Adult Education Class
Monday, September 20, 2010 07:00 pmMinnesota Opera Center
Orpheus and Eurydice
Since opera's beginnings in the late sixteenth century, poets and composers have often turned to the mythological figure of Orpheus as a potent symbol of music's expressive potential, capable of affecting the behavior of humans, gods and goddesses, and the natural world. This was certainly the case for Christoph Willibald Gluck, who with his librettist Raniero Calzabigi offered Orfeo ed Euridice to Viennese audiences on October 5, 1762. Orfeo was the first of Gluck's "reform" operas, in which he and his collaborators sought to bring opera into line with new aesthetic goals of naturalness and simplicity. Yet the choice of Greek mythology's best known musician as an operatic subject also poses a daunting challenge to a composer, who must create a protagonist whose music appears able to achieve the supernatural effects attributed to it. Kelley Harness from the University of Minnesota will look at Gluck's creative solutions to this problem, examining Orfeo ed Euridice as part of a long tradition of Orpheus operas dating back to 1600.
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