John Neumeier directed Orpheus and Eurydice at the Salzburg Pentecost Festival (Pfingstfestspiele)

In addition to the premiere of a new production of Orpheus and Eurydice by Gluck (see “Kommersant” dated June 2) Salzburg Pentecost Festival (Pfingstfestspiele) presented a series of events dedicated to the same mythological story. Behind the regularities of the existence of the Orpheus plot in modern interpretations observed Sergey Hodnev.

Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607), the earliest opera that regularly appears in today’s theatrical repertoire, originally ended in the same way as a cruel mythological story – with the exit of the Bacchantes who tore the legendary singer to pieces. Almost immediately, this spectacle was censored as insulting the sensibility of the public (although the death of Orpheus was not shown on stage). In the version that has come down to us, Monteverdi’s “Orpheus” has a more sublime, abstract ending, without blood and orgiasticity: Apollo lifts the grieving singer to heaven, explaining to him that there is nothing lasting on earth anyway, and in the beauty of the sun and stars he, they say, will be able to recognize the beauty of the late Eurydice.

Now the opposite is happening with the old operas on this plot. The well-meaning and optimistic outcome of the story of Orpheus irritates, if not the public, then the directors as something imposed, illogical, and hence the attempts to at least rethink such an outcome. Just in Salzburg, Gianluca Capuano and Christoph Loy stopped a happy ending at all in Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. John Neumeier, in his version of the same opera (only in the francophone edition of 1774), suggested a different variant.

In Neumeier’s production, made six years ago for Chicago, Orpheus is the choreographer, and Eurydice is the star of his troupe, his muse and, apparently, his wife. During the overture, the viewer is shown a ballet class, where Eurydice is late, and is not in a hurry to get involved in the work. A quarrel breaks out, Eurydice runs out of the classroom and gets into a car accident (a quick pantomime follows with the body of the unfortunate victim flying out of the crashed car, the arrival of an ambulance and the fateful news that Orpheus is told by mobile phone).

The ballet element here is like a glove: after all, “Orpheus and Eurydice” and in Gluck’s time was not so much an opera as an opera-ballet. But the opera side is also not a loser. Tenor Orpheus in the edition of 1774 is a desperately difficult and uncomfortable part due to its high tessitura; once Dmitry Korchak sang it with Neumeier, but now another tenor from Russia, Maxim Mironov, sang it with a completely crystal-clear sense of style and studio quality. The performers of the parts of Eurydice (Adriana Chuchman) and Cupid (Lucia Martin-Corton with her boyish soprano – in Neumeier’s version of Orpheus’s faithful assistant) also did not spoil the impressions, and one can only regret that the Camerata Salzburg orchestra conducted by the young Japanese Kazuki Yamada from Glukovskaya scores extracted something so generalized-academic.

In the underworld, Orpheus was met by a ballet of furies led by a trio depicting the three-headed Cerberus, in Elysium – a ballet of blissful spirits, everything is like in Glukov’s libretto, but it turned out that these were the inner torments and joys of the unfortunate protagonist. Which nevertheless copes with itself and sublimates them in its new ballet “Isle of the Dead” (Becklin’s painting of the same name repeatedly appears as a backdrop) – it is shown to the public in the final to the music of a really ballet Gluck suite. Everything is almost like Monteverdi: Eurydice died irrevocably, it remains only to come to terms with this, but art is eternal.

By booking John Neumeier’s ballet for a single screening, the festival took another extravagant step. Again, for one show, a complex and expensive synthetic performance was made: Monteverdi’s Orpheus, in which the “live” choir, soloists and instrumentalists were placed in the orchestra pit of the Mozart Hall, and a puppet performance by a master from the great Italian troupe was played on the stage ” Carlo Colla and sons. They acted in a wonderful little theatre, where there were spectacular changes of baroque backstage scenery, and antique-pastoral outfits, and, of course, Apollo descending onto the stage in a shining chariot. The puppet context looked like a kind of quotation marks: living artists have long ceased to allow themselves all these naiveties.

Of course, it would be absolutely great if Pfingstfestspiele mentioned at least a few operas of the 17th-18th centuries on the Orpheus plot: few festivals today want and can take on such a thing, and the material there is grandiose in places, and it could be performed in Salzburg. But at least Haydn’s opera “Eurydice, or the Soul of a Philosopher” got on the poster – fortunately, in a concert performance, no one had to rack their brains over the theatrical adaptation of this amazing opera. And the hostess of the festival, Cecilia Bartoli, who sang Haydn’s Eurydice, proved that her no less amazing vocal apparatus is still capable of any plot.