Orfeo ed Euridice

>Orfeo ed Euridice, 1762), and Jacques Offenbach (Orpheus in the Underworld, 1858); Jean Cocteau’s drama (1926) and film (1949) Orphée; and Brazilian director Marcel Camus’s film Black Orpheus (1959).

Then, beginning with Orfeo ed Euridice in 1762, he attempted to enhance both the dramatic and musical components of opera. Superfluous virtuosity and vocal display were drastically curtailed if not eliminated by providing music that reflected the emotional or dramatic situation. As a result of Gluck’s reforms, opera…

…the original production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, which is significant in the history of opera for its dramatic unity and its increased emphasis on dance. In 1765 Angiolini became ballet master at the Imperial Theatre in St. Petersburg, where he choreographed several ballets to music of his own composition.

His libretto for Orfeo ed Euridice, partly based on the theories and practices of such literary men as D. Diderot, F.M. von Grimm, Rousseau, and Voltaire, was enthusiastically greeted by Gluck’s friends, who immediately brought the two together. On Oct. 17, 1761, the dramatic ballet Le Festin de…

…operatic reform Gluck launched in Orfeo ed Euridice a year later. In the ballet, the fight scene near the beginning and the dance of the Furies at the end (itself later incorporated into Orfeo) have a concentrated intensity of musical expression, and the graveyard scene has a degree of imaginative…