a triumph of love & perseverance

Fresh, new love may have its distinct passion. But married love adds a depth and breadth to that passion, binding two souls tightly into a single being. Such is the love between Orphée and his beloved Eurydice—one of the deepest, truest loves of all time.

Philip Glass—the most renowned and often produced opera composer of our time— carefully follows the script of Jean Cocteau’s 1949 film Orphée. Mining such rich mythology, he creates a work of remarkable power that celebrates the potency of love and loyalty.

The delicacy and simplicity of the music highlight the powerful range of emotions that the characters—and all of us—experience in the course of this “must see” opera.

The Portland Opera/West Coast premiere of a production the New York Times called “stunning.”

Sung in French with English translations projected above the stage.

Performances held at the Keller Auditorium.

Audio described performance is Thursday, November 12.

download the study guide pdf

Cast

Scenery designed by Andrew Lieberman
Costumes designed by Kaye Voyce
The scenery and costumes were originally created for Glimmerglass Opera

ACT I — Orphée, a famous poet, chats with another old poet friend and watches enviously as a group of young people swarm around Cégeste, a younger, up-and-coming poet. Orphée becomes transfixed with Cégeste’s patron, The Princess, but the spell is broken when the drunken Cégeste starts a brawl, causing the cops to arrive and break up the party. Cégeste manages to flee the room, but, outside, is struck down by two motorcyclists. The stunned crowd watches as the motorcyclists enter bearing Cégeste’s lifeless body. As the police attempt to move the body, The Princess and her chauffeur, Heurtebise, intervene, and the party clears out. She then turns to Orphée and demands that he accompany her as they transport the corpse. Orphée, in a state of shock, complies, but then is startled to watch as The Princess apparently brings Cégeste back to life and leads him from the room through a mirror. Heurtebise returns carrying a radio, which he presents to the dazed and confused Orphée, then escorts Orphée home.

There, Orphée’s wife, Eurydice, worries and waits for the missing Orphée to return. Her friend Aglaonice waits with her, along with the police commissioner. Finally, Orphée arrives, to Eurydice’s relief, but then rudely dismisses both the commissioner and Aglaonice. Distracted and preoccupied, Orphée interrupts his wife as she tries to tell him that she is pregnant, then closes himself in his studio, along with the radio, leaving Eurydice with Heurtebise, who has entered unobtrusively and watched the entire scene.

Time passes. Orphée becomes obsessed with listening to the radio, which emits mysterious messages. Neglecting Eurydice, he works feverishly to transcribe the words, which he interprets as poetic inspiration. Eurydice turns to Heurtebise for comfort.

Cégeste’s death and disappearance remain a mystery. At the commissioner’s office, Orphée’s older poet friend, along with Aglaonice, accuse Orphée of plagiarizing the dead Cégeste’s work. The commissioner, reminding them that Orphée is a famous poet and a national treasure, dismisses them, and they threaten to find their own justice.

Meanwhile, Eurydice, desperately unhappy, decides to visit Aglaonice. As she leaves, motorcycles are heard once again, and Heurtebise rushes out, returning a moment later with the dying Eurydice, whom he lays out tenderly on the daybed. When he tries to tell Orphée that his wife is near death, the poet ignores him, preferring to write. Finally, Orphée looks up from his work, and Heurtebise informs him that his wife is now dead, but that if he is willing to follow, Orphée can reclaim his wife from The Princess, whom Heurtebise reveals as Death. Following Heurtebise’s instructions, they travel together through the mirror.

ACT II — In the Underworld, The Princess is on trial before a panel of nameless judges for taking Eurydice’s life without “orders.” During the strange trial, Cégeste, The Princess, Orphée, Heurtebise, and Eurydice are each interrogated, and it comes out that The Princess is in love with Orphée and that Heurtebise is in love with Eurydice. The judges withdraw to study the case, leaving Orphée and The Princess alone together. Orphée professes his love for The Princess and swears to return to her regardless of what happens. The judges return to pronounce their sentence: The Princess is given provisional freedom, and Eurydice may return to her life with Orphée upon the condition that he never looks directly at her again. Heurtebise, at his own suggestion, is appointed to accompany them. They return home, but find it nearly impossible to comply with the condition. To avoid Eurydice, Orphée retreats into his studio along with the mysterious radio, but eventually, his gaze falls on his wife, and she immediately disappears back into the Underworld.

