Orfeo Ed Euridice - Revised Versions

Revised Versions

In 1769 for a performance at Parma which was conducted by the composer, Gluck transposed the role of Orfeo up for the soprano castrato Giuseppe Millico, maintaining a libretto in Italian. This version has not been performed in modern times.

Gluck revised the score again for a production in Paris, which premiered on 2 August 1774. This version, named Orphée et Eurydice, had a French libretto by Pierre-Louis Moline, which was both a translation of and an expansion upon Calzabigi's original text. Gluck expanded and rewrote parts of the opera, and changed the role of Orpheus from a part for a castrato to one for high tenor or the so-called haute-contre – the usual voice in French opera for heroic characters – as the French almost never used castrati. This version of the work also had additional ballet sequences, conforming to the tastes that were prevalent at the time in Paris, and included the long "Dance of the Furies", originally from Gluck's ballet Don Juan, and the famous "Dance of the Blessed Spirits" for flute and strings. By 1825 operatic castrati themselves had virtually vanished, and performances of the original version for castrato became increasingly rare. The modern practice of approximating castrati by using countertenors as replacements only dates to 1950.

From 1784 to 1859 the Parisian diapason (concert pitch) rose steadily from 820 to 896 cycles per second, thus Gluck's French version for haute-contre became increasingly impractical. When Adolphe Nourrit sang the role at the Opéra in 1824 his music was altered. Giacomo Meyerbeer suggested to the French contralto Pauline Viardot that she should perform the role of Orfeo. The composer Hector Berlioz was a close friend of Viardot and the leading expert in France on the music of Gluck. He knew the score of "the largely forgotten Italian original as thoroughly as he knew the French", and agreed to prepare a version of the opera – in four acts – with Viardot's voice in mind, adapting the role of Orphée for a female alto. In his adaptation, Berlioz used the key scheme of the 1762 Vienna score while incorporating much of the additional music of the 1774 Paris score. He returned to the Italian version only when he considered it to be superior either in terms of music or in terms of the drama. He also restored some of the more subtle orchestration from the Italian version and resisted proposals by Viardot and the theatre's director Léon Carvalho to modernize the orchestration. In the end Camille Saint-Saëns, who was acting as Berlioz's assistant on the project, did some of the minor rewriting which Berlioz had declined to do.

The Berlioz version was first presented at the Théâtre Lyrique on 18 November 1859 with Viardot as Orphée, Marie Sasse as Eurydice, Marie Ernestine Marimon as L'Amour, Mlle Moreau as L'Ombre, and Adolphe Deloffre as the conductor. The sets were designed by Charles-Antoine Cambon and Joseph Thierry, and the choreography was by Lucien Petipa. (The seventeen-year-old Jules Massenet was the orchestra's timpanist. During the rehearsals Berlioz had complimented the young player on the accuracy of his tuning.) The production was a popular and critical success, filling the house every night, and was given a total of 138 times by the company.

By the following year most theaters in Paris had lowered concert pitch to diapason normal. This was not as low as in Gluck's time: "a Commission had lately recommended that the pitch in France should be lowered from an A of 896 to 870 vibrations." Still this was apparently enough that later in the 19th century the role of Orpheus came to be sung almost as frequently by a tenor as by a contralto.

Berlioz's version is one of many which combine the Italian and French scores, although it is the most influential and well regarded. Since about 1870 three-act adaptations of the Berlioz score, translating it back into Italian and restoring much of the music from the 1774 French version which Berlioz had left out, were common. An 1889 edition for contralto, published by Ricordi, became the most popular. On occasion the role of Orfeo has even been transposed down an octave for a baritone to sing. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Hermann Prey are two notable baritones who have performed the role in Germany. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau recorded the opera, a recording which is still available commercially.