Gluck / Berlioz: Orpheus and Euridice

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INFO COVID-20 : Gluck/Berlioz - Orphée et Eurydice, will be on stage for next Season 2022-2023. Suscribe to our newsletter to be informed for sales opening. 

Orpheus is undoubtedly the opera of operas: from Monteverdi to Rossi, at the origin of lyric art, then with Gluck imposing the reform of opera in Italian in Vienna, in French in Paris, finally with Berlioz in a romantic version, (and before Offenbach’s brilliant parody), the amorous fate of the Greek poet is enduringly perpetuated on theatre stages. After Eurydice's sudden death, Orpheus goes to seek his wife in the Underworld. His song has the power to appease the Furies and animate the Blessed Spirits, allowing the couple to return to the path of light...towards their destiny.

Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice shook up the Europe of the Age of Enlightenment. However, after 80 years of performance of the Paris version of Orpheus created by Gluck in 1774, the score used at the Paris Opera had been greatly transformed by regular use and successive corrections and modifications had corrupted the work. In 1859, Berlioz enthusiastically agreed to work on a revised version: his admiration for Gluck made him an intimate connoisseur of the work and its multiple Italian and French versions. He thus dissected it down to the last detail, in order to produce a "modern" version that was nevertheless true to Gluck. “Let us abandon ourselves fully to what moves our soul and not give in to anything that might prevent us from enjoying ourselves!” Berlioz threw himself into his task of adaptation with great enthusiasm, certain that he would finally give THE version of Orpheus that the Second Empire had been waiting for. And this was the case: "we are stunned!” said Berlioz about Orpheus’s grand aria, and the audience was undoubtedly so.

For Berlioz, the title role required above all a great singer with "a powerful and noble organ". And to return to Gluck's original range in Vienna, he chose the contralto voice (in place of a castrato) instead of the usual tenor, which made it possible to give the role to the great Pauline Viardot, the glory of the Paris opera, whose voice had, according to Berlioz, "an exceptional range, at the service of a great art of broad phrasing, (...) an indomitable, lively, despotic verve, a deep sensibility and almost deplorable faculties for expressing immense pain! ». All his Orpheus is there, never leaving the stage and guiding us with his music from shadow to light, the extraordinary power of music to overcome death...

The beauty of the work owes as much to the intensity of the exchanges as to the eloquence of the orchestra and the spectacular involvement of the choir. The Underworld act with its Furies, its chorus of Demons, the heart-rending supplications of Orpheus... is one of the greatest moments in Western music. Raphaël Pichon conducts this "opera of operas" with a communicative passion for Gluck and Berlioz, and director Aurélien Bory unfolds the dizzying mental, supranatural and afterlife spaces that Orpheus traverses. Eve Maud Hubeaux takes on this iconic breeches role in the company of the magnificent Hélène Guilmette and Lea Desandre, in a three-dimensional staging!