Located in the UK
Located in the USA
Located in Europe
- Matthew Aucoin
Eurydice (2019)
- G Schirmer and Associated Music Publishers (World)
Commissioned by The Metropolitan Opera and Los Angeles Opera. Developed by The Metropolitan Opera/Lincoln Center Theater New Works Program with support from the Opera America Repertory Development Grant.
version with chamber orchestra available for performance after May 2025
- 3(2pic,afl).2.2+bcl(cbcl).2(cbn)/4.3(pictpt).2+btbn.1/timp.5prc/pf.2hp/str
- SATB with solo soprano
- 2S, Mz[=Ca], Ct, 2T, Bar, B-Bar
- 2 hr
- Sarah Ruhl
- English
Programme Note
Cast List
EURYDICE: Soprano
ORPHEUS: Baritone
ORPHEUS’ DOUBLE: Countertenor
FATHER: Bass-Baritone
HADES: High Tenor
LITTLE STONE: Soprano
BIG STONE: Mezzo-Soprano or Contralto
LOUD STONE: Tenor
SATB chorus (with solo Soprano)
Synopsis
Eurydice reconceives the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, telling the story from the heroine’s perspective. We follow Eurydice into the underworld, where she first passes through the River of Forgetfulness, then encounters her deceased father. By the time Orpheus comes to find her, Eurydice has become a different person and is not sure she wants to return to life.
Composer Note
The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice continues to resonate because of its brutally honest admixture of hope and despair. Music can conquer death itself — of course it can — but not for us, not for human beings. We aren’t worthy of it. We’ll always find a way to screw things up.
In past pieces, I’ve explored the myth’s darker implications, the way that Orpheus seems to prefer singing elegies for Eurydice to actually living with her. But for a full-length opera, I realized that I didn’t want to wallow in Orpheus’s narcissism all evening. I wanted a fresh perspective on this most inescapable of stories.
Sarah Ruhl’s play Eurydice, which turns the myth on its head and invents a rich inner world for its heroine, provided that fresh perspective. Her work goes where no telling of the story has ever gone: we follow Eurydice into the underworld, where she loses her memory and reverts to a childlike tabula rasa state.
Sarah’s work is disarming in its emotional transparency, and she helped me strive for a similar quality in my music. The opera that resulted is a meditation on memory, loss, and love (especially love: I started writing it the week I met my now-husband, and I know that the experience of being in love found its way into the piece’s music).
In the world of Eurydice, all human experiences are ultimately washed away by the River of Forgetfulness. But their ephemerality might be precisely what makes them precious.
— Matthew Aucoin
Media
Scores
Reviews
Ms. Ruhl’s spare, direct text leavens seriousness with comedy, and Mr. Aucoin’s music, though heavy on percussion, follows suit, allowing those elements to coexist…
Rather than pushing forward or inducing a hypnotic trance, the music of individual scenes feels swirling and circular, inviting the listener to sit with the feelings as the characters uncover them, and each scene has its own distinctive tone. The effect is cumulative. In the final scenes, Hades, until then a comic figure, is revealed in all his sinister cruelty and power. Eurydice, rather than becoming his unwilling bride, sings a wrenching final aria that encompasses all the love, warmth and humanity that she has found, and then chooses to dip herself in the river of forgetfulness; the opera ends in orchestral grunts and abrupt silence.
Eurydice, based on the play by Sarah Ruhl, is ambitious, confident, often impressive, mostly engaging, instrumentally colorful and splendidly singable. At its best, it is gratifying grand opera…
Where the opera really begins is the second scene, in the underworld (you get there by elevator). Eurydice’s father is writing her a letter, giving us a glimpse at a peculiar setting, familiar and not. Here Aucoin, as though fishing in the same Rhine as Wagner did, creates a sense of wonderment and mystification. Rod Gilfry, who was Aucoin’s Whitman, is the voice from the beyond as the voice of the here and now, an exceptional accomplishment. Ruhl’s Bardo is our world seen through Alice’s looking glass.
