Last night Ensemble Parallèle presented the San Francisco premiere of Philip Glass’ 1991 chamber opera Orphée. The libretto is taken, word for word, from the script for Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film of the same name. Cocteau was a leading avant-gardist during the first half of the twentieth century; and his interests led him to experiment in a wide variety of media. However, it was through film that he could extend the fantastic images of surrealism into the temporal dimension; and Glass’ opera is an effort to translate the time-consciousness of cinema into the time-consciousness of music that is entirely worthy of Cocteau’s experimental spirit.
That experimental spirit seems to have been foremost in the mind of Brian Staufenbiel, who directed last night’s Ensemble Parallèle production in Herbst Theatre. One might say that Cocteau’s experiments were motivated by a desire to confound our convictions that “seeing is believing,” forcing the viewer to question both what (s)he sees and what (s)he believes. The “material imperative” of the live stage, however, has concrete qualities that Cocteau’s film work could transcend; so Staufenbiel had to develop his own repertoire of techniques to confound the senses. This involved a rich repertoire of media that ranged from multi-screen video projection to a circus aerialist dancing high above the rest of the performers, supported by only two long swathes of cloth.
It would be fair to say that the existence of parallel worlds that coexist with our own “physical reality” is one of the fundamental building blocks of all mythologies; and, among those parallel worlds, the one that always seems to exercise the strongest grip on human imagination is the world of the dead. Thus, the myth of Orpheus entering this world to recover his wife is one of the most primal of the stories we have made up about death, since it is primarily about “two-way travel” between “our world” and this particular parallel one. Cocteau approached this myth by shedding all of its Ancient Greek vestiges, moving it to his own world of practicing artists at work. Thus, his first scene is one of “shop talk among poets;” and it is only when one of those poets is killed that we get the first suggestion that his film is about movement between two worlds.
Staufenbiel’s staging follows Cocteau’s lead in differentiating the two worlds. The “real” world is appropriately mundane, only slightly “haunted” by supernumeraries, who suggest that another reality is lurking somewhere beyond human sensation. Cocteau emphasized that mundanity by introducing the character Heurtebise, a liveried chauffer who conducts passage between the two worlds. Where Staufenbiel excels, however, is in that other world, where he could not fall back on cinematic effects. Instead, he filled the stage with Piranesi-like architectural complexity, glowing chandeliers, and three circus artists.
Surprisingly, however, Cocteau’s script reveals that behavior in this world is not that different from what one finds in the world of the living. The heart of the action is a good old-fashioned trial scene (held before a judge of bizarre outsized proportions); and the trial is conducted through the same routines that one would find in an ordinary courtroom. It is only when Cocteau concludes his script with a scene of Orphée and Eurydice together in bed, discussing the child she is carrying, that we realize that the frame of the entire narrative may have been simply a dream shared by two all-too-human mortals, thus explaining the ordinariness of behavior in such an alien setting.
Musically, this is one of Glass’ most satisfying scores. This is due in no small part to his command of instrumental resources, since every instrument is a solo voice. This results in a wide diversity of sonorities to reflect changes in dramatic tone from one scene to the next. Equally impressive is his setting of Cocteau’s prose, which never seems to betray the matter-of-fact delivery executed by the actors in the original film.
As to the performance itself, one could not have hoped for a better approach to Glass. Conductor Nicole Paiement clearly understood the role of repetitive structures in Glass’ rhetoric and the ways in which those structures provided a continuo-like context for the vocal lines. The vocalists, in turn, always balanced securely and confidently against this instrumental context. Eugene Brancoveanu seemed to put more substance into his interpretation of the title role than one found in Jean Marais’ somewhat more distant approach in the original film; but this emphasized his grounding in the real world (even if as a “working poet”). Susannah Biller similarly captured the mundanity of Eurydice with a particularly sympathetic style. This was most evident in her duet with John Duykers’ Heurtebise, in where her innocence never really registers his alien qualities. Indeed, Duykers was compellingly effective in capturing the sad fate of Heurtebise’s duties. In the “other world” Marnie Breckenridge summoned a commanding presence for the death-figure Princess; but the full force of the alien was best captured by Philip Skinner’s trial judge, whose voice was as sinister as his appearance.
This production of Orphée will receive one more performance, this afternoon at 2 PM in Herbst Theatre. Tickets are priced from $25 to $85 and may be purchased through the event page at City Box Office Web site. They may also be ordered over the phone at 415-392-4400. Further information may be obtained from the Ensemble Parallèle Web site, which has set up a specific home page for Orphée.
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