To Hades and back with Gluck's Orfeo

If you take Gluck's original 1764 score for Vienna, his Orfeo ed Euridice is one of the shortest and superficially the simplest three-act masterpieces in the repertoire. A major part of the credit should go to librettist Ranieri de Calzabigi, who strips the myth of preliminary trimmings and all but three characters (though the Furies and the Blessed Spirits are major presences). After Handel's Agrippina, which took more time than I'd thought, I wondered if we might be stretching Orfeo at four two-hour Monday classes on my Opera in Depth Course at Pushkin House. Far from it. In the first I was finally able to dig out excerpts from Peri's Euridice (beginning of the Prologue pictured below), the oldest extant opera in the repertoire from the year 1600, and his collaborator Caccini's version premiered shortly afterwards, as well as what you might expect from Monteverdi and a sideways glance at Telemann's multilingual spectacle for Hamburg.

Once embarked on Gluck, it was vital to check the differences between 1764 and the Paris version of 1774 (frontispiece pictured below), which involved substantial additions, only one of which I'd use if I were staging the work - the piercingly beautiful-sad flute solo which became the centrepieces of the Dance of the Blessed Spirits, about which Berlioz writes so eloquently in his Treatise on Instrumentation. I'd also, by the way, omit the pointlessly jolly Overture and stop the opera at the end of 'Che farò', reprising the opening chorus with Orfeo's three cries of 'Euridice'. No point in staging the 'lieto fine' or happy end and being ironic it, given that modern taste won't swallow it.

So we zoomed between John Eliot Gardiner's recording of the original version, incisive and buoyant in choral and orchestral terms in a way none of the other five recordings I've been using begins to match,

and the Paris version as recorded in 1956 with Leopold Simoneau in the title role recast for tenor (listening options are now between countertenor, mezzo, contralto, tenor and even baritone, though we didn't go as far as that). Neither includes the aria at the end of Act 1, 'Addio, miei sospiri', which was formerly believed to be a borrowing from a contemporary, but in fact turns out to be Gluck adapting himself, albit a pre-reform self with all the showpiece trimmings. I was thrilled to find it on a recording I'd thought of discarding, the one with Marilyn Horne and Solti conducting. Then I screened the end of Act 1 with Janet Baker in the Glyndebourne production, and that has it too.

Anyway, here's Horne somewhat later, transposing down a tone and not so agile with the coloratura, but it's good to see a master singer's way with poise and the Italian language (especially in the preceding recit).

The Furies and Elysium scenes, which need to run continuously - and without the Dance of the Furies, taken for Paris wholesale from Gluck's splendid Don Juan ballet, pointless in this context since Orfeo has calmed the tormented creatures - involve some looking forward, especially to Beethoven, who explicitly moulded the dialogue between soloist and gruff strings at the heart of his Fourth Piano Concerto on the first and the 'Scene by the Brook' in the Sixth Symphony on Orfeo's 'Che puro ciel', for me the tone-poem high point of the entire opera. Gluck's original orchestration, with birdsong flute, seems to be so much lovelier than his simplified revision, and Derek Lee Ragin is my favourite interpreter of this heavenly inspiration, so we ought to have the Gardiner recording with the English Baroque Soloists. For some reason, though, that's not embeddable from YouTube, so I'll settle for Anne Sofie von Otter with the English Concert conducted by Trevor Pinnock.

When Ian Page of Classical Opera and The Mozartists came to talk to us for the third class, he agreed that the original sounds best, but that the revision - where the flute simply exchanges murmuring-brook triplets with the strings, which first appears in the Parma interim version he conducted recently at the Queen Elizabeth Hall - actually works more effectively, balance-wise, live. Ian, polymath extraordinaire, wowed everyone with his range and insights. Within minutes he was talking about how what he thinks of as the tempo giusto for 'Che faro', a faster one than usual, makes it more about passionate loss rather than gentle, consoling elegy, with appropriate adjustments to the reflections marked 'a little slower' (Gluck was very specific, in everything but metronome, about what he wanted here). We then heard Classical Opera's Wigmore recording of the aria with the lustrous Anna Stéphany, and when the following week I compared verses - Lena Belkina (Ian's splendid Orfeo at the QEH), Ferrier, Simoneau, Derek Lee Ragin, Iestyn Davies on the new recording with David Bates's La Nuova Musica - that still came out tops for me. Of course Baker at Glyndebourne is the very model of focused intensity; how she pulls that off at the late Raymond Leppard's incredibly slow speed is little short of miraculous.

Ian's intensive study of hundreds of operas from the mid-18th century informs so much of what he says, and it was surprising to learn that Gluck's first version premiered in Vienna the day before the child-prodigy Mozart visited. Mozart certainly knew and loved this work - viz the parallels between 'Che puro ciel' and Tamino's first use of the Magic Flute, where both heroes lament how the absence of their beloved renders the idyllic scene imperfect. We also discussed, inter alia, dramatic continuity - the Parma version was performed straight through, with no interval and only the shortest of pauses between acts - and supertitling (Ian does his own, to make certain of absolute tie-ins with what's being sung). Here we are as snapped on request by student Andrea Gawn - forgive the shine and the blue tinge, the latter's from the projector/screen, hard to avoid).

