See the word "reformer" on the page and you're apt to think of some current political crusade. But reformers also sprout in the rich soil of the arts, and no art form boasts a more bountiful crop than the improbable concoction known as opera.
From the moment of its invention late in the 16th century by some Florentine intellectuals fascinated by the music of ancient Greece, opera has been a topic of ideological contention, and its makers have engaged in spirited polemics regarding its whys and wherefores.
Many of opera's most prominent composers -- Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Puccini and Alban Berg, for starters -- have advanced reformist agendas. But for most students of opera's history, one name, that of Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-87), is indelibly associated with reform.
Together with librettist Ranieri de' Calzabigi (a colorful, Casanova-like character), the prolific Gluck, in some but by no means all of his 107 stage works, turned away from the florid Italian vocal style dominant in his day, away from the distracting subplots and amorous convolutions that often encumbered 18th-century librettos. In their place, he sought a "noble simplicity" and dramatic relevance. And in his 1762 "Orpheus and Eurydice," which on Saturday launches Minnesota Opera's new season, he found them.
"There's something very pure about the piece," says Lee Blakeley, the Yorkshire-born, Scottish-trained director who leads the company's new staging. "In an era of embellishment and ornamentation, it's very direct and to the point. It does away with the conventional structure, it does away with all the superfluous characters -- with everything extraneous, really -- and just concentrates on Orpheus. It strips it bare -- and you get that through the music, as well. There's a real, honest connection to human emotion in the musical setting of the text."
One final look
Ancient as it is, the Orpheus story shows no sign of relaxing its grip on the imagination. Armed with only his lyre, Orpheus -- antiquity's iconic musician -- descends into Hell to resurrect his wife, Eurydice. He's allowed to lead her back to life, on one condition: that he not look back at her during their ascent. But, of course, he does look -- Blakeley suggests that he is "set up to fail" -- and she dies a second death.
In Greek myth, at this point, things go from bad to worse for Orpheus: He is torn limb from limb, and his head (and lyre) float to the island of Lesbos. But Gluck's courtly audience in Vienna, reform or no reform, demanded a happy ending -- the opera was premiered on the Emperor's name-day -- and so, in reward for Orpheus' undying devotion, the operatic Eurydice is again restored to life, and the couple are reunited amid general rejoicing.
