January 13, 2022 23
Every word sung is projected onstage.
This is not merely a convenience for the
spectators, but an integral part of the
production. The words are not above
or apart from the opera but within it,
as participants. Displayed in a variety
of styles and positions, their precisely
calibrated timing becomes, inaudibly, a
part of the music. We see every phrase
as it is sung, a doubling that accentu-
ates at each moment the primacy of
language in this story in which the dead
send letters to the living and the living
to the dead. In a first glimpse of what
awaits, we encounter Eurydice’s dead
father (Nathan Berg)—still wearing an
old- fashioned business suit, in a cage-
like cabinet on top of which a mortuary
angel crouches—as he writes her con-
gratulations on her wedding. The cur-
sive letters of his sentences melt away
as soon as they are inscribed, water
being the fundamental sign of death
here.
The newly arrived Eurydice must
learn to comprehend the language of
the dead. But her father has managed
to evade the waters of oblivion and re-
tain the memory of human language,
and he restores her to a half- life by
helping her reclaim, with difficulty, its
vocabulary, finally singing to her Lear’s
last words to Cordelia. By hanging on
to names they cultivate a forbidden ar-
chive of memories, memories that no
longer have any link to the living world.
The Father himself is a relic; there is a
moment when, emerging from the dark,
he resembles a nineteenth- century ar-
chaeologist making his way through a
labyrinth in which he has been buried
once and for all. If Orpheus has a dou-
ble, Eurydice’s existence in the under-
world hovers between two other male
figures: the Father, who by stirring up
memory sustains a connection to life,
and Hades (Barry Banks), who ac-
costed her outside her wedding party
and lured her toward death by offering
to show her a letter from her father.
Hades, who sings in a screechingly
high tenor register, materializes first as
a lounge lizard proffering dubious cock-
tails to Eurydice in a penthouse suite
while twiddling with the radio dial to
find suitable mood music. (It’s a ploy
that leads to her tumbling down the six
hundred steps of his stairway into the
underworld.) Later, in his infernal head-
quarters, giving Orpheus the ground
rules for Eurydice’s rescue, he presents
himself as the chintziest of Halloween
Lucifers, with horns and coiled tail;
subsequently, as he asserts his full dom-
ination, he parades even more absurdly
on stilts. Flanked by shadowy demonic
minions who might be refugees from
a ballet in a French Baroque opera,
Banks’s Hades carries on like a comic
emcee at a members- only nightclub,
getting the biggest laugh of the night
when he asks Orpheus if he isn’t enjoy-
ing his grief too much.^2 Since the Lord
of the Underworld has the last laugh,
it’s fitting he should exude a clownish-
ness indistinguishable from cruelty.
Once we reach the country of death,
the earlier sunlit scenes fade into faintly
recalled sketches. Mary Zimmerman’s
production, with sets designed by Dan-
iel Ostling and costumes by Ana Kuz-
manic, reserves its strongest sense of
place for the underworld, even if it is
a place of shifting appearances, where
sharply defined spaces emerge from
darkness and fade as if they never were,
an anteroom still harboring traces of
longing for places and people already
irretrievable, a bardo state or a theater
of the mind more real than life above
ground. It’s raining in the elevator in
which Eurydice arrives, and she steps
out carrying an umbrella, dressed in a
bright green coat of an earlier era, to
find herself surrounded by the trio of
gray stones who are there to initiate
her into the rules of being dead. (Sta-
cey Tappan, Ronnita Miller, and Chad
Shelton operate almost as a percussion
section in human form, carrying a lotof the production’s weight as they boss,
bray, panic, and sob in a grotesque par-
ody of human feeling.) The phantasms
can be auditory as well, like the unseen
train whose passage is so distinctively
marked by a blend of strings, flute, and
piccolo over a low rumble of drums.
In this scene of arrival Erin Morley’s
Eurydice begins to assert her presence
fully, as if a latent strength surged in
reaction to her confusion, her amnesia,
her inability to grasp where she is or to
recognize her father, whom she mis-
takes for a porter welcoming her to a
foreign city. She rises into the intensity
of a belated self- realization that makes
the scenes between Eurydice and the
Father the core of the opera’s emotional
life, the assertion of an impossible per-sistence. The central action, however,
is neither sung nor spoken but mutely
performed, as the Father moves around
the stage with a ball of string, marking
off a room for Eurydice within the void
of the underworld, as if to act out Paul
Klee’s definition of drawing as “taking
a line for a walk.” The effect of the bare
boundary of string is epic enough in it-
self to make the music that accompa-
nies it almost superfluous. The flimsiest
of borders becomes the last and only
dividing line between form and form-
lessness, home and homelessness.
