“Orpheus and Eurydice” directed by Christoph Loy in Salzburg. Review

The Salzburg Pfingstfestspiele (Pentecost Festival) presented a new production of Orpheus and Eurydice by Christoph Willibald Gluck. The performance was created by the conductor Gianluca Capuano and the famous German director Christoph Loy, the role of Orpheus was performed by the artistic director of the festival herself, Cecilia Bartoli. In the summer, this version of Gluck’s Orpheus will be included in the program of the main Salzburg Festival, but for now I watched the premiere on the stage of the Mozart House Sergey Hodnev.

The main theme of the current Pfingstfestspiele is the image of Orpheus in operatic music, and here, of course, one cannot do without Gluck’s masterpiece. This is not just one of the retellings of a Greek myth central to the history of opera, but a turning point in its own way: the Vienna premiere of Orpheus and Eurydice in 1762 was the manifesto of a great reform, not even theatrical, but aesthetic. Gluck and his librettist Calzabidgi postulated a rejection of the rigid conventions of the Italian “serious opera” in favor of formal freedom and the unfettered dominance of what was then perceived as manifestations of natural sensibility (after all, Rousseau’s “Julia, or New Eloise” came out only a year earlier). . That is why they exhausted the usual virtuoso arias in their creation, radically changed the approach to dramaturgy and the structure of roles (Gluck has only three solo parts – Orpheus, Eurydice, Cupid), made the choir the most important participant in everything that happens and, for greater synthesizing, supplemented the action with abundant ballet scenes.

There is, however, one difficulty connected with how the Pentecost Festival has been organized for the last eleven years, from the moment Cecilia Bartoli became its artistic director. This festival is quite short compared to the summer Salzburg festivities, but, firstly, every time it flaunts interesting and richly presented historical, cultural and musical themes. Secondly, its most prestigious core is the premiere of the next opera performance, which then appears on the summer festival poster. And in each such production, Bartoli is steadily trying – at least, as long as his strength allows – to sing the main role. But Orpheus in the Viennese version of Gluck’s opera sings a contralto, which is too low a tessitura for a singer. There is also a Parisian francophone edition of the opera (1774), but there the main part is for a high tenor. And there is, of course, the edition of Hector Berlioz (1859) made for Pauline Viardot, but it was rejected either because of a lack of authenticity, or because it was not entirely convenient for a prima donna either.

But there is another version of Gluck’s opera, completely authentic: the so-called Parma edition of 1769, made for the celebrations in honor of the wedding of the Duke of Parma Ferdinand I and the Austrian Archduchess Maria Amalia. In this edition, Orpheus sings a low soprano: Gluck remade the part for the castrato-soprano Giuseppe Millico, known under the nickname Moscovita (Moscovite), since the singer actually worked for many years in Russia, although not in Moscow, but, naturally, in St. Petersburg, at the court of Elizabeth Petrovna and Catherine II.

This “Muscovite” version in Salzburg is now taken as a basis. Its differences from the usual Viennese edition are small – and yet the opera was unrecognizable. The Les Musiciens du Prince orchestra played in a chamber-like manner, transparently, nervously, with an abundance of completely unexpected accents and nuances, and with sharply unconventional tempos. Even the tried-and-tested hit in C major “Che faro senza Euridice” (“I Lost Eurydice”), which, it seems, everywhere and always they tried to perform with graceful regularity, here rushed swiftly, slowing down in a voluntaristic way only in the last stanza. The singing of the Il Canto d’Orfeo choir was to match: a polished, extremely focused, slightly metallic sound, with its culture reminiscent not so much of ordinary performances of Gluck’s Orpheus, but of specialists in some early Baroque repertoire.

Actually, Cecilia Bartoli herself did not get out of this context: she was hardly ever heard of like that. Almost everything “beautiful”, cantilevered, was somehow bashfully hidden away; phrases came out abruptly declamatory not only in recitatives, but even in arioso, and in especially expressive moments the singer completely broke into a scream. So much so that Gluck’s instructions to the tenor Legros, who sang Orpheus in Paris, were really vividly recalled: “Scream as if your leg is being torn off.” Eurydice, efficiently and gracefully sung by Melissa Petit, and Cupid, performed by the young New Zealander Madison Nonoa, surprised much less, but the overall feeling, albeit outlandish and controversial, is still amazing. In recent decades, few people have managed to present Gluck’s captivating music as unconventional, experimental and avant-garde – that is, the way it was heard in the 1760s.

The abstract-timeless staging of Christophe Loy seemed to be based on the dance: for this, the Parma version of Orpheus was nevertheless supplemented with ballet numbers from the Vienna and Paris editions. Thirteen dancers in modern costumes acted in a huge hall with wooden panels on the walls built on the stage according to the sketches of Johannes Layaker. But this imperceptibly Reich Chancellery space is not very convenient, a fair part of it is occupied by a monumental staircase (as if in a reminder of the structure of the ancient Greek theater). That is why there were more flat plastic sketches and runs up and down the stairs than the actual dance. Bartoli, dressed in a black trouser pair, sometimes somehow built her Orpheus with illustrative gestures into the general plastic drawing, but in the key episode of the meeting with the shadow of Eurydice, everything was completely without fuss. The hero turns away and covers himself with his hands, just so as not to look at the heroine and not to violate the fatal ban – and no new meanings in addition to the textbook mythological plot are still visible. However, the plot itself was also unlucky: the directors eliminated Glukovsky’s happy ending, breaking off the action after the secondary death of Eurydice. This sharpness, as best they could, was obscured, subtly and penetratingly performing at that moment a reprise of the opening mourning choir. This has already been done with Gluck’s Orpheus, but this time it is of little use: devoid of the music of a happy ending, “unnatural”, but still authorial, the opera – no matter how hard you try – turns from a living and free work into an artificial stump.