Orpheus, Ovid and Opera

Abstract

It was in the Shakespeare year of 1964 that I first realized to what extent my work on English stage music lacked foundation and depth without a better knowledge of the practices of dramatic music in Italy. Even at that early stage I recognized that the key plot for intermedi and the first operas was the story of Orpheus which looms so impressively, both in quantity and in quality, at the birth of opera. Indeed, it is a plot that continues to act as a springboard for the imagination of composers of operas and ballets, even after the seventeenth century, as witnessed by the works of Gluck, Offenbach and Stravinsky.

Poetry into Music: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dittersdorf’s ‘Twelve Symphonies on Ovid’s Metamorphoses’

“…72 It may seem contrived and perhaps even anti-Ovidian to those familiar with Ovid's penchant for bloodlust and gratuitous violence, but the eighteenth-century audience would not have winced at such a sweetened ending, being familiar, as they no doubt were, with the numerous popular precedents, perhaps most famously Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice 73 and Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, which ends with a somewhat bewildering apotheosis. 74 …”

Orphée baro/queer

“…La nymphe est pourtant la victime des deux hommes : elle meurt une première fois suite à la violence d'Aristée, une seconde fois par l'incapacité d'Orphée (accès de folie chez Virgile, manque de confiance, chez Ovide) à se contenir pour se soumettre aux conditions des divinités infernales et la sauver. 8 Après la perte définitive d'Eurydice, Orphée renonce aux femmes et se retire dans des contrées sauvages, où il charme par son chant les bêtes et les arbres. Ovide le présente comme l'inventeur de l'homosexualité masculine, ou à tout le moins comme celui qui introduisit en Thrace cette forme de sexualité.…”