Fairfax City, Va., February 12, 2012 – In an astonishing leap of artistic faith, the Virginia Opera staged the first DC-area production of Philip Glass’ 1993 opera, Orphée at George Mason University’s Center for the Arts this weekend. DC opera audiences don’t usually cotton to modern opera.
Friday evening’s performance was under-attended, although not badly so. But those who plunked their money down for tickets to this unusual event—i.e., an opera by a still living composer—certainly got their money’s worth for their efforts.
Orpheus, Heurtebise, and a house of mirrors. (Photo credits: David A. Beloff.)
Why so?
Over this reviewer’s lifetime, classical audiences grew accustomed to boycotting concert and opera presentations either featuring or wholly devoted to compositions by living composers. From the time of Schoenberg, most new works seemed comparable to Henry Ford’s legendary Model-T automobile, which you could order in any color so long as it was black.
In the case of classical music, composers learned that they were free to write whatever music they wanted so long as it was atonal, usually loud, and almost always supremely hard on the listener’s ears. And composers kept this up for decades, even though audiences clearly hated this kind of music, unrelentingly rejecting it for well over a half-century. Increasingly snug in academic positions, nearly an entire generation of composers, however, found their tenured-in lifestyles comfortable enough that they no longer needed to worry what their dwindling audiences thought.
The classical audience, in turn, voted with its feet. This habit has been hard to break ever since it first became ingrained even though circumstances slowly began to change in the 1970s and 1980s.
Philip Glass, for all his faults, was one of these changes. Starting out in the atonal camp—for a long time a matter of survival in the classical firmament—he found that the 12-tone row itself was just as restrictive (if not more so) than the traditional western scales this system had been invented to replace. Glass’ solution: he began to write tonal music once again, but this time without the sweep of Romantic gigantism (Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, Busoni) that had engulfed that format in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Instead, Glass invented what has been dubbed “minimalism,” a compositional technique characterized by brief, tonal phrases or figures that are repeated, like a mantra, over and over (ostinato), producing an effect similar to that of ancient Gregorian chant. Development, such as it is, involves altering the basic mantra/theme by gradually, almost endlessly, altering its rhythmic structure along with the choirs of instruments that repeat it.
Minimalism, at least as it was practiced early on by Glass, is as mathematical, in a way, as the 12-tone row. But the main difference is that minimalism largely abandons atonality’s profound ugliness even as it creates a new potential negative—the capacity of repetitiousness to become boring.
Other composers, such as Poland’s Henryk Górecki, Estonia’s Arvo Pärt, and the American Steve Reich, composed in a similar style, resulting in a kind of ad hoc international minimalist movement that has proved to be quite surprisingly enduring, capturing new and largely youthful new audiences for this new twist on an old tradition.
Glass—who doesn’t like to use the term minimalism itself—has further refined his own techniques over the years. From the time of his massive and sublimely strange 1978 opera Satyagraha—recently staged by the Met—until now, Glass’ repetitiousness has evolved into something infinitely more inventive and sophisticated, and that’s a good thing.
While younger listeners were initially attracted to Glass’ new music due to is paradoxically Zen-rock-like simplicity and accessibility, older classical audiences had found his music to be overly spare and infinitely boring, devoid, at least to them, of genuine musical creativity.
But in Orphée, Glass proved he could break new ground by layering his earlier, more rigid approach with greater complexity and melodic sophistication. While there are still no conventional arias in this opera, Glass has, in effect, morphed opera’s late 19th century verismo, “sung drama” into a highly effective contemporary construct.
Orpheus (Matthew Worth) tries to explain things to Eurydice (Sara Jakubiak). It's not working out very well.
Orphée’s dialogue is highly intellectual and is at least as important as the music. But Glass’ musical line, minimal though it is, melds with the dialogue to give Glass’ “sung drama” a surprisingly organic emotional impact.
Sung in French, Glass’ Orphée is based on the eponymous 1949 film update of the Orpheus legend by Jean Cocteau. Its original music was composed by Georges Auric, a member of “Les Six,” a French compositional axis that also included Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, and others.
Glass essentially transformed Cocteau’s film-update into sung drama. It was a rather original concept—movie to show rather than the other way around—and yet it’s become an accepted direction today, as in, say, Disney’s “Lion King,” which started out as an animated feature but became a hit Broadway show.
Glass’ change, though, is to substitute his own score and musical approach for Auric’s while yet retaining, in many ways, the distinctive feel of “Les Six’s” Deco approach to the performing arts.
Both Cocteau’s and Glass’ Orphée are clever updates of the ancient Greek legend of Orpheus, a tale well known to anyone who’s studied even a smattering of classical Greek literature in translation. The musician, Orpheus, loses his beloved wife Eurydice to death, but is granted a miraculous opportunity to retrieve her from Hades (a somewhat kinder, gentler version of hell)—provided that, as he returns her to Earth’s surface, he never cast so much as a glance in her direction.
Being human, of course, Orpheus can’t resist taking a look at his beloved. As a consequence, she’s lost to him forever.
Cocteau revised the story to give Orpheus a makeover as a contemporary French poet (what else?) and a popular one at that—though at the opening curtain of Glass’ opera version, he’s losing his touch with his public, which has become enamored of a radical young poet (Cégiste) instead.
