Dvorak’s The Jacobin and Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, the two operas that opened this year’s Buxton Festival, are both relative rarities today, but their creators’ fortunes tell an interesting story. Dvorak’s operas — or at least Rusalka — joined the repertoire around the same time, during the 1980s, that Gluck’s arguably starting slipping from the stage, to the extent that now means the UK’s main companies are all but ignoring the composer’s 300th anniversary this year.
Both works, in their different ways, also explore the power of music. Orpheus is the archetypal musician in art, whose power as singer enabled him to bring back Eurydice from death — temporarily in the original myth, permanently in the double-reprieve, Enlightenment-friendly happy ending concocted by Gluck and his librettist Ranieri de’ Calzabigi. In The Jacobin, Dvorak’s eighth opera of 11, virtually everyone is a singer: it’s a piece that seems to me a little like an unruly Bohemian Meistersinger.
But the loosely political and the broadly picturesque are haphazardly assembled in Marie Cervinkova-Riegrova’s libretto, which has the additional problem of having too many characters featuring in too many plots — all of which drift unpredictably in and out of focus.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in