We were also, for some reason, talking about Haydn symphonies and how Ian wants to champion the best ones without nicknames. He talked about the musical palindrome in the Minuet and Trio of No. 47, and how mind-blowing it is to get players to render it backwards from the score (as Haydn intended) rather than having it written out. There's a wealth of strangeness and wonder still to explore in the musical world.

Expectations of Iestyn Davies's visit this week were dashed when it turned out that he'd got the day wrong for his return from tour. We'll hold him to coming to see us next term; but I do think we got infinite riches from Ian. In the meantime, went to the Royal Overseas League yesterday for the launch of our beloved Linda Esther Gray's new collaborative volume with tenor Ian Partridge, Thoughts Around Great Singing (there's also a website: www.singingtags.com). Both spoke engagingly of their experiences and the collaboration. I'll report back when I've read the book.

Volubilis: an outpost of empire

Sites, shmites: it's easy to become cynical about yet another tourist-attracting antiquity. Actually, when I come to think about it, those that have been worth running varying degrees of the fairground gamut to see are more numerous than I'd casually remembered: the pyramids and sphinx, Ephesus, Nemrut Dag, the Acropolis of Athens, Persepolis, Tyre, Palmyra, Qalaat Samaan, Petra, Thanjavur...probably I've left something spectacular off the list. The point is that Roman Volubilis, about which I'd heard nothing before we went to Morocco, wasn't high on the list: the feeling was, we're in Meknes, we ought to go. And it turned it to be one of the most breathtakingly-located, mosaic-rich set of ruins we'd ever seen. The rains had brought the flowers out in abundance, of course, and even the edge of the site looking over to the basilica and forum was a wonder to behold. The ruins are spread out on a ridge above the high and fertile Zerhoun plateau. Above are abundant olive groves and copper-rich hills forming an amphitheatre, in the middle of which nestles the shrine-town of Moulay Idriss. Volubilis may have been a Berber settlement before the first century BC, when the Romans arrived. Its era of prosperity began when Augustus gave the combined kingdoms of Mauritania and Numidia to the Berber prince Juba II. So Volubilis became the seat of the provincial governor of Mauritania Tingitana (love that name, comes from Tingi which was the original name for equally influential Roman Tangiers). It exported wheat and oil - easy still to see why - as well as wild beasts for Roman games. And just as Lebanon was all but stripped of its cedars to provide timber for ships, so ancient Morocco lost its lions, bears and elephants. They became extinct in 200 years, about the length of the Roman rule here. After it, the mixed population continued to speak Latin well into the seventh century. The city was all but abandoned a century later, with the coming of Islam, and plundered in the eighteenth, when Moulay Ismail plundered the site for its marble. The animals are at least depicted in what for me is the most charming of the many mosaics which still preserve their brilliant colours in full sun and are subjected to only the minimum of cordoning-off (we saw not a single guard, and 1990s plans for expansion with a new museum and visitors' centre seemed to have come to a full stop). The so-called House of Orpheus is a sizeable mansion, formerly of three storeys. Its finest floor has a design I'd want in my own palace: the great musician at the centre, taming the birds and beasts who radiate outwards from the centre. There's also a more basic, black and white marine picture with a stocky Amphitrite in a chariot drawn by a sea horse and sundry exotic sea creatures. The prospect of basilica, capitol and forum then leads you forward - as do the storks nesting peacefully on several of the columns, unperturbed by the sparrows which flit noisily in and out of the twigging beneath them. The complex here seems to have been rebuilt in 217 AD during the reign of the African-born Emperor Septimus Severus. The path then leads onwards to a triumphal arch erected in the year of Caracalla's death. It would have been lavishly adorned with statues, many of which along with bronzes which give their names to some of the houses have gone to the museum in Rabat and seem, given the present building lethargy at Volubilis, unlikely to return here in the near future. The Decumanus Maximus which rises upwards from the arch is lined with many of the more prosperous residences. Most of the mosaics are slightly crudely executed - especially as compared with those in Tunis's splendid Bardo Museum - but the colours, where not over-restored, are very jolly. Bacchus discovers a half-lost Ariadne in the Knight's House while the labours of Hercules are portrayed in roundels to the north and there's an even finer mosaic of Bacchus flanked by the four seasons (only two of them reproduced in full below) and with what is - I think, but the guidebooks can't reach a consensus about this - a Bacchante beneath him. The best-executed mosaics are on the other side of the Decumanus Maximus, in the House of Venus. In the most celebrated of them, Diana is discovered at her bath by Actaeon. The surprised nymph on the left and the love-goddess's Roman hairdo are marvellously executed. And in the next room, Hylas is captured by frolicking nymphs. No doubt more will come to life if the indolent archaeological team can get its act together. But it's a wonderful site to spend an afternoon strolling around, and it certainly wasn't swamped by tour groups when we went. By 5.30 when I returned to the capitol, there was just a handful of visitors and the stork welcomed her hunter-gatherer mate back to the nest. I missed snapping that, but here she is anyway looking haughtily at a cheeky sparrow. There was no time to stop in Moulay Idriss, other than to take a view from above of the camel-humped town with the mausoleum to Morocco's influential sultan-pioneer of Islam in its dip. Then we sped back to Meknes to enjoy the early-evening entertainment on the square.