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Orpheus as Elvis
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19800 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1991 |
1,644 Words |
| Author
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Philip Kennicott
Philip Kennicott, based in New York, is a writer on
performance arts. |
The words East German, although politically nullified, still have a certain cachet in matters theatrical and operatic. East Germany means Brecht, it means Walter Felsenstein, and it means the Komische Oper, which made its American debut last February with a production of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice.
The Komische Oper's director, Harry Kupfer, is often quoted as saying, "Everything is political. Life is political." Despite the bumper-sticker neatness of that statement, there is a complexity and integrity to Kupfer's work that international critics have praised. "Everything is political" is interpreted broadly on stage as "every relationship should be dramatically telling."
Orfeo is not the opera one might expect an adventuresome company to bring for its U.S. debut. It is an austere, conservative work, known more for its important position in operatic history than for its memorable arias. Its overt political content is virtually nil, and its basis in the Orphic myth seems unlikely to yield any didactic opportunities for a late twentieth-century director. Indeed, one might expect a director with Kupfer's reputation to go traveling with Berg's Lulu, or Wagner, or some more contemporary, value-laden work.
Opera as Drama
But there was an appropriate irony in Kupfer's choice of Orpheus and Eurydike, as the title appears in the German translation Kupfer used. Composed in 1762, Gluck's best-known work is a reform opera, one of those recurrent, inherently polemical works that pop up in operatic history every hundred years or so. Gluck's particular reform was rebellion against the crass virtuosity of eighteenth-century singers and their cavalier attitude to the dramatic side of opera. With such works as Orfeo and Iphigenie en Aulide, he attempted to return to what he believed was the ideal, classical Greek method of music drama. As a result, Orfeo is constructed with limited action, focuses attention on the various emotional states of the two major characters, and has few opportunities for sheer vocal display.
Despite the two-hundred-year gap separating them, Kupfer and Gluck share a similar devotion to opera as drama. Kupfer is easily drawn into polemics that Gluck himself might have spoken. On several occasions Kupfer has vehemently stated that opera in major opera houses today is not about drama, but is, in his words, nothing more than "a costume
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