The ending of the first, the Vienna version is a disaster, and in Paris, when he had a chance to fix it, he made it longer instead. (Because for Paris, opera always meant dance as much as song.)
So now it’s not only bathetic, it’s too long.
The opera was commissioned by the Empress Maria Theresa—she was paying the bills so she called the shots. And it was a love-gift for her husband, Francis of Lorraine (Emperor Franz I), for his name-day, October 4 (St. Francis’s day), 1762, though in fact the performance did not take place till the fifth. And the Empress—who had been running twenty countries for more than twenty years, remodeling laws, fighting hectic wars, building palaces, giving birth to sixteen children—well, she had her notions. And an important one was Franz. “No unhappy endings on my Franz’s day,” she told the composer.
The myth of Orpheus doesn’t contain much in the way of activity and there are no classical plays based on it. That didn’t stop opera composers, from as far back as Peri’s Euridice (1597, sometimes called the first opera) and Monteverdi’s La favola d’Orfeo (1608, often called the first operatic masterpiece). But the myth doesn’t follow modern dramatic pattern.
In the myth, Orpheus, son of Apollo, the greatest of musicians, whose singing could enchant wild animals, scads of workmen (his work songs made raising cyclopean monuments effortless), delight the gods (even Hades), is miserable because a serpent has bitten his true love, Eurydice, on the day of their wedding according to some versions (including Monteverdi’s). Love (Amore) tells him he will be permitted to descend to the realms of Death and fetch his bride back—but only if he goes straight home without looking at her. Of course he doubts—he isn’t sure she’s really there, he can’t hear anything, and he looks back just at the last—and she is lost. And his attempts to return to sing her out again are repulsed.
The myth means: It doesn’t matter how brilliant, how talented, how god-approved you are, once someone is dead, you can’t get them back.
By altering the end, by having the Gods change their minds, the opera now says: If you lose your love and can’t get them back, it’s your fault! You didn’t love them enough! If you had, the Gods would have let them return. This is nonsense, and offensive. And Maria Theresa got hers: In 1765, Franz dropped dead, and though she mourned him for fifteen years, she never got him back. They say she never wore court dress or jewels or makeup or a powdered wig again. (She continued to transact business, to the frustration of her brainy son, Joseph II.)
Have you ever lost anyone you deeply loved? Did you not get them back? You can’t have loved them very much. Not really. That is Gluck’s childish moral. Whenever I hear the glorious music he wrote for Acts I and II, my delight is hampered by knowledge of this nasty ending.
Act III contains the bitter duet in which Euridice reproaches Orfeo for not turning around and looking at her. They had to tell it this way because it’s an opera and Euridice needs something to do, to make a character of her. And Calzabigi, the librettist, turned her into a shrew. At last Orfeo turns, she perishes instantly, and he sings “Che farò senza Euridice” (or “J’ai perdu mon Euridice”) and then Love returns with the good news …. And then (in the French version) the dances of rejoicing go on forever and mean nothing.
Except once. It was the Paris Opera Ballet, on a visit to New York shortly after the death of Pina Bausch. That genius among choreographers had restaged the opera into a 60-minute entertainment. There were three singers as Orphée, Euridice and l’Amour. Otherwise, the chorus sang in the pit, and dancers enacted their parts.
The opera opened with a despairing Orphée moaning “Euridice!” on the tomb of his beloved while the dancers commiserated. From that point we moved to his solo scenes and all the rest of the opera. Until “J’ai perdu mon Euridice.” As that perfect aria concluded, and I grew tense awaiting the return of l’Amour, something curious happened: the dancers returned and resumed the postures and steps of the opening scene. They attempted to console the inconsolable widower. And the chorus sang that opening scene. And heartbroken Orphée, on the ground, immobile, merely sang, “Euridice!” (Four syllables, please note.)
We realized that the rest, his quest, the interference of the Gods, the visit to the Underworld, the bitter duet, the despair of the quest’s end, had all occurred in the minstrel’s mind. There was no visit to reclaim Euridice. She was dead. What’s done cannot be undone. Gluck’s perfect score came—to my way of thinking—to the perfect end.
I leaped from my seat screaming in delirious joy. Pina Bausch saved a damaged, wonderful opera! My opinion of her, already exalted, unfurled to the heavens with gratitude. I love all Gluck’s operas, actually, more and more the more of them I hear. Alcestis deserves a new production, don’t you agree? And Armide and both Iphigénies and Ezio and Temistocle. And plenty more we’ve never heard. (He wrote about seventy.)
I never want to hear Orfeo with that tacky happy ending again! Spoils the whole thing. Detach the French dances and do them on a separate program or stick them in some Tchaikovsky grand opera where they won’t be noticed.
Change my mind.
