t have any castrati around anymore, so you have to resolve it by casting either a mezzo-soprano – as in this production – or a countertenor.’ Having recently played Hänsel in Hänsel und Gretel, Sesto in Giulio Cesare, and the title role of Ariodante, Carty is well used to playing trouser roles. This is her second appearance on OperaVision having created the role of Amy in the world premiere of Donnacha Dennehy and Enda Walsh’s The Second Violinist.

5° A choreographer's touch

For this production, Irish National Opera teamed up with United Fall, a company led by director and choreographer Emma Martin, whose work blurs the borders between conventional theatre and dance. ‘Emma’s approach to Orfeo ed Euridice has delivered a production of unique taste,’ says Fergus Sheil, Artistic Director of Irish National Opera. ‘She has carefully and honestly balanced the elements of movement, music and virtuosity.’