Concert & Tickets

Programme note

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Orpheus (1947)

Down the ages, pagans, Christians and humanists, poets, painters, musicians and filmmakers have all been moved by the story of Orpheus. His journey to the underworld to attempt to retrieve his lover Eurydice has been the paradigm for all manner of symbolic quest narratives, from Dante’s The Divine Comedy and Monteverdi’s Orfeo, to Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! In each case the familiar story is refashioned in the image of its own age, with renewed relevance; each age has reclaimed Orpheus for itself. Across 3000 years of history there is hardly a generation that has been untouched by Orpheus’ songs of loss and lament.

The terrible and unnecessary deaths of the youthful Orpheus and Eurydice took on particular resonance in the violent 20th century. It is telling that Stravinsky chose Orpheus as the subject for his ballet begun within a year of the end of the Second World War. Orpheus (following Apollon musagète and Persephone) is the last of a trio of ballets on Greek myths written over a period of twenty years, and is the most stylized of the three. Exiled for a second time in America, Stravinsky experienced the terrors and privations of the War only at a distance; indeed, it is a sense of distance – from the story’s violence, from overt emotion – that in general characterizes this work. With the close collaboration of choreographer George Balanchine, whose initial idea it was to use Orpheus as the subject, Stravinsky worked out a scenario that starts with Orpheus weeping at Eurydice’s funeral and ends with Orpheus’ apotheosis where Apollo appears, "wrests the lyre from Orpheus and raises his son heavenwards". The music throughout is restrained, distanced. The sense of formality is reinforced by, among other things, the chorale-like frame of prologue and epilogue, and the importance throughout of counterpoint. The designer chosen for the premiere production was Isamu Noguchi, a sculptor whose abstract geometric sets, costumes and masks perfectly matched the distilled purity of Stravinsky’s music and Balanchine’s dances.

The apparent turning away from violence in Orpheus is not a sign of retreat from the horror of the War. In the face of such slaughter, not least in the far-away country of Stravinsky’s birth, another barbaric Rite of Spring would hardly have been possible. The only violent music in Orpheus is the ‘Pas d’action’, where the ‘Bacchantes attack Orpheus, seize him and tear him to pieces’, but even here the music is disciplined. Like other archetypical neoclassical works of the war years, such as the Symphony in C and the Symphony in Three Movements, Orpheus offers "timely reflections on war and death", to appropriate Freud’s phrase of 1915, but with a sense of detachment. Stravinsky’s Orpheus is imbued with a melancholic world-weariness. Alienation, memory and mourning are its defining features. This is captured poignantly in the ballet’s opening. "Orpheus weeps for Eurydice. He stands motionless, with his back to the audience." The falling, lamenting, Phrygian lines of Orpheus’s lyre (harp) are both ancient and modern; they speak directly of loss.

© Jonathan Cross