From demigods to fake gardeners: 130 years of music drama on DVD

Abstract

After the nepotistic Barberini family tumbled from papal power it was expedient for them to stay in Paris for a few years as guests of Cardinal Mazarin. It seems that Luigi Rossi went with his patrons, and his L’Orfeo inaugurated the remodelled Palais Royal theatre on 2 March 1647. The first fully fledged opera of its kind to be produced in France, a reduced score (copied about 30 years later) and a manuscript of Francesco Buti’s libretto both survive in the Vatican library—but these invite plenty of questions and doubts about how to edit suitable performing material for a modern revival. William Christie’s pioneering recording (Harmonia Mundi hmc901358/60, rec 1991, 218′) presented one possible way of reconstructing Rossi’s problematic masterpiece, but other attempts have been rare. Jetske Mijnssen’s production of L’Orfeo (Harmonia Mundi hmd9859058/59, rec 2016, 184′), staged at the Opéra national de Lorraine, is performed by Pygmalion and conducted by Raphaël Pichon, whose liner note explains that the prologue extolling the young Sun King, all ballets and several subplots have been cut because they ‘weigh down and dilute the dramatic tension’ (one wonders whether such theatrical concision was of any concern in the original 1647 production, which apparently lasted over six hours). The musical sources contain little more than voice and continuo parts, but Pichon proposes that the Vingt-quatre Violons du Roi must have played string accompaniments, and for good measure he also adds recorders, cornettos, sackbuts and trumpet; the conductor claims that the rich orchestral realization is modelled after Rossi’s other opera Il palazzo incantato (Rome, 1642), has partially rewritten basso continuo lines in emulation of Rossi’s chamber cantatas, and two canzoni by Cavalli and Ferrari have been incorporated for buffo characters. In other words, it is impossible for anyone other than a handful of experts to be able to discern how much this is really a work ‘composed’ by Rossi in the customary sense. Nevertheless, the singing, playing and staging are compelling. Instead of the 1647 production’s lavish sets (parks, palaces, caves and Hades) and flying machines, we see an austere black set with a gradual progression from a pseudo-Mafiosi wedding breakfast to a funeral, with Francesca Aspromonte’s spellbinding Eurydice at the core of almost everything. Also outstanding is Giuseppina Bridelli as the unfortunate Aristaeus, who desperately loves Eurydice but whose scheme to win her love backfires and brings about her death. The production has a focused directness and simplicity that means comic interludes about enjoying looser kinds of more fleeting love appear crassly hedonistic (Dominique Visse, Marc Mauillon and Renato Dolcini all on top comedic form), which in turn increases the concentrated intensity of the serious scenes. There are some clever dramatic touches: for example, David Tricou’s Apollo is a Catholic priest whose role to perform the wedding ceremony becomes the sad duty to lead proceedings at Eurydice’s funeral, and the three Fates are undertakers. Judith van Wanroij’s Orpheus is vocally impressive, but the character is hindered by the plot and location of the final act being changed: instead of visiting Hades to rescue Eurydice, Orpheus is rebuked by her father Endymion (not Charon); Pluto and Proserpine are merely a pair of guests, and the opera ends with him grieving over her coffin (instead of Jupiter placing him amongst the constellations). This makes the theatrical experience less mythological and more human, but such distortions of the story results in muddy obscuration.