FULL Ópera tango “Eurídice, una sombra ya pronto serás” Buenos Aires 2024 Victoria Gaeta, Natacha Nocetti, Emiliano Bulacios

Buenos Aires chamber version of Gluck’s opera

Musically, this version is a sort of Buenos Aires chamber version of the 1762 opera, prepared from the originals. Gluck’s re-orchestrated arias are the musical focus, while the recitatives, which traditionally provide the dramatic context, are replaced by poetic texts by great tango lyricists such as José María Contursi or Emilio Fresedo. The orchestration includes traditional tango instruments such as bandoneon, guitars and bass.

The person in charge of the dramaturgy and the staging, Mariana Ciolfi, points out that “we tried to recreate the myth of Orpheus based on Gluck’s opera from a female perspective and in a space known as the carnival. We chose that context because this celebration functions as a space of social subversion. We can all be ‘kings’ or ‘queens’ in the carnival, all inequalities are compensated, but at the end of the day each one returns to his or her reality and those socially forbidden behaviors that surfaced beneath the masks reveal what we really are.” 

“The aesthetic language,” Ciolfi adds, “is that of dance-theatre, which emerges from the danced interludes of the original opera, creating images from popular comic culture that explore an exaltation of the most immediate and lowest materiality, therefore related to sexuality and the most animal dimension of the human being.”

According to the plot summary, Eurydice and Orpheus, both children of Italian immigrants, meet at a carnival celebration in Buenos Aires in the late 1930s. They both attend dressed as a bride and groom. Love strikes immediately. They look at each other and fall in love. They decide to get married and, in the midst of the celebrations, Amor, a pimp, bursts into the crowd and harasses Eurydice and tries to rape her. She wants to flee but is kidnapped. When Orpheus realizes she is missing, he begins a frantic and tireless search. Eurydice does not appear. With no hope left, he sinks into sadness and gets drunk in a bar, where Amor arrives and, deceiving him, gives him the key to find his wife. He himself leads him to the place where she is, a cabaret run by Amor himself. He warns him not to try to look at Eurydice or he will lose her forever. Orpheus enters, rejects other women in the place who try to seduce him and finally manages to identify Eurydice’s voice through a wall. They manage to exchange a few words and the joy of both is infinite. For a moment they feel reborn. Then Love bursts into Eurydice’s room. Taking advantage of the fact that Orpheus cannot see or touch her, he violently forces her to demand proof of love, at least a look. Orpheus cannot bear any more suffering and ends up giving in and falling into Love’s trap, who will end Eurydice’s life.
Quoted from gba.gob.ar