The German choreographer Sasha Waltz has succeeded in turning Monteverdi's L'Orfeo into a danced opera in this new century. What happens to be the first opera in history, despite having been others in Florence that sounded wonderfully and caused the Duke of Mantua to commission this commission from the composer of Cremona in the year 1600, may err on the side of poverty from now if it is presented only dramatized. Those who have attended Waltz's brilliant exhibition, as it passed through the Teatro Real, will lack the elegance of the movement and the light of the bodies having fun.
The audience at the Madrid Coliseum came out on Monday night 21 euphoric for this opera of cornets, trombones and timpani, which also seeks to sound original as it did four centuries ago. Added to the magnetism of the myth of Orpheus, the Thracian musician who enchanted wild beasts, was an unusual combination of singers who danced and dancers who sang. With a disarming, deep and refined naturalness.
Of course, the ensembles with which Waltz works are unparalleled: the Freiburger Barockorchester puts the instruments under the baton of the Helvetic-Argentine maestro Leonardo Garcia Alarcón; the Vocalconsort Berlin provides the voices, with a cast headed by the French soprano -and now a dancer- Julie Roset and the Austrian baritone with tenor treble Georg Nigly, as Euridice and Orfeo, and finally there is the organic work of the artists of the sasha waltz company
Europe becomes flesh in this show that, touched by grace, premiered in Amsterdam in 2014 commissioned by the Dutch National Opera and was last seen four years ago at the Staatsoper Berlin. And the exceptional nature of the proposal did not go unnoticed by the Real public, who responded standing up with a standing ovation for several minutes. What a few years ago would have been a Baroque-Renaissance rock for a certain public in the capital is today, as a proposal by the Real and in the hands of the choreographer who most skilfully leads operatic productions, a must that no one feels the need to abandon to the average part.
The set of trombones penetrating through the corridor of the stalls to the sound of a tocccata, the musicians located in the band and band of the stage or the maestro leaving at a given moment to dance with the artists made the poetic plot something dynamic and the music something beautiful, essential. Waltz is fascinated by Monteverdi's music and, on the other hand, wanted to continue working with Georg Nigl, with whom in 2010 he made Passion, a contemporary opera by Pascal Dusapin, inspired precisely by the music of Claudio Monteverdi.
Waltz has made famous collaborations with the Berlin operatic world. Daniel Barenboim commissioned him to stage Wagner's Tannhäuser for his famous Easter festival at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. And his most iconic production is that of Dido
But going as far as the public does not know if the one who sings and dances is a singer or a dancer, as happens in this L'Orfeo with, for example, Luciana Mancini (Proserpina, Alex Rosen (Charon) or Konstantin Wolff (Pluto), is an unexpected artistic jolt. The great entente between singers and dancers makes them all a stage presence. This also allows us to delve into the relationship with nature, the central theme of L'Orfeo, that is, the cycle of life and death A movement that allows the use of archaic elements such as handkerchiefs, which appear here in ancient Greek festive dances, in a different way.
It is Waltz herself who has ensured that these singers adopt the choreography as their own. A work from two years prior to the Dutch premiere in 2014, together with the Spanish choreographer Antonio Ruz as repositor. In the same way, the moral heir to the German dance theater of Pina Bausch has launched her dancers to work on their voices and sing the choral parts, or at least those that are not out of tune. It is the ultimate goal of the dialogue between music and dance that has characterized the work of the German choreographer.
This is how the Real arrives at the middle of its season focused on the myth of Orpheus, the one that best embodies the essence of the opera itself. Philip Glass's was seen in September and Gluck's will go on stage in June. Monteverdi's has an outcome in keeping with the humanist tradition of the Renaissance, recalls Matabosch in the Real program. In the end, Orpheus is not dismembered by the Bacchae, but a deus-ex-machina, Apollo, descends from heaven to invite him to contemplate his beloved, forever, from the stars. An ending that puzzled some at the Real... but it is not a contemporary invention, but rather the composer's own coming out of an exhausted Renaissance and entering a Baroque as daring as it was emerging.
