Saturday July 21, 2012 – The Paris Opera Ballet concluded their 2012 guest-season at Lincoln Center with Pina Bausch’s staging of Gluck’s immortal opera based on the myth of the singer Orpheus, a man who braves the furies of hell to bring his beloved wife back from the dead. Bausch created her version of the opera in 1975 at Wuppertal and it entered the repertoire of the Paris Opera Ballet in 2005.
Ms. Bausch eschews Gluck’s plan for the opera to end happily; the composer has the gods taking pity on Orpheus after he has caused Eurydice’s ‘second death’ and she is restored to him. In her setting, Ms. Bausch follows the course of the myth: by disobeying the decree that he not look at his wife until they have left the Underworld, Orpheus loses Eurydice forever. He is condemned to wander the Earth, lonely and tormented, until he his torn to shreds by the Maenads. This gruesome conclusion is not depicted onstage; we simply see the dead Eurydice and her distraught husband in a final tableau as the light fades.
The Paris Opera Ballet‘s production, vivid in its simplicity and superbly performed by dancers and musicians alike, made for an absorbing evening. A packed house seemed to be keenly attentive to the narrative; the silence in the theatre was palpable. The only slight drawback in the presentation was the need for two rather long set-changing pauses during the first half of the evening; the house lights were brought to quarter and the audience began to chatter. Fortunately, order was quickly restored once the music started up again. The second act, with its unbroken spell of impending doom and its heart-breaking rendering of the great lament “J’ai perdu mon Eurydice” by the superb mezzo-soprano Maria Riccarda Wesseling – the audience seemed scarcely to draw breath while she spun out a miraculous thread of sound in the aria’s final verse – was as fine a half-hour as I have ever spent in the theatre.
The opera was sung in German, with the chorus seated in the orchestra pit. Each of the three principal roles in the opera is doubled by a dancer and a singer. The three singers, clad in simple black gowns, move about the stage and sometimes participate in the action. So fine were the musical aspects of the performance that the opera could well have stood alone, even without the excellent choreography.
Ms. Wesseling (above) was a revelation; her timbre reminded me at times of the younger days of Waltraud Meier and she shares with that great artist an intensity and personal commitment that make her singing resonate on an emotional level. Ms. Wesseling’s sustained and superbly coloured rendering of “J’ai perdu mon Eurydice” – with remarkable dynamic gradations – was so poignant; how I wish we could have her at The Met, as Gluck’s Iphigenie perhaps. The two sopranos, Yun Jung Choi (Eurydice) and Zoe Nicolaidou (Amour), gave lovely performances. Conductor Manlio Benzi wrought the score with clarity and dramatic nuance, wonderfully carried out by the musicians and singers of the Balthasar-Neumann Ensemble.
In this powerful musical setting, Ms. Bausch moves her dancers with dignity and grace; the ritualistic passages for female ensemble evoked thoughts of Martha Graham, and reminded Kokyat of Lydia Johnson’s stylishly flowing images of sisterhood. As Orfeo, Nicolas Paul looked spectacular in flesh-tone briefs, his torso god-like and his anguish expressed by every centimeter of his physique. Tall and radiant, Alice Renavand looked tres chic in her red gown as Eurydice. Charlotte Ranson was a lively angel in white as Amour.
It was in the second half of the evening where Ms. Bausch’s vision transcended theatricality and took on a deeply personal aspect. Nicolas Paul as Orpheus strove movingly to ignore his wife’s pleas to look her in the face; when at last he could no longer withstand her torment, the fatal moment comes. Ms Renavand collapses on her singer-counterpart’s body and remains prone and absolutely still as Ms. Wesseling sings the great lament. Mr. Paul kneels, facing upstage, in a pool of light which accentuates the gleaming sweat on his back. In this simple tableau, so much is expressed without movement of any kind. The voice of Orpheus in his grief fills the space and the soul.
The Dancers:
Alice Renavand (Eurydice), Nicolas Paul (Orphée), Charlotte Ranson (Amour)
The Singers:
Orpheus: Maria Riccarda Wesseling
Eurydice: Yun Jung Choi
Amore: Zoe Nicolaidou
Oberon's Glade 