Orfeo 101

February 24, 1607, Palace of the Duke of Mantua, Italy

The People

Orfeo, a legendary musician

Euridice, his betrothed

A messenger

Music, then Hope

Caronte (Charon), the ferryman in Hades

Plutone and Proserpina, king and queen of Hades

Apollo, Orfeo’s father

Orfeo is the only main character. The other parts, which include various shepherds and spirits in addition to those shown above, are all smaller; many can be combined in different ways.

The Percentage of Main Characters Who Don’t Make It Out Alive: 50%*

*Given Euridice is important to the plot, we’ll give her main character status for this metric.

The Places

The fields of Thrace, the underworld, and the heavens

The Legend

Orpheus was a Greek hero with legendary musical skills — even rocks or trees were moved to dance when he sang or played the lyre. His mother was Calliope, foremost of the nine Muses; his father was either Apollo or a Thracian king, depending on the myth source. In the opera, it’s Apollo. Orpheus was one of Jason’s Argonauts, and he saved them from almost-certain death by musically outdueling the Sirens, whose songs were so alluring they caused ships’ crews to sail into rocks in pursuit of them. Orpheus fell in love with Euridyce shortly after the Argonauts’ expedition ended.

The Plot

While the libretto is structured as a classical tragedy, with a prologue and five acts, the divisions are arbitrary. The action is continuous and the scene changes following acts two and four would have been performed in front of the audience.

PROLOGUE: The fields of Thrace

Music compliments the audience, describes her celebrated powers to rouse the emotions, and introduces Orfeo, highlighting his musical abilities.

ACT I: The fields of Thrace

It’s the wedding day of Orfeo and Euridice, who enter accompanied by a chorus of nymphs and shepherds. Orfeo sings of his great love for Euridice, who then pledges her heart to him. Most of the chorus and the bridal couple leave to celebrate their union at the temple. Those who remain remind the audience that no one should be consumed with sadness, since a brighter day will eventually arrive.

ACT II: The fields of Thrace

Orfeo and his friends continue the celebration until they are interrupted by a messenger, who announces Euridice’s death due to a fatal snake bite. After a poignant lament, Orfeo vows to bring her back from the underworld. The chorus sings of the impermanence of human bliss, as the brass instruments are heard in music anticipating the transition to the underworld.

ACT III: The underworld

Orfeo arrives with Hope, who has guided him to the underworld and now must depart. He confronts Caronte, who refuses to take him across the river Styx. Orfeo flatters him in a showy aria (“Mighty spirit and powerful divinity”), but the ferryman is unmoved. An episode of lyre playing finally lulls Caronte to sleep and Orfeo steals his boat, rowing himself across the river.

ACT IV: The underworld

Greatly moved by Orfeo’s singing, Proserpina pleads with Plutone to allow Euridice’s release. He agrees on the condition that Orfeo not look back at her during the trip back to the upper world. At first the journey goes well, but Orfeo becomes increasingly concerned and turns to see if she is still following him. Euridice is ordered to stay in the underworld forever, while an unknown force draws Orfeo away.

ACT V: The fields of Thrace

Orfeo laments the loss of his bride, vowing to never love again. Suddenly Apollo descends from the heavens, reproaches his son for succumbing to his emotions, and invites him to join him in the heavens, where they can gaze at an image of Euridice in the stars. They ascend skyward during a bravura duet.

Resurrecting Greek Drama

From roughly 1573 to 1582 a group of musicians, poets, and scholars in Florence, Italy, began experimenting with musical styles based on what was then known about the nature of music in Greek tragedy. This “Florentine Camerata” believed that Greek drama had been primarily sung or chanted, rather than spoken, and that current vocal music, with its complex counterpoint, obscured the impact of its texts. Something simpler, based on a single vocal melody, was needed to recapture the power of ancient drama. The camerata influenced the work of Jacopo Peri, whose Dafne, performed in Florence in 1598, is generally recognized as the first opera. Peri’s Euridice (1600) is the first opera for which all the music survives, and it is occasionally performed today.

