22 The New York Review
Notes from Underground
Geoffrey O’BrienEurydice
an opera by Matthew Aucoin,
with a libretto by Sarah Ruhl,
at the Metropolitan Opera,
New York City, November 23–
December 16, 2021
The Impossible Art:
Adventures in Opera
by Matthew Aucoin.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
299 pp., $28.00
It seemed appropriate that after the
first performance of Matthew Aucoin’s
opera Eurydice at the Met, conductor
Yannick Nézet- Séguin led the entire
orchestra onstage to take a bow. They
had certainly been playing a lot of
music, sustaining an unabated pulse
for three acts with a brightness, clar-
ity, and percussive precision that might
almost have made you forget you were
watching an opera about dying. They
did more than justice to an insistently
vigorous score full of quick changes
and fleeting stylistic intrusions of ev-
erything from Philip Glass to tango
music to medieval chant to Wagnerian
overload to Bergian dissonance, all
moving forward like a motor that can’t
be stopped. “For musicians,” Aucoin
writes in his new book, The Impossible
Art: Adventures in Opera, “the most
inescapable myth of all is the story of
Orpheus and Eurydice,” and here it’s
as if the music evoked by this myth is a
watery fusion of epochs. At thirty- one,
Aucoin writes with a precise awareness
of what has gone before in this domain;
he opens his book by surveying the
many operatic variations of the myth,
with a focus on Monteverdi, Charpen-
tier, and Harrison Birtwistle.
This seeping through of layers of
the past is fully in keeping with Or-
phic tradition. Every recasting of the
story of Orpheus and Eurydice seems
to demand to be recast in turn, mi-
grating from one medium to another,
so that (in modern times alone) Jean
Cocteau’s play and movie Orphée be-
came an opera by Philip Glass and an
insistent reference point in the poems
of Jack Spicer’s The Heads of the Town
Up to the Aether; Vinicius de Moraes
and Antônio Carlos Jobim’s stage pro-
duction Orfeu da Conceição became
Marcel Camus’s film Black Orpheus;
and Jean Anouilh’s occupation- era
transposition Eurydice is ritually re-
enacted in Alain Resnais’s extraordi-
nary penultimate film, You Ain’t Seen
Nothin’ Yet. Perhaps at the bottom of
all these reenvisioned reenvisionings is
the hope that this time it might turn out
differently, the fatal backward glance
averted, death for the nonce outtricked.
To engage with the myth encourages
trickery, the invention of a new story
in which Orpheus might somehow not
succumb to the urge to look back, and
art by its own will to persist would con-
jure a world in which death was some-
how (however obliquely or vicariously)
defeated. At such a juncture art is all
there is, and at the same time it is not
quite enough. Since Aucoin declares
opera to be the quintessential “im-
possible art” (because “an imagined
union of all the human senses and all
art forms... is itself an impossibility”),
what more suitable subject than the
myth that so emphatically demonstrates
the impossibility of the triumph over
death that art ultimately aspires to?
He has already dealt with the subject
in a short dramatic cantata called The
Orphic Moment, founded on a particu-
lar notion of Orpheus as “the ultimate
narcissistic aesthete,” half- deliberately
provok i ng loss as a goad to ma k i ng a r t.^1The opera is itself a recasting of a free-
standing, highly accomplished work
well calculated to knock that figure to
the margins of the story. Sarah Ruhl’s
play Eurydice, which premiered in2003, aims for once to reverse the per-
spective and follow Eurydice into the
underworld. Here she is reunited after
a fashion with her dead father, and this
reunion becomes the center of the play,
a countermyth with its own tragic end-
ing, in which the backward glance is
prompted by her speaking Orpheus’s
name in a moment of ambivalent hesi-
tation. (Ruhl, whose father died when
she was twenty, has said, “It made sense
to me that if Eurydice went to the un-
derworld she would meet her father. She
wanted to have more conversations with
him the way I wanted to have more con-
versations with my father.”) I have never
seen it performed, but the spare, vernac-
ular, rapid dialogue would seem to lend
itself to a multitude of possible perfor-
mance styles. Sudden chasms of dream
logic and dark humor function within a
structure that feels at once made up on
the spot and eerily ordained.
