“Don’t look at me. Don’t look at me!” Eurydice implores her soon-to-be husband, mere minutes into Act I. Foreshadowing the moment of the backwards look, the moment which centuries of artists have repeatedly sought to capture, her words prompt us to ask several questions. Does she want Orpheus to lead her out of the underworld? What do we assume about what she feels in that fateful glance, that instant which symbolizes—as Greek mythology does so well—the eternal and unchanging capacity of humans to err?
Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s version of the ever-popular tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is, really, not an adaptation at all. Rather than simply switching up a few details here and there, putting an individual twist on a familiar story—as centuries of Orpheus operas have done—Eurydice uses mythic archetypes as a medium to explore themes of memory, grief, and loss. Even as the focus is, for once, on Eurydice’s voice and perspective, the opera isn’t just about telling her side of the story as a balance to an Orphic androcentrism: it has its own narrative throughout which fragments of key elements of the myth—wedding, death, Hades, lament, look, death again—intersect and refract.
To say that contemporary opera creators are attracted to mythology is rather like saying that they have decided to use key signatures. As a source of plot material—and as a form of drama—mythology and opera have walked hand in hand since the beginning. But there are always moments in this long-entwined history that stand out as especially rich, where the appeal of the timelessness, universality, and endless mutability of the mythic seems to proliferate more than usual. We are, I believe, in the crest of such a moment, one that began sometime in the late 1980s, just as opera—especially in the United States—was undergoing a period of renewal and revitalization.
But Eurydice also reflects another tendency: a wave of interest in (re)centering women’s voices in novel artistic engagements with myth. “When women are the storytellers, the human story changes,” Elizabeth Lessing declares, in her 2020 book Cassandra Speaks. Clémence, in Kaija Saariaho and Amin Maalouf’s opera L’amour de loin (2000), is given a voice denied to the muted object of affection, the idealized domna of medieval Occitan troubadour poetry; Mette Edvardsen and Matteo Fargion yield ground away from Odysseus in their “opera in essay form,” Penelope Sleeps (2019); Anthony Davis and Allan Havis’ opera Lilith (2009) restores the world-altering feminist power of Adam’s “first wife” before Eve. Doing this work of imaginative and critical rewriting is not an exclusively modern phenomenon: think of the places accorded Circe, Dido, Medea, Sappho, and other mythological women in Christine de Pizan’s Le livre de la cité des dames (The Book of the City of Ladies), for example, completed around 1405. But scan the offerings in any well-stocked bookshop these days and you’ll find a growing plethora of retellings of classical mythology that privilege historically decentered perspectives, whether the heartbreakingly tender reimagining of Achilles and Patroclus’ relationship in Madeline Miller’s much-celebrated novel The Song of Achilles (2011), or the many mythological women’s voices that have been enjoying ongoing bursts of attention—including Circe, Cassandra, Medusa, Ariadne, Elektra, or the women of Troy. Women have never been silent, but they haven’t always been listened to.
What happens to Eurydice when she is the storyteller? Centering her experience in this opera takes us away from her definition-by-absence in the classic myth—away from Orpheus’s repeated performance of grief, and from the “slightly sadistic” Orpheus, in the composer’s words, that Aucoin wrote for his 2014 solo cantata, The Orphic Moment. It’s not that Orpheus is absent: he still gets to lament, doubled by a countertenor shadow that affords opportunities to duet himself—standing together at the gates of hell at the beginning of Act III, their voices wrap around one another; lengthy, almost antiphon-sounding melismas coil around flinty dissonances. Orpheus’s voice(s) can still knock down Hades’ door. But he’s part of Eurydice’s journey here. The narrative is no longer driven by her abstracted status as muse in absentia, but by her presence. Creating a twenty-first-century Orpheus and Eurydice in any form produces a kind of acute self-consciousness of participating in a long tradition of myth-reimagining. Alongside prioritizing Eurydice’s perspectives on her marriage and afterlife, Ruhl’s libretto is peppered with moments that satirize the vaguely solipsistic musician, and thus, music itself: when Eurydice asks, “What are you thinking about?” for a second time in Act I, he responds “Music. Just kidding. I was thinking about you. And music.” In Hades, meanwhile, a shatteringly high role full of serpentine tenor coloratura and erratically dramatic melodic lines, we hear a parody of the god, the sounds of vocal excess representing an unstable, threatening force that is also wickedly funny. So too does a dissonant imitation of a Baroque concerto in Act III, Scene 3 perform a tonally-warped satire of Hades’ (ultimately ineffective) power to trap Eurydice.
