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Gluck, Orphée et Eurydice:  (New production) Soloists, chorus. ballet and orchestra of Opéra Toulon Provence Méditeranée, Giuliano Carella conductor. Toulon, France. 12. 9.2007 (MM)

Orpheus is synonymous with opera: the poet sings, making art and action one, and in the myth he must move hell itself.  The bigger challenge though is to move an audience, and this task is both easy and hard.  Easy if there is the artistic integrity that the myth itself demands, but hard because both hell and audiences instantly perceive when art falters.  Or falls flat on its face as did this Orphée et Euridyce at the Toulon Opera.

Announcing a production of an opera with any mention of the Orphic in the title has come to suggest a flirtation with art itself.  The Harry Kupfer 1991 production of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice (the 1762 Italian version for castrato) at the Komische Oper Berlin incorporated the orchestra, audience and art itself into its catharsis while the Trish Brown/Roland Aeschlimann 1998 production of Monteverdi's Orfeo at Brussel's Monnaie graphically elaborated and then resolved the puzzles of the Renaissance's Orpheus myth.  The 400th anniversary of the birth of opera was celebrated at the Getty Center in Los Angeles in 2000 with a production of Peri's Euridice, one that instilled vibrant life and high entertainment into this venerable artistic artifact.

Thus there were precedents for excitement about a new production of Gluck's 1774 version of Orphée et Euridyce for Paris where Orpheus would be sung by a tenor rather than by a castrato substitute (a male or female mezzo soprano) or by the baritone of the 1867 Berlioz edition;  not to mention that Toulon Opera possesses a fine ballet all of which  hinting that just maybe we would have all the forces necessary to realize Gluck's vision of what Wagner later re-envisioned as Gesamtkunstwerk.

With the modern orchestral forces of the Toulon Opera there could be, thankfully, no attempt at a precious Collegium Musicum reading of the work, thus the tuning tone A was at approximately 448, considerably higher than the A at 393 in 1774 (giving some real justification for Berlioz' baritone).  That Toulon's fiery Italian conductor Giuliano Carella was in the pit,  evoked a bit of trepidation as the circumspect and ceremonious proceedings of Gluck reform operas never caught on in Italy: Gluck's Alceste was judged a turgid de profundus at its 1767 Milan premiere.

But if there were any pleasures at all in this evening,  they came from the pit during the third act when Euridice confronted Orpheus' coldness in a duet that Carella made quiver with the very Metastasian hyper-emotions Gluck had wished to restrain.  Carella then drove emotional excitement and simple raw speed through Eurydice's death culminating in Orphée's great lament, delivered in chokingly exaggerated orchestral phrasing to Orphée's unbridled despairing lyricism. This was far from the heroic self-awareness that Gluck and the Enlightenment's Orpheus had worked so hard to achieve, but worth the price of admission.

The first two acts of Orphée et Eurydice are extended scenes for chorus and ballet in which Orpheus' predicament unfolds, each scene centered around an Orpheus monologue and aria.  While the pushed quality and fast vibrato of Russian tenorino Maxim Mironov worked in Carella's passionate third act, these fine Rossini attributes were out of place in the stately pace of these acts;  the measured emotions of Chiamo il mio ben and Che puro cielo simply did not materialize making both acts a musical and dramatic void.

The brief appearance of the Eurydice was the only excitement offered. German soprano Henrike Jacob exuding a heated, Carmen like physical and vocal sexuality that was blatantly foreign to the intelligence of the Orpheus' tragedy.

The two pantomimes of the second act, the furies barring Orpheus' entry into hell and the blessed souls of the Elysian Fields, unfolded in what seemed to be some sort of anti-choreography, the first pantomime clumsily mimicking grotesque motions and the second a moving circle miming some sort of dead harmony :  so much for Gluck's intention of integrating the complex ballets of the intermèdes of French tragedie lyrique into the action of the opera.  All the more confusing because there was a choreographer credit in the program.

Jack-of-all-theater-trades Numa Sadoul, born in Brazzaville though one assumes naturalized to France, staged the opera, taking the chorus that Gluck had so carefully integrated into the opera out of the action, dressing the choristers in costumer Luc Londiveau's idea as to what would pass for eighteenth century finery and  seating them in the first two levels of the boxes overhanging the orchestra pit.  With Amore -  French soprano Joanna Malewski and her two mute accomplices in eighteenth century dress as well -  director Sadoul apparently intended to frame the action within some sort of historical context though no perspective made itself discernable.  The result was to distance  the audience from any confrontation with the complexities of the Orpheus tragedy.

But, voilà, the ballet!  Finalment!  With  everything finished except for the last chorus celebrating the inevitable happy ending, sixteen golden eighteenth century courtiers invaded the stage, and we saw that they were not the clumsy furies and the bored souls of Act II, but eight real ballerinas and eight real ballerinos who carried out a complex choreography in classic ballet movements for perhaps thirty minutes.  They danced to the music that Gluck was obliged to provide for an extended ballet segment at the 1774 production, a ballet that had absolutely nothing to do with his opera and occurred only after the unities of his tragedy were complete.

In Toulon however,  Gluck's final celebratory chorus was a stinger to this ballet, director Numa Sadoul somehow managing to outmaneuver Gluck once again.  France would be far wiser to invest in augmenting its arsenal of nuclear weaponry rather than adding yet  more mediocre (or worse) productions to its opera repertory.


Michael Milenski

Picture © Opéra Toulon Provence Méditeranée
 

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