Don’t Look Back

Love may conquer most things, but it has never been able to overcome death. Gluck and his librettist Ranieri de’ Calzabigi may have felt compelled to end their version of Orfeo ed Euridice with divine intervention and the triumph of love in order to provide their eighteenth-century audience with a redemptive conclusion, but the underlying myth of Orpheus and his ill-fated journey to rescue Eurydice offers a far gloomier moral: that which has been irretrievably lost can never be recovered. 

Jürgen Flimm’s new staging of Orfeo ed Euridice, which opened the 2016 edition of the Staatsoper’s annual Festtage, restored a measure of hopelessness to Gluck’s opera, reimaging the action as an extended meditation on bereavement and loss that was all the more affecting for quietly dispensing with the happy ending. Although the production was not…