Aucoin’s Rethinking of Orpheus Myth

Readers may recall that this past Thursday I used my xfinity service to view a saved copy of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice (Orpheus and Eurydice) presented by the Lyric Opera of Chicago on a Great Performances broadcast. This was intended as “homework” before viewing my saved copy of Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice opera, composed on a joint commission by the Metropolitan Opera and the Los Angeles Opera. What made the Chicago Gluck performance interesting was that the casting included the Joffrey Ballet with John Neumeier serving as both director and choreographer.

Aucoin’s undertaking also departed from convention, beginning with the decision to prioritize Eurydice. In fact the libretto was prepared by Sarah Ruhl, using her Eurydice play as a point of departure. Furthermore, the production was staged by Mary Zimmerman, who won a 2002 Tony Award for Best Direction of her own play, an adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In other words this was a production that had “Greek mythology power team” written all over it.

Unfortunately, the result might be described as all power without any team. Both Ruhl and Zimmerman had their own agendas about Eurydice, and it seemed as if both the libretto and the staging kept bumping into each in squirm-inducing ways. My only previous knowledge of Aucoin was his New York Review of Books article about the book Music Lessons, documenting lectures delivered at the Collège de France by Pierre Boulez. That article was probably the most devastating attack I had encountered in my many years of reading the New York Review. While I welcomed his alternative perspective on Boulez, I have to say that his own efforts at composition left me as annoyed with him as he seemed to be annoyed with Boulez.

I suspect that the primary problem was that there were too many inventive perspectives that kept bumping into each other. The primary casualty was a well-defined approach to narrative. Perhaps that approach was neglected under the assumption that everyone already knew the story. However, this was not the case, since I am pretty sure that not everyone was familiar with the past achievements of either Ruhl or Zimmerman. Indeed, if Aucoin’s music came out sounding as if it was doing little more than following the words, it may have been because he was in the uncomfortable position of a servant of two masters.

Sadly, this left me in a position in which I find that I have almost no recollection of any of the Metropolitan Opera vocalists, let alone their conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. It takes a lot of power to distract attention from the high-quality musicians that contributed to this production. This was particularly disappointing when considering that at least two of those distractions did not seem to know very much about opera.