Gluck´s “Orpheus and Eurydice”
performed as a collaboration between the Stuttgart State Opera and the Stuttgart Ballet
Stuttgart Opera-House
Stuttgart, Germany
June 27, 3009
by Horst Koegler
copyright@2009 by Horst Koegler
Having attended about two dozen different productions of Gluck´s opera “Orpheus and Eurydice” in half a century, I remember most of them as crashing bores (including Balanchine´s Hamburg staging of 1963). Nor am I sure, from reading some notices and looking at the pictures, that I would like Mark Morris´s ´provocative, trendy, postmodern and dance-heavy´ (Opera News, August 2007) recent production at the Met. Thus I was not exactly thrilled when Stuttgart announced the opera s a copr-oduction of the Stuttgart State Opera and the Stuttgart Ballet, directed and choreographed by Christian Spuck, one of the two resident choreographers of the company What made the project interesting, though, is that it was advertised as to be given in its French version of “Orphée et Euridice”, which Gluck had specially prepared for Paris in 1774, his original Vienna version of “Orfeo et Euridice” as `azione teatrale per musica´ of 1762 blown up to “Orphée et Euridice” dimensions. It thus changed into a ´tragédie-opéra en trois actes´ with many dance additions concoctet for the special occasion to pamper Parisian audiences. While most productions, even when tackled by choreographers, are based on the original Vienna version with dances borrowed from the French adaptation, Stuttgart promised us the complete the French work, keeping its promise by offering us a performance which lasted almost three hours instead of the ninety minutes of the original Vienna ´azione teatrale´. After which certainly nobody could complain of having been bored, with the dancers and choristers mixing with the soloists, so that there happens a lot of activity even in the scenes which are normally staged as statuary rituals.
One cannot say that Spuck simply illustrates the text by ornamenting it with dances. He adds a lot of byplay and by introducing new figurants. Thus Euridice is performed by two singers, duetting with herself (Alla Kravchuk and Catriona Smith) - later on, in the Elysian Fields, she even appears in eightfold form, which, of course, doesn´t strengthen her individuality (maybe that she has drunken too much Lethe and thus herself become a Blessed Spirit). L´Amour appears as a comédienne, like a guest from a performance of Offenbach´s “Orphèe aux enfer” at the Bouffes Parisiens, her delegates being five sexy boys, led by Alexis Olivera, who accompany Orphée on his way to hell. Instead of the harp with which he generally plays, trying to soften the Furies, this Orphée, hardly the original artist but a wretchedly bourgeois type (Luciano Botelho) fumbles with what looks like a miner´s hand lamp. But then Emma Ryott has costumed the singers and dancers mostly in black modern looking clothes, later changing into white, with the Suite de l´Amour boys in glittering revue briefs. The first act, designed by Christian Schmidt, looks like a waiting room at a railway station, furnished with piled up chairs. Orphée marks with chalk the contours of Euridice´s body on the floor like a police-man marking the spot where a dead man had been found, For the Elysian Fields the lights by Reinhard Traub change to garing white brightness, with snow pouring down from the flies – maybe the powder from cannabis.
Dancing happens throughout – not only in the Ballet of the ´Air de Furies´´or in the Ballet ´Ombres heureuses´, let alone in the final ´L´Amour triomphe´ scene, an expansive divertissement of seven different numbers. But all the individual airs are accompanied by dancing, not by directly clinging to the text, but by trying to portray its psychological sources. Though at lot of this happens letting the audience in doubt what it means, it has to be admitted, that it is beautiful to listen to as conducted sprightly by Nicholas Kok and to look at, as performed by Stuttgart´s top dancers, including Ailicia Amitrain, Oihane Herrero, Nicolay Godunow, Roland Havlicka and William Moore plus the gracious girls and boys of the corps. The strange thing is that the mixing of soloists, choristers and dancers looks the most natural thing in the world, which shows how intensively Spuck must have worked with the soloists and the choristers.
It is difficult to define the style of the choreography. It is based on the classical academic school, but has absorbed many elements from different dancing forms and vocabularies – modern, ethnic, showbiz, pseudo-historical etc, - that no common denominator would fit. What troubles me is that neither the furies nor the blessed spirits develop any characteristic profiles, helping to develop an individuality of their own – neither are the furies really frightening, nor spread the blessed spirits the perfume of eternal happiness.
In the end it all mixes up to a spectacle like a meal, consisting of expensive but indigestible ingredients, so that one leaves the theatre with an overfed stomach, afraid that any moment it might burst. Balanchine summed up his experience, after he had staged the Gluck opera when the American Ballet was in residence at the Metropolitan Opera , declaring: ´For that you have to be young, with energy. I wouldn´t start anything so impossible today´. Well, in 1936 he was 32 years old. He tried the ´impossible´ again in Hamburg in 1963 and repeated it in Paris in 1973, but what was left was the truncated excerpt of “Chaconne”). Spuck, unafraid of former flops, is forty today and plans to continue his path as a director of opera next year in Wiesbaden with Verdi´s “Falstaff”. Three days after the Stuttgart premiere, Pina Bausch died on June 30. A couple of days later arte, the German/French/Suisse/Austrian television station, repeated its broadcast of Bausch´s production of “Orfeo ed Euridice” at the Paris Opéra. It survives as a model of what Gluck and his choreographer Gasparo Angiolini were striving for in 1762 Vienna: the integral interweaving of music, singing and dance, which Kirstein, in his ´Movement & Metapher´ attributes to Gluck and his ´dramatic directness, his analysis of structrure building towards exciting climax, marks another powerful partrnership between dance and music on the highest expressive level´. In Stuttgart the mixture turned out a rather indigestible spectacle of gluttony.