The Underworld is already an inherently abstract space, one without fixed time or place; in Eurydice, it’s somewhere that the opera’s core themes of love, loss, memory, and selfhood can be explored. Through the new role of the Father and his vital function in how Eurydice processes her new existence in death and Orpheus’ attempts to restore her to life, loss—of family, life, language, identity—is given space. Breathing room is important in Eurydice: Aucoin considered Ruhl’s stage directions ideal for musical interludes: “like parks within the city map of a play’s text, green open spaces where music might grow and breathe.” In this new chamber version, with reduced orchestral forces and much of the chorus writing excised, there is more intimacy to the opera, heightening the effect of Aucoin’s often tender and heartfelt score. There’s no less capaciousness, though: those “open spaces” for music grow in many directions, with an especially robust percussion roster—over thirty individual instruments in the hands of two players—contributing to a multifaceted orchestral landscape, where glistening passages with harp and woodwinds skittering through the texture give way to rich, often warm, sometimes lugubrious string writing.
Eurydice’s diverse soundworld creates a space that mirrors the strange and confusing range of emotions one might experience in the afterlife. Imagining loved ones in a place where they continue to think and act is a way of coping with loss, but we typically locate these facets of memory and grief with the living. Here, we spend far more time exploring the perspectives of the dead, how one might have to reconfigure an understanding of how to exist—to read, speak, know one’s own name; indeed, how to know at all. Eurydice’s loss of sense of self in her death—“How do you say good-bye to yourself?”—is repaired with her father, who helps her remember her husband, her mother, even though it will be painful. As he patiently constructs her a room out of string, Eurydice observes the underworld. The libretto indicates that “time passes” (how long is inherently unknowable); musically, this is compressed into a few minutes of our “real” time, but we can imagine a boundary-less expanse in which, gradually, one might sift through the atoms of one’s selfhood.
We all know what happened between Eurydice’s premiere at LA Opera in February 2020 and its Metropolitan Opera début in November 2021 that shifted how we might think about loss and memory. Today, there is no reason to impose a pandemic lens onto the opera, but we have all encountered new experiences of loss that might resonate in different ways as we watch. As persistent as the opera-myth relationship is, it’s also one that has tended to emerge at points of societal crisis: retreats into Arcadian pastoral idylls in early-twentieth-century English poetry and literature teeming with allusions to Classical mythology, for instance, represented a form of escapism for those caught up in two world wars. Myth in Eurydice once again offers the option to process our external realities as much as our interior lives. So too do moments within the opera suggest retreats and escape; the Father’s spoken monologue in Act III, for instance, is at once a final farewell and a last nostalgic plunge into his past. As he recites directions to a “red brick house,” the wordless ensemble meanders in unison, anchored by the low strings, before landing in poignant four-part harmonies. A profoundly gorgeous elegy to memory itself brings us to the moment he will “swim” in the river and choose to forget. (The directions, incidentally, will take you to a real place, in Davenport, Iowa, where Ruhl’s grandparents once lived.)
Eurydice will face her own choice, and that she chooses to forget Orpheus is, undeniably, a counterpoint to his operatic history. But this is also where the power of the opera’s examination of memory lies: in the permission to forget. We can hear some of this conflict in the contrasting sections of her centerpiece aria in Act II, scene 4. Statements of “This is what it is to love an artist”—a deliberate, almost strident melodic phrase based around descending fourths—bracket pensive reflections (“The moon is always rising above your house”) in gently ascending scales, the latter of which Aucoin marks “liquid, achingly sad” in the score. Eurydice allows herself and Orpheus the chance to move forward, even if that is towards death—to saying good-bye to herself. Ruhl’s vivid imagery of a river of forgetfulness invites overlapping metaphors for death, loss, and forgetting that soothe and calm as well as obliterate. Choosing to dip oneself is a kind of ablution-absolution, where letting go is washed of lingering guilt.
In their dreamy indie-pop 2022 single “Orpheus,” Toronto girl band The Beaches cautions the artist: “There’s no point in looking back/If there is something you cannot get back to.” Women have always been involved in writing and rewriting myths, often taking on Eurydice’s voice. As The Beaches tell Orpheus, “Don’t look back/I’m not behind you, fade to black,” so too does this operatic Eurydice gently entreat her beloved: “Don’t try to find me again.” We can’t quite resolve all the contradictions of grief and life—if Eurydice grapples with her love for her husband and for her father, Orpheus too is torn between the impulse to retrieve or to voluntarily, knowingly lose her—but in the strange realm that is the Underworld, we can, as the Father searches to do, “remember to forget.”
By: Dr. Jane Isabelle Forner
Dr. Jane Isabelle Forner is a musicologist and opera scholar, writing a book about sonic representations of mythological women in popular and classical music, and research on the politics of multilingual contemporary opera in Europe. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto.