L’Orfeo - Premiere - Schedule, Program & Tickets

L’Orfeo - Premiere

musical direction
Pablo Heras-Casado
Staging
Tom Morris
Stage & costumes
Anna Fleischle
light
James Farncombe
Video
Finn Ross
choreography
Jane Gibson
La Musica / La Speranza
Kate Lindsey
Orfeo
Georg Nigl
Euridice
Slávka Zámečníková
Messaggiera / Proserpina
Christina Bock

What makes Claudio Monteverdi's Favola d’Orfeo (The Legend of Orpheus), first performed in 1607 at the northern Italian court in Mantua, the first opera? Of course there were a few forerunners. But in this work it is for the first time the music itself that not only symbolically takes up the word as an allegory in the prologue, but also congenially interweaves the entire scene. The Orpheus poems of antiquity and renaissance interpreted the mythical singer, who knew how to enchant all of nature and even soften the underworld, as a virtuoso master of eloquence rather than as a musician. Monteverdi was the first to host a celebration of the musical driving forces unleashed by the achievements of the new "performing style" (stile rappresentativo). Multi-voiced, lively dance or solemnly measured choirs and a richly occupied instrumental apparatus frame Monteverdi's sounding interpretation of words and affects, which touches us to this day with undiminished freshness and depth of feeling. After cheering wedding preparations, which are abruptly interrupted by the news of the death of the bride Eurydice, who died from a snakebite, we traverse the abyss of grief and despair with the orphaned Orpheus and accompany him on his way into the underworld. After he has "let go of all hope" he starts a chant that pulls out all the stops of internalized sensation and highly virtuoso alienation. Paradoxically, this heart of the opera shows us not only the power, but also the impotence of the song: Charon, the ferryman, remains deaf to this evocative supplication and refuses to cross into the realm of the dead. Only the fact that he falls asleep enables Orpheus to sneak in there unheroically. And it is not Orpheus' singing directly, but rather the intercession of Pluto's wife that causes the god of the dead to consent to the return of Eurydice. This also happens under a condition that causes Orpheus to lose her a second time. The triumph and misery of art have been inscribed in the opera genre since its origins: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better «(Beckett). Director Tom Morris invites all visitors to a wedding party, which he has chosen as a contemporary equivalent to the court festival as a setting for his staging.

Subject to changes.

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