Orphée et Eurydice

About

Pina Bausch’s staging of Orphée et Eurydice creates a landmark dance-opera by doubling each principal with both a singer and a dancer. This device intensifies Gluck’s drama without contradicting the score, letting voice and body reveal different facets of grief and love at the same moment. The visual world is stark and elemental—high glass walls, dark spaces, and bare, earthbound movement characteristic of Bausch’s Tanztheater, adapted here for the Paris Opera Ballet. Repeated, mimetic gestures evoke mourning, blindness, and the vulnerability of human bodies. Musically, a period-instrument approach by the Balthasar-Neumann Ensemble and Choir adds crisp textures that contrast with the expressionist movement onstage. Thomas Hengelbrock leads most performances, with Philippe Hui conducting select dates. The production’s focus on mourning, violence, peace, and death darkens the myth, drawing attention to loss and the inescapability of mortality.