Eurydice, finally offered a chance to
return to the surface world with Or-
pheus, is torn by a desire to stay with
the Father; he, believing she has al-
ready gone on her way, submits to the
obliterating waters of a river, which
here takes the form of a shower stall
in a tiny bathroom. Returning to find
him definitively lost to her, Eurydice
surrenders to the same process: a dou-
ble suicide, each dying a second death.
The Father’s final monologue, in which
he dredges up from childhood mem-
ory the directions to the river (“Take
Route 88 West to Route 80. You’ll go
over a bridge. Go three miles and you’ll
come to the exit for Middle Road... ”),
is spoken, not sung, over what Aucoin
describes as “a gentle, watery texture.”
It’s as if language were drowning in
sound.
The opera’s reversal of perspective
means that Orpheus takes on a role
that is, if not diminished, then at least
more distant. We are a long way away
from the piercingly beautiful (or beau-
tifully piercing) grief of Monteverdi’s
Orpheus, gathering all feeling into it-
self while Eurydice barely makes her
presence heard. Here Orpheus’s plain-
tive reflections and outcries after the
death of Eurydice seem like remote
transmissions, more depressed than
anguished. The opening scene showed
an Orpheus at once naive, vulnerable,
detached, and almost arrogant in his
absorption in his own art. He is locked
in communication, but it is not clear
with what; and his determination to re-
trieve Eurydice seems compounded of
boyish bravado as much as of despair.
When he arrives at the walls of Hell,
we are given an impressive full- frontal
view of them, something more solid
and clear- cut than the shadowlands
within: more like the implacable archi-
tecture of an old epic movie like Land
of the Pharaohs or The Egyptian, with
music textured momentarily to match
that evocation, as if the infernal pow-
ers could call on Bernard Herrmann
or Dimitri Tiomkin to shore up their
defenses. Told he can only sing to the
dead in a dead language, Orpheus and
his angelic double respond with a Latin
chant, music from a crypt to break open
a crypt. It is lovely but lost, nothing
that might plausibly move the heart of
Hades, who in any case prefers “happy
music with a nice beat.”
It is instead Eurydice who is given
an aria of love fully recollected to sing,
even if it is a love of an artist who “is
always going away from you.” In death
as in life they finally fail to connect,
moving in opposite directions until
the moment when Orpheus, no longer
singing, arrives by the same elevator in
the land of the dead, entering the same
silence and darkness as Eurydice, pick-
ing up a letter he can no longer read. It
is not so much an ending as a stopping
point, the sudden clicking off of a large
machine. Q(^2) Aucoin writes in The Impossible Art,
“Orpheus seems more at home singing
elegies for Eurydice than he is actually
living with her.”
LAXNESS
It came to me later in the day
Walking the dog I’d decided
To put down because among other
Recent aggressions she had
Bitten the child of a stranger
I had to walk her to get away
From thinking about it and that’s when
His name finally occurred to me
An acoustic image descending
The vowel scale from “likeness”
A man’s adulthood contained so little
Of it that I took note of anything
Such as his book that made me
Burst into tears
In this tears resembled laughter
In books I had encountered scenes
Of people bursting into song
In Kidnapped Alan Breck kills four men
Then bursts into a Gaelic poem
Composed by himself on the spot
But there were few experiences like it
I tried to remember the landscape
Was bleak and the suffering relentless
The view made up for a great deal
Even before the ocean came into it
The father was mean but you forgot
Everything about him in time
Except what he did to his daughter
That and the reindeer he rode
Into the blizzard and through
The river ice trying to kill it
And I would say who wrote it
But was drawing a blank
As I held my weeping child
At 4 AM in the converted room
Blankness was the better place
I promised you the vet would find for her
And there was hope and solace in it
Like a lake famed for its monster
A long form made of lake water
And then I thought of likeness
And the dog bursting into flames
And the flames licking my hand
—Cyrus Console