ORFEO ED EURIDICE

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…