Orphée didn’t travel to Hades instead, he imagined a trip to Hades. Neumeier made some other changes as well. Presumably in her angered state following the incident, Eurydice slams her car into a tree, rolls out of the vehicle, and perishes. The opera opens with a tiff between the title characters, culminating with a public slap across Orphée’s face and Eurydice’s tramping out of the rehearsal space. Orphée et Eurydice was the baby of director, choreographer, and set, costume, and lighting designer John Neumeier, who changed the traditionally lyre-playing musician Orphée into a choreographer leading a dance company in modern times. Also to suit French tastes, Gluck added dance – a lot of it. Fortunately for young boys, the French never bought into castrati, so when Gluck revamped Orfeo for his Parisian audience in 1774, he cut out (no pun intended) the castrato and transformed the role of Orfeo into the French Orphée, a haute-contre, or high tenor, role. The era of the castrati was nearing its end in the second half of the 18th century, but it was not yet a relic of the past by the time Gluck embarked upon Orfeo. The role of Orfeo was played by a castrato – an (unfortunate) voice type manufactured by castrating boys prior to their journey through puberty. As the name implies, it was an Italian work. How did dancing come to play such a significant role in this opera? Christoph Willibald Gluck originally composed Orfeo ed Euridice in 1762 for the Burgtheater in Vienna. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m out of my element when it comes to ballet, but even this neophyte couldn’t help but be captivated by the fluid, effortless motions of the Joffrey Ballet dancers.
I went into the theater expecting to see an opera with some incidental dancing, but I could not have been more wrong the production was as much a work of dance as it was a sung story. Joining Russian tenor Dmitry Korchak (Orphée), Canadian soprano Andriana Chuchman (Eurydice), and American soprano Lauren Snouffer (Amour) on stage was the magnificent Joffrey Ballet, a Chicago-based company.
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