Orphée et Eurydice - Christoph Willibald Gluck

Exciting music drama in the French manner. The iconic aria J’ai perdu mon Eurydice from Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice is engraved in the collective memory. After the singer Orpheus has brought his beloved Eurydice back from the realm of the dead through the power of his music, he loses her a second time. In his masterful music drama, the composer shows himself a master of controlled emotion. Gluck bids farewell to the bravura arias and intricate plot twists of the baroque opera. Singing, text and orchestration are entirely in the service of a deeply felt tragedy, remarkably direct in its delivery with only three protagonists (Orphée, Eurydice, Amour) and with a dramatically active role for the chorus. Gluck initially wrote the opera in Italian in 1762 and in 1774 produced a French version for the Parisian Opéra. OBV presents the reworking by Hector Berlioz from 1859, which is anything but a carbon copy of the original, but a full-blooded French opera with additional music. Maestro Francesco Corti, who last season signed for a fiery Don Giovanni, once again guarantees exciting music drama on the cutting edge.