Eurydice

Program Note:

Tonight’s program includes the world premiere of Zachary Wadsworth’s Eurydice. The composer ponders the following questions:
“As many times as we have heard the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which Orpheus cannot avoid looking back at his wife and she is condemned forever to hell, how many times have we actually considered the story from Eurydice’s perspective? After being left behind by Orpheus, how did Eurydice feel? Was she enraged? Was she disappointed? Did her love for him survive even after he left her behind?
These questions are the central focus of H.D.’s [Hilda Doolittle’s] chilling poem ‘Eurydice,’ a portion of which is set here for soprano and strings. The piece is in three contrasting sections, tracking the development of Eurydice’s response to being abandoned.
In the opening section, Eurydice’s anger is painted with quiet, pitchless noise, broken by sudden explosive outbursts of rage at Orpheus’s ‘arrogance’ and ‘ruthlessness.’ In the second section, as she implores ‘Why did you turn back?’ this rage finally catches fire with explosive and colorful writing in the strings, and with virtuosic writing in the soprano. The third and final section ponders the beauty that has been squandered by Orpheus’s mistake in a wrenching arietta, ‘Saffron from the fringe of the earth.’ Here, the strings play fragments of an invented Renaissance motet, always incomplete and always distant from the singer’s vivid anguish.”

(c) Jason Stell and Zachary Wadsworth