But here’s where things get a little strange. Orpheus has begun to neglect his wife, becoming infatuated by a beautiful, imperious woman known as La Princesse, or the “Princess.” Attended by her manservant and chauffeur Heurtebise, the Princess is equally attracted to Orpheus.
The Princess (Heather Buck) ponders her next move. Heurtebise (Jeffrey Lentz) hovers in background.
As we ponder this relationship, we hear outside the raucous sound of gunning motorcycle engines and learn that poet Cégiste has been run down outside the building. The motorcyclists silently enter with the body of Cégiste and transport him offstage.
As it turns out, the Princess, Heurtebise, and the motorcyclists are quite literally the tag-team from hell. The Princess is Death itself in human form and her staff is in attendance to claim each victim.
Unfortunately, the Princess violates the rules and falls in love with Orpheus, which effectively scrambles up the original legend in an all-too-French way, as interlocking romantic triangles ensnare the Princess, Heurtebise, Eurydice, and Orpheus, with the latter serving as the common point between the two triangles.
In the end, a little like Bobby’s “dream” in the old “Dallas” TV series, Orpheus awakens from his nightmare vision, no doubt realizing that he’s very much in love with Eurydice (who’s alive and still living with him); while also acknowledging that, like all good romantic poets, “Death” is his true muse. This, along with the second act’s imperious mini-Supreme Court judicial hacks, adds a delightful element of political and artistic satire to the over all construct of both the film and the opera.
Sam Helfrich’s spirited direction helped keep things from bogging down, supplying inventive narrative interest without getting in the way of Glass’ score.
Split into two roughly equal halves, Helfrich’s realization of Glass’ Orphée (with sets imported from a recent Glimmerglass production) unfolds in a refreshingly classy, modernist drawing room/salon outfitted so that each half of the stage is roughly a mirror image of the other. This effectively transforms the performance space into a time portal allowing travel between Paris and the underworld.
Particularly inventive was Helfrich’s use of silent body doubles to produce the magic mirror effects so often referred to by the principle soloists. Choreographed like symbolic figures in kabuki theater, these shadowy doubles served to underline this work’s emphasis on the parallels between temporal and artistic lives, both of which are crucial to understanding Cocteau’s and Glass’ re-imagination of the Orpheus myth.
Musically, in Orphée, we find Glass at his most inventive. The repetitions, or ostinato figures, still predominate here. But the basic building blocks of each section are grounded in contemporary musical formats, particularly Continental-style jazz. The opening scenes are built on musical figures that are light, airy, and, well, jazzy, something of an homage to Gershwin, Ravel, and “Les Six” (particularly Poulenc) rolled into one. You almost expect F. Scott Fitzgerald or Maurice Chevalier to pop up at any moment.
Glass also employs a considerable variety of musical figures throughout. Each dissolves with a fair degree of rapidity into the next, avoiding the long repetitions that characterized the composer’s earlier Satyagraha thus helping keep the audience more involved in the action on stage.
The Virginia Opera’s mostly youthful cast is amazingly good with all this stuff. They’re fine singers, although at least one of them, tenor Jeffrey Lentz (Heurtebise), could use a little more punch in his vocal delivery, which was at times a bit tough to hear. The soloists’ French enunciation was also exceptional, to the point where a listener with at least a smattering of French could actually understand some of the dialogue without the supplied surtitles.
In Friday’s performance, baritone Matthew Worth proved a terrific Orpheus, deeply intellectual, vain, suspicious, and even at times put-offish. His voice radiated a central authority even when he seemed bewildered, as when he received mysterious Area 51-style messages from what looked like an old Tivoli/Kloss Model 1 radio.
Is Orpheus (Matthew Worth) tuning in radio transmissions from Area 51?
As the much put-upon Eurydice, soprano Sara Jakubiak was trim, sexy, and in fine vocal form even though her character gets relatively little to do in this opera.
But perhaps the finest and most interesting performance of the evening was turned in by fellow soprano Heather Buck who starred in the central role of the Princess, aka Death. Regal, elegant, and haughty to the extreme, Buck’s Princess gradually melts as she admits her undying—and forbidden—love for Orpheus.
Buck’s soaring near-soliloquy near the end of the second act is a high point in Glass’ otherwise spare score, and she delivered it with great vocal depth and conviction.
The Virginia Opera chorus sang well during brief opportunities. Minor roles are also sung quite ably in this production, with special hat tips due to Marta Wryk (Aglaonice), Jonathan Blalock (Cégeste), and Christopher Temporelli (Chief Judge).
Glass scored his opera for a small orchestra. The Virginia Opera’s musicians, under the able baton of Steven Jarvi, produced a tight, disciplined, chamber-music style sound.
The Virginia Opera’s surprising, rewarding Orphée wraps up this afternoon, alas, at George Mason. But if you still want to see it and can afford a tank or two of gas at today’s prices, you can catch Orphée’s final performances this coming weekend down in Richmond, Virginia. For tickets, directions, and information, check out the Virginia Opera’s website here.
Rating: *** (Three stars out of four.)
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