Orfeo Revived

Expecting realism in opera is like asking Hamlet for a weather report. But even the most fantastic librettos in the current repertory are straight reporting compared to the matchstick plots of 200 years ago. Written mostly by long-forgotten Italian composers and poets, the fashionable operas of the day were filled not with human beings but with animated decorations. Singers stepped out of character at will, indulging in barbarous cadenzas or improvised roulades, and were indignant at the idea of any composer's trying to write down all the notes.

This tradition was smashed by a German with a temper so violent that (so the story goes) the Emperor himself occasionally had to be called in to pacify the musicians. Christoph Willibald Gluck cleared the way for modern opera.

Gluck's revolutionary work was Orfeo ed Euridice (1762). Though it was based on the ancient Greek myth, it was the first opera to portray something like real human feelings. To the story of how Orpheus journeys to Hades to bring back his dead wife, Gluck wrote music that flowed smoothly, affectingly and formed a whole with the text. Gluck's only concession to current fashion: the use of a male alto for the name part.* No bigger change in operatic technique occurred until the 19th century and Richard Wagner.

Last week Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera revived Orfeo for the first time in 13 years, in a gracefully staged, elegantly paced production. It had its faults: Sopranos Hilde Gueden (Euridice) and Roberta Peters (Cupid) performed without much style. Mezzo-Soprano Rise Stevens (Orfeo) evidently found the role too low for her voice, and sang without luster during most of the evening, although she made the best of the beautiful third-act aria (Che Faro). Though famous for that most feminine of roles, Carmen, she acted her male part convincingly. Other credits to the production: smooth, well-balanced chorus singing; leaf-light dancing by Guest Ballerina Alicia Markova; a fearsome dance of the Furies (choreographed by Zachary Solov), in which hundreds of white arms reached through the darkness like the suckers on a starfish; handsome sets (by Harry Horner) for Hades, the Elysian Fields, the Temple of Love. But most of all the audience was charmed by the elegiac sweetness of Gluck's music, which 200 years did not seem to age.

* He rewrote the part for a tenor when he moved to Paris, but in the U.S. it is usually sung by a mezzo-soprano in man's dress.

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