To Hell and Back by Jake Heggie - The visionary collaboration of Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer has produced some of contemporary opera’s most important titles including Moby Dick and It’s a Wonderful Life. In To Hell and Back the team reaches beyond the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and focuses on the abduction of Persephone, daughter of the harvest goddess Demeter, who was stolen by Pluto, the god of the underworld. Scheer based his text on the story as told through Ovid’s Metamophoses, shaping it into a modern tale of spousal abuse. The result is a devastating chamber drama for two voices that reframes mythology with unflinching contemporary clarity.
Eurydice by Jodi Gobel - Eurydice is a through-composed setting of Hilda Doolittle’s Imagist epic prose poem. It explores the Orpheus myth from the typically silent perspective of its female protagonist. Doolittle’s poem breaks the silence imposed on Eurydice, giving her a furious, unflinching voice to confront the husband whose hesitation doomed her. Composer Jodi Gobel sets Doolittle’s modernist text to music, transforming a poem of grief into a reckoning and finally giving Eurydice the last word. The OperaDelaware performances will be the world premiere of a new version of Eurydice, tailored specifically for Company Artist Emily Margevich.
L’altra Euridice by Jonathan Dove - L'altra Euridice comes from Tales of Hope and Desire, Jonathan Dove's trilogy of one-act operas exploring myth and longing through radically reimagined lenses. Dove takes the Orpheus story and turns it completely inside out: the opera retells the Orphean myth from the perspective of Pluto, god of the underworld, reversing the roles of hero and villain that have defined the myth for thousands of years. In Calvino's telling, Pluto is not a monster but instead he is a devoted partner who has spent his life with Eurydice deep within the earth, dreaming of bringing the planet itself to life from its core, only to lose her when Orpheus lures her to the surface with his deceptive, seductive song. It is a love story told by the one history has always cast as the villain, and once you hear his side, you may never think of the myth in the same way again.
