Every step is a pounce. A leap.
An act of defiance against gravity. In a gust of plumes, humble feather balls rise and fall like music notes on the shadow of a nearby railing. A second of wide eyed stillness, then action.
Sparrows don’t walk to their desire, they hop-to-it.
-coffee shop, pre-pandemic
Ichi-go ichi-e is a Japanese term for beautiful unrepeatable moments. I can sit for hours with a good book and wait for a gust of wind and a host of sparrows to dazzle the moment.
Of all the things I’ve missed during the pandemic, I might miss coffee shops most of all. A place to wait for beautiful moments and think on them. Coffee shops, those unique heterotopias where I can be alone, but not feel alone. The loss of coffee shops has me feeling a little depressed and now that winter has settled in I’m deep into the dumps like Churchill followed by the black dog. The world is feeling smaller and smaller and darker and darker.
Coffee shops are not all the pandemic has taken away: concerts, restaurants, friends (some to the caution and others to the political divide). The losses are piling up. The pandemic predicament makes me think of Hell. The particular kind of hell we find in the opera Eurydice. It is a hell of absence. Absence of memory and absence of song.
Eurydice to break my heart, is an opera absent of coffee shops.
Being a newer opera and new to composer Mathew Aucoin I didn’t have any expectations going in and was delighted by how much I enjoyed it. I was surprised the beginning sounded so Wagnerian – so big. Then equally surprised when I thought of Philip Glass, that’s quite a chasm of influence to traverse and Aucoin does it ably.
The orchestra full of xylophones, drum, winds, brasses, and harps is exciting. Even when the sounds turn inward they are dense with subtle variations. The sounds were so interesting I was watching the orchestra through binoculars in the final act and missed the ending. The curtain came down and I had to ask Chaltin what happened.
Erin Morley affectingly ends each act with a soulful aria.
Act II’s aria “This is what it is to love an artist” speaks to me too much. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and making art and wonder about what and who I neglected in all that art making time. It hurts to ask myself still who I might be neglecting – when my mind muses on sparrows.
It’s also a very fun fun opera, I mean any story with a devil alway is. When Hades changes a radio channel and I’m pretty sure I hear a Mozart sample for a moment. Somewhere in this opera there must also be a reference the Gluck’s “Che faro’ senza Euridice.”
One of my all time favorite operas is one of the genres first, Gluck’s opera Orfeo Ed Eurydice from 1762. Orfeo sings about losing Eurydice and while the lyrics are about that specific loss, the music speaks to loss in general. I include it here and write with the hope of reuniting with old friends and coffee shops.
So What Is Eurydice All About? Eurydice is the classical tale of Orfeo and Eurydice retold from Eurydice’s point of view. It is still tragic she still goes to hell, but she is given agency to choose her destiny.
Notes on the Production
Composer…………………………………… Mathew Aucoin
Libretto……………………………………….. Sarah Ruhl
Eurydice………………………………………. Erin Morley
Orpheus………………………………………. Joshua Hopkins
Orpheus’s double…………………….. Jakub Jozef Orlinski
Father…………………………………………… Nathan Berg
Hades…………………………………………… Barry Banks
Little Stone………………………………… Stacey Tappan
Big Stone……………………………………. Ronnita Miller
Loud Stone………………………………… Chad Shelton
Conductor…………………………………… Yannick Nezet-Seguin
Metropolitan Opera
11/27/2021