The Composer

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was one of the premier composers of the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods. He is best known for his madrigals, sacred music, and operas, in which forward-looking harmonic and expressive techniques were presented in standard forms and structures.

Monteverdi’s early music was extremely well crafted but designed more to charm and delight than achieve anything deeper. Under the influence of a Flemish composer named Giaches de Wert, his music started to become more complex, angular, and dissonant. For a 10-year period he published very little music as he perfected this new style, followed by his first masterpieces, sets of madrigals that appeared in 1603 and 1605.

Orfeo was his first opera. The librettist was Alessandro Striggio, a nobleman, diplomat, and musician who based his text primarily on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, although he also drew on several other sources. Monteverdi combined the opulence of Renaissance-era dramatic entertainments with a pastoral tale told primarily in expressive recitative.

The opera’s score is rightly praised for its sensitivity to the text and ability to convey complex emotions and psychological situations. It also contains the first example of a stage action illustrated by music. As Orfeo leads Euridice out of the underworld, his footsteps are depicted in a steady, quarter-note rhythm played by low-pitched instruments, a technique now known as a walking bass. When he stops to look back at Euridice, the walking bass also stops.

The Premiere

The premiere took place in the Palazzo Ducale di Mantova, the dynastic home of the Gonzaga family. It’s the sixth-largest palace in Europe, with more than 500 rooms, seven gardens, and eight interior courtyards. It’s not known in which room Orfeo took place, or whether it was performed with any kind of staging or costumes.

The day before, a Gonzaga court official wrote a letter that gave a few details, including these: “Tomorrow evening the Most Serene Lord the Prince is to sponsor a musical play ... It should be most unusual, as all the actors are to sing their parts.” Only one performance was planned, but it was so successful that a second was added a few days later.

Resurrecting Monteverdi’s Opera

There are no known performances of Orfeo between 1646 and a concert performance, in an arrangement by composer Vincent d’Indy, in 1904. During the early and mid-20th century, performances were always given in arrangements or adaptations for current-day orchestral instruments. Many of these were by well-known composers, including Ottorino Respighi, Paul Hindemith, and Luciano Berio.

Monteverdi’s orchestra was large — almost 40 players — and it included then-standard instruments such as pocket violins (they folded up), sackbuts, theorbos, bass viola da gambas, and a regal. It was only with the growth of early-music specialists and the use of authentic or reproduction instruments later in the 20th century that it could be heard in something resembling its original sound.

Both approaches are made use of today. The Santa Fe production falls into the former camp, with a new orchestration commissioned from Nico Muhly, composer of the 2017 operatic version of the film Marnie.

Opera’s Most Popular Subject

More operas have been written on the Orpheus myth than any other subject, not surprisingly, given its inherent celebration of music’s power. The tally over four centuries is more than 100. The two best are Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo and Euridice and, in a much different vein, Jacques Offenbach’s satirical operetta Orpheus in the Underworld. (The latter featured an “infernal galop,” which spawned the can-can.)

In it Orpheus, a country bumpkin violin teacher, is delighted when Plutone takes Euridice down to hell, where Jupiter wants to seduce her. One problem — Plutone has locked her in a room. So Jupiter transforms himself into a fly and buzzes through the keyhole. The ensuing seduction duet is both sexy and hilarious, and it takes place partly in buzzing noises.

Here's a wonderful version of it with Natalie Dessay and Laurent Naouri:

The hit Broadway musical Hadestown is an updated Orpheus and Eurydice story. It won eight Tony Awards in 2019, including Best Musical and Best Original Score.

Check out “Way Down Hadestown” here:

Opera’s First Joke?

Orfeo contains what may well be opera’s first joke. In Act III, as the character Hope leads Orfeo into the underworld, she reads an inscription on a rock. It’s the famous line from Dante’s Inferno, “Abandon all hope, you who enter,” and Hope promptly abandons the journey.

To Sum Up

You’ll like Orfeo if you like (see “Know the Score,” Pasatiempo, June 16, 2023):

• Tenor fests — the title role dwarfs all the others
• Plots that have an “I never saw that coming!” surprise ending
• Genuinely short operas