The Mask of Orpheus

by Harrison Birtwhistle, libretto by Peter Zinovieff

seen at the London Coliseum on 29 October 2019

ENO are presenting four Orpheus related operas this season; this is the first that I have seen. Martyn Brabbins and James Henshaw conduct Peter Hoare as Orpheus the Man with Daniel Norman as Orpheus the Myth; Maria Fontanels-Simmons as Eurydice the Woman with Claire Barnett-Jones as Eurydice the Myth; James Cleverton as Aristaeus the Man with Simon Biley as Aristaeus the Myth; and Claron McFadden as the Oracle. There are also mime artists Matthew Smith, Alfa Marks and Leo Hedman representing Orpheus, Eurydice and Aristaeus respectively as 'Heroes'.

The opera is dense with allusion and patterning, as various versions of the Orpheus myth are presented and repeated intertwined with one another, and interrupted by three 'Passing Clouds' and three 'Allegorical Flowers' illustrating other myths of fateful death. Three acts, three main parts played by three people each, three Clouds, three Flowers; also three priests, three women and three furies - the idea of cyclical recurrence is very strong. The music is an astonishing mixture of percussion, wind and electronic, rising at times to shattering climaxes, and reducing at other moments to the buzzing of bees or the almost sub-aural murmuring of the sea. 

There is an extraordinary amount of sung recitative exposition - almost the entire second act is spent by Orpheus describing what is sees as he crosses seventeen arches, rather than showing us; and needless to say, the cyclical pattern allows him to foresee the arches at the end of the first act and to recollect them in he third. The role of Orpheus the Man is particularly taxing in this respect, and Peter Hoare sang and acted it extremely well, ably supported by the rest of the cast.

Daniel Kramer, the director (and controversial outgoing artistic director of ENO) and Lizzie Clachan the designer have eschewed the option of emphasising hieratic ritual, preferring rather to populate the stage with carnivalesque or voodoo figures with absurdly exaggerated profiles dressed in bright primary colours, moving figures from a Max Ernst painting, or even from Hieronymous Bosch. However, there is a danger here, because in the paintings the vibrant feathery effects or diaphanous clothes appear somehow organic, whereas on the Coliseum stage they are all too obviously plastic and stiff. The final manifestations of Orpheus and Eurydice the Myth are almost ridiculous in their bulbous opulence, and certainly extremely unwieldy. The three women look perilously close to fantastical sex dolls in gaudy but tightly fitted nurses uniforms, while the mute actors in the Cloud and Flower interludes were dressed in earth or dung-coloured body-suits replete with unpleasant globular excrescences. The mesmeric gorgeousness which permeated the ENO's marvellous production of Akhnaten was here replaced by distracting campy excess.

With all this business it required some effort to disentangle Birtwhistle's idiosyncratic approach to staging myth, relying as it does on attention to ritual and repetition with significant variation. Eurydice constantly was pulled back into death as Orpheus constantly looked back at her; but the circumstances varied as we were asked to consider that their marriage may have been idyllic, or may have been full of tension; that she my have resisted seduction by Aristaeus or may have succumbed; that Aristaeus may have killed her, or a snake may have while she was trying to escape; that Orpheus may have killed them both, or just Aristaeus. 

Luckily, even with the visual distractions, it was possible with concentration to appreciate these points. The final tableau, in which the Hero mimes of Orpheus ad Eurydice rotate suspended above the stage as the music draws to an unexpectedly lyrical close, was mercifully free from excess in itself, though th stage below was cluttered with the debris of excess accumulated in the preceding episodes. I'm not at all convinced that the production did justice to the work itself..