‘Eurydice’ Review: An Ancient Tale Told Anew

The Metropolitan Opera’s staging of the work by composer Matthew Aucoin and librettist Sarah Ruhl refreshes the familiar. 

By Heidi Waleson

Nov. 24, 2021 5:54 pm

New York

On Tuesday, for the second time in just two months, the Metropolitan Opera presented the New York premiere of a new opera to an enthusiastic reception. If the pandemic-enforced absence from live performance has taught us anything, it is that new voices, rather than business-as-usual repertory, are the lifeblood of this old art form. It is especially telling that the piece, “Eurydice” by composer Matthew Aucoin and librettist Sarah Ruhl, tackles one of opera’s foundational stories and finds something new to say about it. 

I saw “Eurydice” at its world premiere at the LA Opera in February 2020. It felt tighter and more persuasive here, and Erin Morley’s richly varied soprano gave the title character more depth and poignancy than Danielle de Niese did in Los Angeles. The tragedy of “Eurydice” creeps up on you. In this telling, based on Ms. Ruhl’s 2003 play, it is Eurydice’s tragedy, rather than the story of a man who loses his wife twice. The journey to the Underworld is a psychological one. First, Eurydice finds love with Orpheus, although they are different—she is about words, he is about music. Vaguely discontented, she retreats to the protection of her (dead) father. He laboriously helps her rebuild her consciousness and remember what love is, but when offered the opportunity to move forward, she turns back. It is the wrong choice. Eurydice’s refusal to take on adulthood, with all its contradictions, results not in a safe, eternal childhood but rather in emptiness with neither words nor music. 

The piece is never weighty or didactic. Ms. Ruhl’s spare, direct text leavens seriousness with comedy, and Mr. Aucoin’s music, though heavy on percussion, follows suit, allowing those elements to coexist. The composer, who is 31 years old, is deeply versed in opera—his forthcoming book, “The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera,” demonstrates how profoundly he thinks about it—and throughout “Eurydice” he and Ms. Ruhl play with our expectations. For example, they gently poke fun at the story’s conceits: Orpheus’ song at the gates of Hell is a heroic salvo rather than a plea. In the myth, Orpheus’ singing can make stones weep; in the opera, three characters are actual Stones, and these rather dopey, bossy guardians do indeed weep, but we have to wonder why. 

Philip Glass is the clearest musical influence in the score, especially in the orchestration, yet Mr. Aucoin’s use of repeated figures and phrases works in its own way. Rather than pushing forward or inducing a hypnotic trance, the music of individual scenes feels swirling and circular, inviting the listener to sit with the feelings as the characters uncover them, and each scene has its own distinctive tone. The effect is cumulative. In the final scenes, Hades, until then a comic figure, is revealed in all his sinister cruelty and power. Eurydice, rather than becoming his unwilling bride, sings a wrenching final aria that encompasses all the love, warmth and humanity that she has found, and then chooses to dip herself in the river of forgetfulness; the opera ends in orchestral grunts and abrupt silence.https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Ms. Morley’s vibrant soprano encompassed Eurydice’s naiveté, playfulness and growing understanding, moving from a bright, flexible, high-lying tessitura to a more dramatic and lyrical expressivity. As Orpheus, baritone Joshua Hopkins conveyed an artist’s macho single-mindedness. Orpheus’ Double, a countertenor, represents his musical consciousness. The ploy works most effectively when the two have slightly dissonant duets; Jakub Józef Orliński was occasionally inaudible but always noticeable, especially when he was shirtless and wearing the flowing, gold-embroidered black pants designed by Ana Kuzmanic. Bass-baritone Nathan Berg brought an affectionate warmth to Eurydice’s Father, and Barry Banks’s stratospheric tenor toggled effectively between Hades’ comic and sinister natures. Stacey Tappan, Ronnita Miller and Chad Shelton supplied bumptious comedy as the Stones. Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin artfully made the score’s percussive extremes expressive (the orchestra took a well-deserved, onstage bow at the end), and the invisible, wordless chorus of the dead sounded like loss personified.

Director Mary Zimmerman’s production emphasized the opera’s meditative quality, and Daniel Ostling’s spare set and T.J. Gerckens’s lighting used simple means to evoke place and emotion. The upper world is a bright, sunny beach, sparsely furnished with a couple of beach chairs; the Underworld is a dark, patterned stone wall and the cutout yellow sun is now black. An elevator between the two worlds is a clever touch; efficiently, the shower inside it confers the forgetfulness required in the land of the dead. Ms. Kuzmanic used bright colors, patterns and fabrics to mythologize the quasi-modern costumes—I especially liked how Hades’ attire went from a loud suit to a long gown (he was on stilts), with full-length tail and horns for his final appearance as his true self—and the Stones, encased in gray like giant Michelin Men, looked properly absurd. Denis Jones supplied amusingly goofy ’60s-flavored choreography for the wedding scene, and S. Katy Tucker’s projections included graphically varied titles—all caps for shouting, calligraphy for letter-writing—that integrated seamlessly with the décor. 

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).