ORFEO ED EURIDICE
Christoph Willibald Gluck
Sun 6:00pm January 25, 2015
Moniuszko Auditorium
Opera in three acts (Vienna version)
Libretto: Ranieri de’ Calzabigi
World premiere: Vienna, 5/10/1762
Polish premiere: Warsaw, 1776
Bratislava premiere: 5/12/2008
Premiere of this production: 23/05/2009
Co-production with the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava
Original language version with Polish surtitles
Running time: 1 hour 20 min
Conductor: Łukasz Borowicz
Direction: Mariusz Treliński
Set Design: Boris Kudlička
Costumes: Magdalena Musiał
Choreography: Tomasz Wygoda
Chorus Master: Bogdan Gola
Lighting Design: Marc Heinz
Literary Consultancy: Piotr Gruszczyński
Video: Bartek Macias
Chorus and Orchestra of the Polish National Opera, Polish National Ballet
Photo: Krzysztof Bieliński
Poster for the production, designed by Adam Żebrowski
Cast:
Orfeo – Wojtek Gierlach
Euridice – Olga Pasiecznik
Amor – Bożena Bujnicka
This is the oldest work that Mariusz Treliński has taken on in his 15 years as an opera director. He chose the Viennese version of Gluck’s opera, performed in Italian and with a baritone Orfeo. Treliński’s Orfeo is a piece that grew from the music and the cultural background, but apparently was also inspired by some hard times he personally experienced. His confrontation with the great tale of Mediterranean culture and also the founding myth of the whole opera genre resulted in a completely contemporary form: real, “ours”, almost palpable, just like in Czesław Miłosz’s poem Orpheus and Eurydice.
The director left out Gluck’s conventional lieto fine, a relic of the Enlightenment worldview – a form of interference Treliński had never before allowed himself and never has since. In such a personal production the major chords of the ending would have simply been an inappropriate dissonance. Treliński’s Euridice commits suicide only to literally haunt her still living lover after her death, practically not leaving the stage even for a moment. What an accumulation, in the performance’s two hours, of shocking images that it is impossible to shake off upon leaving the theatre! Let us mention just one, perhaps the most powerful – when Euridice’s coffin is about to be consumed by the crematorium furnace…