Out of the Darkness: Opera Atelier’s Orpheus and Eurydice

Mireille Asselin as Eurydice, with Artist of Atelier Ballet Xi Yi, in Orpheus and Eurydice. (Photo: Bruce Zinger)

Life after death? The question is purely rhetorical in Christoph Willibald Gluck’s plucky retelling of the ancient Orpheus and Eurydice story. His 1774 French opera ends not – as in the original Ovid myth – in tragedy but in a triumph of love conquering all. As outlined in Ranieri de' Calzabigi’s 18th-century libretto, boy gets girl and lives happily ever after, uplifted by melodious music, song and ballet. Canada’s acclaimed Opera Atelier company, known for its historically accurate stagings of Baroque opera, amplifies the joy in Gluck’s dramatically divergent ending in an energetic production recently presented at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre.

Assembling an all-star cast of Canadian singers for their season opener, Opera Atelier co-founders Marshall Pynkoski and Jeanette Lajeunesse Zingg successfully transform Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice into a celebration of not just life but also the power of art to exist for eternity as a testament to the best of human achievement.

Canadian tenor Colin Ainsworth gloriously hits all the high-register notes in Gluck’s demanding contra-tenor Orpheus. Though they have fewer arias to sing, sopranos Mireille Asselin as Eurydice and Anna-Julia David as Amour also beguile with their bright and heartfelt performances. Conductor David Fallis leads the Tafelmusik orchestra and chamber choir. Rounding out the cast are the 17 members of the Opera Atelier dance ensemble, led by Zingg, who both choreographed and performs the Baroque ballet sequences.

Gluck’s reform opera, so-called because it replaced Baroque courtly conventions with complex scene development and emotionally expressive music, came about at the request of Marie Antoinette, who reportedly asked the Bavarian composer to modify the Italian version of the opera he had first presented in Vienna in 1762 to satisfy Parisian tastes by adding more dance music and substituting the lead castrato vocal part with a countertenor. Jean-Philippe Rameau was then all the rage in the French capital and while aiming to better Rameau’s grandly elegant operatic productions, Gluck added a psychological dimension, creating characters who pop out of the elaborate scenery to strike a chord with the viewer.

Orpheus, the poet-musician who braves a journey into the Underworld to rescue his beloved from the clutches of Pluto, is, in Gluck’s hands, a tortured soul who frequently breaks into plangent song to give vent to his sorrow. Eurydice, his betrothed, who dies just before their wedding day, sings responsively, probing her lover’s vulnerabilities and stirring him to defiant action after accusing him of cold indifference to her adoration.

Orpheus, as permitted by the gods in the ancient tale, ventures to retrieve his beloved from Hades under one condition: he must not look upon her until she’s freed from her shadowy subterranean dungeon—here evoked with heaps of smoking dry ice. Should Orpheus disobey, he’ll lose Eurydice forever. Alas, he succumbs to temptation, becoming an enduring symbol of the dangers of reckless curiosity. The classical myth continues with dire consequences for his mistake, including Orpheus’s decapitation by the frenzied maenads, followers of Dionysus. Gluck’s optimistic pre-French Revolution rendition takes a different turn. Divine intervention ensures Eurydice’s resurrection under the guidance of Amour, a new god of love character for female voice introduced by Gluck to guarantee a felicitous reunion. The unusual happy ending surprises, yet Pynkoski’s seamless direction saves it from feeling tagged on, as is sometimes the case with other productions.