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BACKGROUND
Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, the first of the composer’s “reform operas” written in collaboration with Italian poet Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, had its premiere at Vienna’s Burgtheater on October 5, 1762. With Orfeo ed Euridice and its successors, Alceste (1767) and Paride ed Elena (1770), composer and librettist sought to create works of “edle Einfalt” (noble simplicity) that abandoned the complicated conventions of opera seria.
The role of Orfeo was sung at the Vienna premiere by the alto castrato Gaetano Guadagni, an artist whose beautiful voice and restrained elegance were much admired. In 1769, for a production in Parma, Gluck transposed the role of Orfeo for the soprano castrato Giuseppe Millico, thus beginning the process of revision that has made the performing history of this work a particularly rich one. In 1774, Gluck made extensive changes to Orfeo ed Euridice for its premiere at Paris’s Académie Royale de Musique, rewriting the leading role for Joseph Legros, an haute-contre tenor, and adding significantly to the opera’s store of vocal and instrumental pieces. The text of the 1774 Orphée et Eurydice was by poet Pierre-Louis Moline, based on Calzabigi’s original libretto. In 1859, more than seventy years after Gluck’s death, composer Hector Berlioz created his own edition of Orphée for French contralto Pauline Viardot, combining what he considered to be the best elements of Gluck’s Italian and French versions.
Most performing versions of the opera since Berlioz’s day have been hybrids, often combining an Italian adaptation of Berlioz’s edition with music from Gluck’s own revisions of 1774. After Viardot’s triumph as Orfeo, the favored casting for the role remained a contralto or a mezzo until the late twentieth century, when countertenors started taking on Orfeo ed Euridice with considerable success.
The Met first presented Orfeo ed Euridice on April 11, 1885, when Marianne Brandt sang a single (German-language) performance on tour in Boston.
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