Orphée et Eurydice - Versailles Opera house (2024) - Orphée et Eurydice - Opéra Royal du Château de Versailles (2024)

Description

"In Berlioz's mind, the title role required above all a great interpreter endowed with "a powerful and noble organ". And to return to Gluck's original tessitura in Vienna, he chose the contralto voice (taking the place of a castrato) instead of the usual tenor, which made it possible to entrust the role to the great Pauline Viardot, glory of the Paris Opera, whose voice had, according to Berlioz, "an exceptional range, at the service of an art of phrasing the wide song, (...) an indomitable, catchy, despotic verve, a deep sensitivity and almost deplorable faculties to express the immense pains! " All his Orpheus is there, who never leaves the stage and must guide us by his music from shadow to light, the extraordinary power of singing to overcome death...

The beauty of the work owes as much to the intensity of the exchanges as to the eloquence of the orchestra and the spectacular involvement of the choir. The act of the Underworld with its Furies, its chorus of Demons, the heartbreaking pleas of Orpheus… is one of the greatest moments in Western music. The director Aurélien Bory deploys the vertigo of the spaces that Orphée travels through, animated by Marie-Claude Chappuis while Václav Luks deploys the spells of the virtuoso musicians."

More information is available on the official website of the opera house.