Soon after, a mob of angry youngsters appears to confront Orphée about Cégeste’s death. Heurtebise hands Orphée a pistol, and during the confrontation, Orphée is shot. Returning to the underworld, Orphée is reunited with The Princess, but she commands Heurtebise to return Orphée, once and for all, to his life. Despite his protests, she is adamant, explaining, “A poet’s death must sacrifice herself to make him immortal.”

Orphée is returned through the mirror, and finds Eurydice resting casually. They chatter about the child they’re expecting before Orphée heads back to work, seemingly unaware of all that has passed. In the Underworld, The Princess and Heurtebise are led off to their frightening, unspecified judgments.

Exploring Mortality with Orphée

“The process is to become super-involved with the subject matter. And as the subject matter becomes clear to me, the music can take shape.”

—Philip Glass in a 1994 interview with Melissa Harris

There are over 66 operas dealing with the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. This number does not include operas in which the Orpheus myth appears peripherally, or even operas that are anonymous, and does not begin to touch on the number of plays, ballets, films, novels and paintings based on this story. At a glance, it makes perfect sense that composer after composer should wish to write the music that would sing the story of Eternity’s greatest musician and his beloved wife. This tale of a love beyond death, of the immortality of art, of the sacrifice of human passions to artistic ones, is a many-layered story, compelling in its simplicities as well as its complexities.

The foundation of the Orpheus myth in the form recognizable to us first appears in the 6th century BCE. The most widely disseminated narrations were those of Virgil and Ovid, with the version from Ovid’s Metamorphoses gaining great popularity during theRenaissance. While the bones of the myth are ultimately tragic (Orpheus is torn apart by vengeful Bacchantes after losing his wife, Eurydice, to death and reclaiming her from Hades, only to lose her again because he could not comply with the condition of her release), most of the operas have substantially altered the plot to allow a joyful reunion of Orpheus and his wife.

The ancients recognized the allegorical possibilities of the Orpheus myth, and many of the more modern treatments of it go beyond Orpheus as chanteur and lover. The details of the legend offer intriguing offshoots to explore. Jean Cocteau explored the themes of death, immortality and art in his play and his film of the same name. Cocteau is particularly drawn to the idea of meeting one’s own death specifically and the flirtation of the artists with their own mortality during the process of creation. In his film, Cocteau poses the question to Orphée, “Who do you want, Eurydice or Death?” Orphée answers, “Both.” Cocteau’s vision of Orpheus accuses the comforts and joys of life, symbolized by Eurydice, of stifling originality and inspiration. Orphée is wildly successful, adored by the public, but disdained by the young poets who are the heirs to what was once the cutting edge of his artistry. He has sold out. Or has he? Throughout this retelling, the tension between mortality and immortality is personified. But there remains much that is mysterious, much that is hinted at, but never explained.

Cocteau said, “Mystery exists only in precise things.” It seems natural then that the precise, disciplined and deliberate inspiration of Philip Glass should lend itself to reinterpreting Cocteau’s meditations on the creative process in Orphée. Glass was no stranger to the operatic stage when he received the commission from American Repertory Theater for Orphée, the first in what would become his “Cocteau Trilogy,” which includes Orphée, La Belle et la Bête and Les Enfants Terribles. He had tremendous success with his “Portrait Trilogy,” all massive works, including the six-hour Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, and Akhnaten. In addition, Glass, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, had written The Voyage, ostensibly about Columbus’ discovery of the New World, but ultimately a rumination upon exploration. With Orphée, Glass pares down the awe-inspiring visuals and writes more intimately.

