House director Rainer Holzapfel traces the Orpheus story with the question: Is the gods' condition even fulfillable: that Orpheus must not turn around after his increasingly desperate beloved? Or is her return actually just a perfidious, false hope? Dance, already an important element in Gluck's work, will play a decisive role in this multidisciplinary production.
He embodies one of the great myths of mankind and the original opera of music history: Orpheus, the singer who can move the gods with his music and override the laws of the underworld. Orpheus, whose love is so great that he is the first man to return alive from the realm of the dead. Orpheus, the musician who became music himself, whose legend was by far the most frequently set to music in the early days of opera around 1600. Why can't he keep the commandment not to turn around after his Eurydice on his way back to the living, why does he have to lose his great love a second time?
Christoph Willibald Gluck, the most successful German opera composer before Mozart, has relieved us of pondering this question: He allows for a happy ending with the help of the god Cupid. So love is greater than death after all. Countless poets and composers would agree with him...
Premiere March 9, 2024
Further performances: March 15 and 24 and on April 13, 2024
