The Met's Orfeo ed Euridice

I can’t help but wish for the tragedy as I sit through Glück’s absurd ending and find myself wondering whether that’s what we’re meant to feel.

The Met’s production of the 1762 Vienna version of Orfeo ed Euridice was very good. I am sorry to say the major blot on this production was the chorus. I do not meant their singing of course, but in costumes designed by Isaac Mizrahi they appeared as figures from our collective consciousness: there was Abraham Lincoln, Henry VIII, Jimi Hendrix, Rosa Parks and Frederick Douglass. This was most absurd when first encountered in Act I, as they mourn Euridice with Orfeo. The unfortunate singers were also witnessed making simple hand gestures as they silently sat through Orfeo’s troubled musings—raising their arms as Orfeo mentions the gods above, crossing their hearts as he speaks of marking the trees of the forest in token of his love. The trouble was not so much that the chorus is not well-trained in movement nor that their choreography in itself was so awful (and it was), but that they did it with absolutely no conviction, and that is one thing we can not excuse. Awkward amateurism does not sit as badly with us as dispassionate, devil-may-care performance, and this is the director’s fault, not the chorus’.

That said, the director Mark Morris choreographed splendidly for the dancers, who were the real stars. The choreography struck that delicate balance between suiting the music and sufficing as a thing of beauty in itself. Particularly noteworthy were the tortured writhing in mourning, the halting stumbling of the dead as we enter Hades and the dance of the furies. In the ballet at the conclusion one charming section began with a male dancer keeping time with his foot as he turned his female partner in front of him and then they switched roles and performed the same steps, the rest of the dancers joining in couples, including one male couple and one female. The dancers were costumed in casual contemporary clothing, summer dresses, suits and sweats, changing into new costumes identical in design to what the wore in the opening but in brighter colors for the final scene. The dancing was fabulous.

Stephanie Blythe as Orfeo sang with superb line and was well cast. Absolutely gorgeous in the role of Euridice was Danielle de Niese and I suppose she sang well, too. James Levine was exceptionally sensitive to Blythe’s urgency and musicality.