Asked why he was interested in basing opera on Cocteau’s films, Glass gave a two-fold answer. He told writer Melissa Harris, “Opera has always been based on the literature of its time, whether it be poetry or plays or novels. Part of the literature of our time is certainly film.” Of course, these films were made by Jean Cocteau, and therein lies the second answer to the question. “[Cocteau]…was viewing the same subject from many different angles. He was completely obsessed with this one subject: the creative process … you can see that clearly in Orphée. There he takes on art in terms of immortality—the relationship between death and mortality and art.” It seems, though, that Orphée may have had more personal resonance for the composer, as well as the purity of creative simpatico between Cocteau and Glass.

About the time that Glass was writing Orphée, some critics expressed dismay at the “conventional” nature of his work in the early 1990s, including The Voyage and Hydrogen Jukebox. Instead of viewing these works as an evolution as Glass clearly does—“The only way music can be profoundly successful is if the musical language is part of the argument of the piece” —“rigorous” musicians and critics saw a “backsliding” from the originality of Glass’ 1970s work. They saw the “cultural phenomenon” that is Philip Glass as a liability, and that the lessening importance of individual works in the context of the body of his works weakened the individual works. Compare this with the opening of Orphée, where dapper, successful Orphée converses with an older poet. “No doubt they think I’m old hat too, and that a poet shouldn’t be too famous,” he says. It is Cocteau’s line, but it must ring true to artists from Weill and Bernstein to Glass, artists whose work defied genres and gained popularity with the public yet remained “legitimate.”

Glass also suffered the loss of his young wife, artist Candy Jernigan, in 1991, two years before the premiere of Orphée. “She was going to live forever, as far as I was concerned.” Jernigan’s art also gained her a kind of immortality after her death. During her lifetime she was little known outside the avant-garde art world, whereas two books of her collages were published posthumously. Orphée’s themes of love and loss, inspiration and creation, mortality and immortality weave in and out of Glass’ personal life during this time, and make the work seem more intimate and intricate. It also seems to fit with the way that Glass prefers to work. “The process is to become super involved with subject matter. And as the subject matter becomes clear to me, the music can take shape.” Glass had visited the Paris that Cocteau’s films documented—1954, the poets, the artists’ cafés. He was young and involved in the “scene.” He knew Cocteau’s work and was “attracted to it…” His timing allowed him to become even more intimately connected to the questions posed within the film and transferred into the opera. The result is spellbinding.

—Alexis Hamilton

Philip Glass (1937- )

Through his operas, his symphonies, his compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations with artists ranging from Twyla Tharp to Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen to David Bowie, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times. The operas—Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, Akhnaten, and The Voyage, among many others—play throughout the world’s leading houses, and rarely to an empty seat. Glass has written music for experimental theater and for Academy Award-winning motion pictures such as The Hours and Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, while Koyaanisqatsi, his initial filmic landscape with Godfrey Reggio and the Philip Glass Ensemble, may be the most radical and influential mating of sound and vision since Fantasia. His associations, personal and professional, with leading rock, pop and world music artists date back to the 1960s, including the beginning of his collaborative relationship with artist Robert Wilson. Indeed, Glass is the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film and in popular music—simultaneously. He was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud. Finding himself dissatisfied with much of what then passed for modern music, he moved to Europe, where he studied with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (who also taught Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones) and worked closely with the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble—seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer. The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed “minimalism.” Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops. There has been nothing “minimalist” about his output. In the past 25 years, Glass has composed more than twenty operas, large and small; eight symphonies (with others already on the way); two piano concertos and concertos for violin, piano, timpani, and saxophone quartet and orchestra; soundtracks to films ranging from new scores for the stylized classics of Jean Cocteau to Errol Morris’s documentary about former defense secretary Robert McNamara; string quartets; a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, and Doris Lessing, among many others. He presents lectures, workshops, and solo keyboard performances around the world, and continues to appear regularly with the Philip Glass Ensemble. —Courtesy of Tim Page (www.philipglass.com)

Rob Ainsley, Orphée assistant conductor and Portland Opera chorus master, talks about Orphée and plays excerpts.

Sam Helfrich, Orphée director.

Lisa Saffer, Princessa, discusses her role in Orphée.

Listen to the Music