Orfeo Resurrected

Franz Joseph Haydn was busily conducting the first rehearsal of his opera, Orfeo ed Euridice, when into the new King's Theater walked the royal bailiffs with an order prohibiting the performance. King George III had decided that the London of 1791 was big enough for only one Italian opera company--his own at the rival Pantheon.

That abortive first rehearsal was as close as Haydn ever got to seeing a performance of Orfeo. Not until 1951, in fact, did the opera receive its first staged performance, when it was presented at Florence's Maggio Musicale. Last week there was a second: at the Vienna Festival, with a star-studded cast headed by Soprano Joan Sutherland and Tenor Nicolai Gedda.

Hailed by Vienna critics as the highlight of the festival, Haydn's Orfeo may well have as much claim to entry in the active repertory as the better-known operatic version of the story that Christoph Gluck wrote 30 years earlier. Apparently influenced by his exposure to England's oratorio tradition, Haydn composed Orfeo for a chorus and orchestra much larger than he had previously used. The heavy dose of choral music and the numerous arias in sona ta form make much of the opera sound like an oratorio. The chorus, for example, joins in a love duet with Sutherland and Gedda in the early scenes, sings a lament for the dead Euridice, and in the third act consoles Orfeo with four lengthy passages. But the opera also sparkles with tuneful solos, and concludes with a scene of effective operatic violence: the Bacchanalians who have poisoned Orfeo are swept away by a tidal wave; the curtain falls to an eerie, pianissimo timpani roll, with only the dead couple on the empty stage.

Soprano Sutherland and her husband, Conductor Richard Bonynge, share a fondness for unearthing faded or seldom-heard operas. Sutherland made her U.S. debut in Dallas in 1960 in Handel's all-but-forgotten opera Alcina. She and her husband are also responsible for the revival of Rossini's Semiramide, which had not been staged in the U.S. for 59 years when the couple brought it to Boston in 1965. For the sake of his principals, Bonynge embellished the score of Orfeo with newly composed "decorations for the soprano and tenor, which are part of the tradition of Haydn's time." He also transferred to his wife the lyric soprano aria of the Genius who leads Orfeo down to Hell in search of his beloved. There was good musical reason for that too. "The opera is lopsided," explains Sutherland, who will sing in Orfeo six times at this summer's Edinburgh Festival. "If I didn't come back to sing the Genius' aria, I wouldn't have anything to do after the second act."

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