Eurydice review – a hell-raising opera and a missing composer

We were to meet Mozart. At least, a modern-day equivalent. An upstart composer of 31 whose opera Eurydice was debuting at New York’s Met. Never mind that Wolfie had died at the age of 35 with 22 operas on the scoresheet. Matthew Aucoin, wunderkind, has penned five. Not quite Mozart, yet.

Still, pretty good in this day and age when the gestation period for an opera is elephantine. Mozart popped them out like rabbits. For today’s composers, the art of creation seems hard labour. 

Aucoin looks a bit like Mozart. Remember the diminutive, pushy kid in Amadeus? There he was, black-clad for seriousness, masked, telling us unmasked listeners, not about his opera, but that, sadly, he had to leave. At once. 

He had received instruction from his PR people to appear on a television show. That trumped his longstanding prior engagement. “Goodbye. Enjoy my opera”. 

Harrumph. I imagined being told by Allegra Stratton that she couldn’t make my Christmas party because there was a better one in Downing Street, or perhaps another at Tory Central Office. 

Probably just as well, because I was poised to ask him what was so great about wasting time writing a counterpoint to Gluck’s Orfeo and Eurydice anyway? Acres of gobbledygook newsprint have lauded Aucoin for fashionably taking the woman’s side. “Yeah, high time Eurydice spoke up. That Orfeo and his lyre always hogging the limelight. Give her a voice!”

The snafu fly in Aucoin’s ointment is that the first operatic versions of the Orfeo/Eurydice legend came from the quills of Jacopo Peri in 1600 and Giulio Caccini in 1602. Both were titled Eurydice. Far from being blanked from legend, the poor gal had got her operatic oar in first. Gluck levelled the playing field in 1762 with his Orfeo and Eurydice. 

Admittedly, in the 70 or so operas that followed, Orfeo shot up the league table, Eurydice stepped down a league. So, good for Aucoin for rebalancing the scales using American playwright Sarah Ruhl’s 2003 play, Eurydice, as the basis for the libretto. But, it is a rebalancing, not a blinding insight as received wisdom would have it.

Aucoin digs deep in the curiosity cupboard for his opera themes. From Sandover (2010) is based upon a James Merrill 17,000 word epic poem about cute ghosts transcribing messages from the dead over twenty years. The opera is hard going. 

Hart Crane (2012) is about the life of the intense American poet Hart Crane, a follower of T S Elliot, who reflected on the American dream. Crossing (2015) reprised the work of Walt Whitman and his view of American culture. Second Nature, also 2015, focused on young children emerging from a sanctuary habitat to repair the damaged earth from which they had been sheltered.

Sarah Ruhl’s play is also close up and personal. It adds elements to the Orfeo/Eurydice myth which are deftly exploited in the opera. There is the invented character of Eurydice’s father, already in the land of the dead, who greets his daughter as she steps from the elevator descending from the upper world. He is arguably a more important influence than Orfeo. 

He is the “tall tree” she remembers from childhood in whose shade she would shelter. Husband Orfeo cannot offer comparable solace. Her ultimate decision to return to her father rather than follow Orfeo back to the land of the living is the hinge upon which the opera turns.

Aucoin has written a book, The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera, published this month. He observes of Ruhl’s approach, “She also posits the uncomfortably plausible idea that Aristotelian dramatic structure is based on ‘the structure of the male orgasm’ and describes one of her (male) students describing one of his own plays, thus: ‘First it starts out, then, it speeds up, and it’s going and going, and then bam, it’s over’.” 

“Yikes”, Aucoin has the decorum to exclaim, confronted by this puerile nonsense. But perhaps he overreacts, as the ebb and flow of the Orfeo, Eurydice, Father, Hades characters’ relationships at times seems directionless. 

Another innovation. Orfeo is a dual role, with an angelic musical golden-winged doppelganger cherub acting as a guardian angel.

The underworld is guarded by three “stones” – Little Stone, Big Stone and Loud Stone. They are the guardians of the land of the dead, ban singing, proscribe the use of pens – which may send messages to the world above – and insist on the abandonment of conventional language. Hades folk must converse in dead-speak.

Think of them as lockdown enforcers in Boris Covid Crisis 22. No parties in the underworld, thank you, or it’s back in the elevator to the land of the living for you. The Stones prove a highly successful theatrical element, their fussing bureaucratic interference lifted straight from the characters, Ping, Pang and Pong in Puccini’s Turandot. 

Eurydice, from the moment of her wedding in Act I, is forced to confront the fact that Orfeo and his doppelganger have a conflicting priority. His love of music is more powerful than his love for her. And when the music inspired by her death penetrates the underworld there is an unsettling feeling that all his efforts to rescue his wife will fail. 

Orfeo’s art has been perfected by Eurydice’s death.

The Act III scene when Orfeo and Eurydice walk the perp walk, he looks back and she is once more lost to death is a theatrical triumph. We all know the story, yet when Eurydice could not resist tapping Orfeo’s shoulder and he fatally turned to her, there was an audible gasp of horror from the almost full house 3,500 audience.

Musically, the score conjures up a world analogous to the tale. A sense of eeriness pervades both the realms of the living and the dead. The pervasiveness of the myth in the European psyche – 70 operas for goodness’ sake! – is alluded to with choral passages akin to Gregorian chant, Vivaldi Baroque references and on to Philip Glass one-note sambas and John Adams’ minimalism. Even Aaron Copeland’s ho-down style gets a nod. 

Aucoin’s sound world is harmonically unchallenging. Unusually, I found myself suffering from dissonance deprivation as the harrowing onstage action begged for a more unsettling accompaniment. Where is Alban Berg when you need him?

The tempo is metronomic. Conductor Daniela Candillari, for whom this was a Met debut, was received ecstatically but obliged to beat little more than steady time from the pit. Useful colour could have been added with a less relentless approach. But I have no doubt she was faithfully following score markings.

The chorus remained hidden. Completely hidden. In a subterranean room with a sound link to the stage. Chatting to some chorus members before the performance I suggested they would be better off in Smith’s bar on the other side of Columbus Avenue than in the bowls of the Lincoln Center. 

For all I know they took me up on that. Certainly, there were raised eyebrows all-around at the needless distancing and the difficulty of following the conductor remotely. 

The cast of principals: Eurydice, soprano Erin Morley; Orpheus, Joshua Hopkins; Orpheus’ Double, Jakub Józef Orlinsky; Father, Nathan Berg and Hades, Barry Banks. All were perfectly competent, although only Barry Banks’ voice reached to the back of that vast Met auditorium. 

The three Stones, Stacey Tapan (Little), Ronnita Miller (Big) and Chad Shelton (Loud) were brilliant all-round comedic performers and pretty much stole the show. 

Whatever my reservations, the audience reaction was ecstatic. As the lights dimmed on Orfeo, standing on the letter sent from the underworld by Eurydice, instructing him on how to handle his next wife – was there no end to this woman’s annoying need to interfere from beyond the grave? – unable to read the letter, the curtain fell.

Contrived bouquets were “spontaneously” tossed onstage by a factotum, one retrieved by doppelganger Orfeo from the margins of the pit. Daniela Candillari joined the happy throng. 

But where was the composer, Matthew Aucoin? Missing in action once more. Doubtless, his “people” had found him a more fruitful gig than taking a curtain call to acknowledge his Met audience.