Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo”, for the first time at the State Opera: standing ovations for Tom Morris’s colorful and grotesque direction. Pablo Heras-Casado on the podium of the Concentus Musicus loves opulence, Georg Nigl leaves no one indifferent in the title role.
Nobel perishes the world! If you can afford it, just get married in the State Opera. A delegation of trumpeters belts out the “Toccata”, i.e. the Gonzaga fanfare, several times as the audience arrives on the main staircase: the sound symbol vibrating with splendor and power, created by Claudio Monteverdi for the Duke of Mantua, is converted into the general festive signal. In the hall, violins from the proscenium box take over, later also recorders. The singing ensemble strolls through the stalls in their fantasy costumes somewhere between life ball and flower power and welcomes the visitors to the premiere as the wedding guests of the couple Orfeo and Euridice.
At the very end of the performance, in the final chord enriched with improvisation, the fanfare, the mother of all opera overtures, will once again raise its proud head – and La Musica, which surprisingly opened the evening with its prologue in German and English at the performance, which was otherwise originally sung in Italian , bows on behalf of all. Orfeo has already accepted his fate with an expression of suffering, which, as a widower, together with his newly lifeless wife, has taken him to heaven.