Tuesday, November 23, 2021
The Emails Behind the Opera ‘Eurydice’
The New York Times: In 2015, the composer Matthew Aucoin emailed the playwright Sarah Ruhl to ask whether she would be interested in working with him on a new opera inspired by the Orpheus myth.
Instead they ended up adapting her 2003 play “Eurydice” — a yearning, fanciful treatment of the Orpheus story in which Eurydice is reunited with her dead father in the underworld.
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I love the way each of these creators speak about storytelling, language, thought, and composition. "Art is a dream we have together" is a phrase I never knew I needed to hear. It's interesting that their emails to each other almost read like love letters to their art forms and ability. It's like the most eloquently written fangirling and acknowledgment that the other's talent is baffling and beautiful. I also appreciate that Aucoin didn't try to push too hard for the addition and reshaping of the overall narrative to more fully show Orpheus's standpoint. Coming from wanting to work on Orpheus, it makes sense that he would feel very comfortable in that knowledge and want to contribute in that way but the ability to let go of what is comfortable and let the structure of the existing play breathe is hard when you have such heavy thoughts and opinions on the direction you already want to go.
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