Aucoin writes of the play’s
“sometimes- goofy, Alice in Wonder-
land” effect, and Ruhl’s Eurydice
does resemble Alice’s grieving doppel-
gänger, down the rabbit hole for good
and abandoned to the unconsoling
company of a trio of bullying stones.
The edge of comic disruption is in
no way inconsistent with the through
line of grief. The libretto pares the
play down and adds a few additional
elements without damaging its skele-
tal strength, and however forceful the
score’s pulse, it does no more than keep
pace with the play’s own darting, light-
footed, but equally relentless rhythm.
Between them Aucoin and Ruhl have
fashioned an opera that for all the fa-
miliarity of the myth and profusion of
whimsical invention generates a sus-
pension of disbelief. Against all expec-
tations, the plight of the newly dead
entering into oblivion becomes a mat-
ter of empathetic concern.
At the production’s outset, the cur-
tain, which resembles an aquatint of
a brooding landscape of forested hills
and misty glens, seems to bode some
folkloric supernatural realm of trollsand mountain spirits, and the first bars
of music likewise are a dark ominous
swirl sounding orchestral depths. The
curtain rises on something quite differ-
ent: a bright abstraction of beach and
sky, the flat sun a perfect circle fixed
calmly above like a big yellow beach
ball, a postcard representation of a ge-
neric happiness. Orpheus (Joshua Hop-
kins) and Eurydice (Erin Morley) are
out on a date; with gestures he offers
her sky and birds and sea; she says (or
sings) “Wow.” It doesn’t feel like the
proverbial day at the beach, since the
orchestral music keeps getting between
them, intervening persistently and em-
phatically in every pause between their
tentative forays into each other’s hid-
den thoughts.
Aucoin has written that in opera “the
music and the poetry should each, ide-
ally, manifest a certain stubbornness;
their desires should even be somewhat
at odds with each other.” Such a con-
testation seems to permeate the opera,
with Orpheus and Eurydice themselves
sometimes acting out the struggle. They
appear to be a young couple intent on
transcendent bonding but never quite
able to communicate. Orpheus is pre-
occupied with music; Eurydice retreats
a bit, as if sensing that his music wants
to take possession of her. His preoccu-
pation is made visible and audible by
the descent via celestial elevator of his
winged twin (Jakub Józef OrliĔski on
opening night; John Holiday on some
subsequent dates). This character—
one of the elements added to Ruhl’s
play, figuring indeterminately as muse,
other self, divine messenger, or secret
lover—is a countertenor whose voice
intertwines with Orpheus’s baritone
to signal, presumably, moments of the
most unalloyed inspiration. In turning
toward him, Orpheus turns away from
Eurydice, suggesting some motive for
her later uncertainty in calling out to
him at the crucial moment.
Before we have gotten to know them,
or perhaps before they have gotten
to know each other, the couple are
engaged, with their cries of “Yes!”
“Yes!” sounding a little too desperate,
just as the festivity of the wedding that
quickly follows feels too insistently,
mechanically exuberant. As Orpheus
and Eurydice finish reciting their self-
scripted vows, the party kicks into
gear with a blast of what sounds like
Balkan wedding music, something out
of Goran Bregoviü’s raucous score for
Emir Kusturica’s appropriately titled
film Underground. The music thumps
but is scarcely cheerful—it couldn’t
be further away from, say, the ethe-
really buoyant wedding chorus from
Monteverdi’s Orfeo, with its effortless
conjuring of the pervading delight, no
matter how tinged with melancholy,
of mere being. Nothing here suggests
a world of luscious pleasures that one
would never, under any circumstances,
want to say farewell to. When Eurydice
sings “I hate parties,” it doesn’t come
as a surprise. She walks away from her
own wedding party to get a drink of
water—a water cooler standing in the
middle of nowhere becomes a minimal
symbol of the sunlit world she is about
to leave, and a premonition of the wa-
ters that wash away the memories of
newcomers to the underworld.Jakub Józef Orliĸski as Orpheus’s Double, Erin Morley as Eurydice, and Joshua Hopkins as Orpheus in EurydiceMarty Sohl /Metropolitan Opera(^1) The piece can be heard on the recently
released CD set Matthew Aucoin: Or-
phic Moments (Boston Modern Or-
chestra Project).