The New York Review of Books (2022-01-13)

22 The New York Review

Notes from Underground

Geoffrey O’Brien

Eurydice

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.^1

The 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 in

2003, 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 trolls

and 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 Eurydice

Marty Sohl /Metropol

itan Opera

(^1) The piece can be heard on the recently
released CD set Matthew Aucoin: Or-
phic Moments (Boston Modern Or-
chestra Project).
O'Brien 22 23 .indd 22 12 / 15 / 21 5 : 05 PM