Monteverdi's La Favola d'Orfeo
A movie adaptation by Claude Goretta
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Cast
Alberto Acciarito — Assistant director
Alessandro Striggio — Scenography
Jacques Bufnoir — Stage design
Gabriella Pescucci — Costumes
Gino Quilico — Orpheus
Audrey Michael — Eurydice
Carolyn Watkinson — The messenger
Danielle Borst — Proserpine
Frangiskos Voutzinos — Pluto
François Le Roux — Shepherd I
Guy de Mey — Shepherd II
Henri Ledroit — Shepherd III
Eric Tappy — Apollo
Colette Alliot-Lugaz — The Music
Shelley Whittingham — Nymph
Filippo Degara — Charon
Program notes
Claude Goretta brings to life the age-old tale of Orpheus and Eurydice in a fresh adaptation of Monteverdi’s Orfeo.
Monteverdi’s fabled opera Orfeo was long described as the first opera to have been written. Although modern scholarship has proven this to be untrue, the work remains one of the pillars of western music history, a musical creation which laid the foundations for much of what was to come. As musicologist Jack Westrup explains, Orfeo marked a major milestone not because it broke new ground, but because imagination had taken precedence over theory. While Monteverdi may not have been a revolutionary, his music represents the culmination of centuries of musical evolution, and shows him as the clear master of both polyphony and monody.
Argument:
The work opens on shepherds and nymphs singing about the love of Orpheus and Eurydice. Suddenly, a Messenger arrives, bringing sad news of the death of Eurydice, bitten by a snake when she was picking flowers. Stricken with grief, her fiancé Orpheus swears to find her in the depths of hell and bring her back with him. To reward Orpheus’ courage, Pluto decides to let Eurydice go her love, on one condition: that he does not look at her until they have successfully arrived back in the realm of the living. At the last moment, Orpheus succumbs to temptation, losing his love forever, but the god Apollo invites the young hero to join him in the heavens, where he will be able to contemplate Eurydice for eternity.
