Not light, not darkness, but something in between
(I'm directing a new opera!)
“All at once the god stopped her, and with pain in his voice spoke the words: he has turned around—” Rainer Maria Rilke, Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes
Last weekend, my friend, the composer and mezzo-soprano Elliot Menard, came to Atlanta to workshop her new opera Umbra, which she has asked me to direct. This is our second collaboration, having previously worked together on Kate Soper’s Here Be Sirens, where Elliot played one of three mythological sirens trying to understand the true power of her song.
Umbra also treads classical territory, adapting the myth of Orpheus to explore how often we must pass through darkness to find our way to something new.
You probably know the story, but here’s my retelling of it:
Orpheus, blessed with music that could make stones weep, loses his bride Eurydice to a serpent’s bite. He journeys to the underworld, where his songs move even the dark gods to pity. They grant him the impossible—a chance to lead Eurydice back to life on one condition: he must not look back at her until they reach the light. But at the threshold of the upper world, in that moment between dawn and darkness, Orpheus turns… and loses Eurydice for a second time.
For four centuries, composers have returned to Orpheus like pilgrims to a sacred site, each finding something different in his descent to the underworld. From Monteverdi's L’Orfeo, which gave birth to opera itself, to Broadway’s Hadestown, we seem unable to let go of this story of a musician who defied death with song.
What makes Elliot’s opera startlingly original is her focus on what happens after Orpheus returns from the Land of the Dead.
Drawing from Ovid, she gives us an Orpheus crushed by loss. Bereft (the word orphan shares a prefix with Orpheus), he shuns the company of friends, gives up singing, and wanders the earth for years until one day he sits on a barren field beneath the blazing sun, perhaps ready to die.
But in this scorched wasteland, an extraordinary thing happens: the trees, moved by his grief, uproot and journey toward Orpheus to create a grove of shade around him. They come one by one—mighty oak and fragile hazel, ash and fir, spruce and pine, each bringing its particular shadow—until Orpheus finds himself in what the Romans called umbra, that in-between space that is neither light nor darkness, but something more complex and forgiving.
This moment in the story touches me deeply. As someone who renounced the practice of theater for five years, then slowly found my way back to it, I’m fascinated by Orpheus’s homecoming, by his return to music. This, to me, is the crucial Orphic turn. What conditions might allow an artist to find their voice again?
Surrounded by an audience of trees and birds, a heartbroken Orpheus sings to the sun at dawn.
He sings of love and death—reflections of his own story, as he moves through grief. And this also really interests me: how does suffering change one as an artist?
I will mourn for you: you will mourn for others, and enter into sorrows. —Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book X, 142
Umbra springs from Elliot’s personal experience of loss. And this loss has led her to write music that is vulnerable and transformative, sometimes mournful, sometimes radiant, music where the human voice blurs the contours of light and darkness and covers us with a veil of beauty.
Here is a very brief taste:
You might notice that Elliot is working in Latin. To my knowledge, there are only nine operas composed in Latin, by the likes of Stravinsky, Mozart, Orff, and Philip Glass. Elliot’s genius is to tell the story of an artist trying to bring someone back from the dead, in a dead language that suddenly resurrects in our ears.
And yet, like all stories of resurrection, this one too must reckon with mortality.
Accepting that he cannot sing Eurydice back to life, Orpheus sings himself to death. Under the spell of his songs, the Bacchae (female worshipers of Dionysus) emerge from the woods and tear him to pieces.
His severed head floats down a river, still singing, as his soul journeys to the land of shadows, where he finally reunites with Eurydice.
Elliot and I are thrilled to present a staged workshop production of Umbra in Los Angeles this March. When it opens, it will play to a city ravaged by fire, intimate with loss and grappling with redrawn boundaries between what endures and what must be surrendered.
I wonder what it means to stage an opera about finding shelter in such a place.
What sanctuary of shade might we offer each other? What songs might emerge from the city’s collective grief?
If you are in Los Angeles I hope you will join us. Umbra will play on March 21 and 22 at Highways in Santa Monica. Ticketing info coming soon.
And regardless of where you are, I hope you will consider making a small, tax-deductible contribution to our fundraising campaign to make Umbra possible. We’ve already raised $25,000 but still need help reaching our goal:
Turning to you in gratitude,
Héctor