Kamakura, Japan
I arrived in this ancient samurai capital on a warm autumnal afternoon to attend a groundbreaking performance of a baroque opera out-of-doors on the grounds of the sacred Shinto shrine Tsurugaoka Hachimangu. Young priests were scurrying about shaded lanes in their pastel hakama, the long-pleated pants they wear over crisp white kimonos. On the outskirts, the immense lotus ponds were looking seasonal with their scattering of upright brown seedpods. I seated myself near the pavilion with water troughs, where visitors scooped up water with wooden ladles to purify their hands before ascending the grand staircase to the main shrine.
In this serene atmosphere, I had a quiet moment to look back at how I came to be here. Like other opera aficionados, I now await new productions with fear and trepidation as directors attempt to outdo each other, either by establishing a new time frame or another locale—sometimes both—to make the performance of a masterwork appear more relevant. More often than not, one leaves feeling the overlay distracts from, rather than enhances, the original work.
But last year I discovered there is another way to enrich opera when, on a cold rainy evening in New York, I attended a joint lecture by the Australian conductor Aaron Carpenè, a leading authority on baroque opera, and the visionary director Stefano Vizioli, who were visiting from Rome. To celebrate the 150th anniversary of bilateral relations between Japan and Italy, they proposed to stage Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo in Japan, integrating into the opera itself traditional formal elements of that country’s performing arts. In 2013, they had already succeeded in Bhutan by mounting that country’s first opera ever with a cross-cultural production of Handel’s pastorale Acis and Galatea, incorporating Bhutanese song, dance, instrumentation, and colorful folk costumes.
In Japan, they connected with Kyoko Mimura, president of a Japanese organization called Friendship Bridge, which seeks to create an international dialogue through classical music and the arts. They became the producers of the opera, garnering support and identifying the specific Japanese performing artists to be included.
First performed in 1607 in the ducal palace of Mantua, L’Orfeo (with a libretto by Alessandro Striggio) marked the emergence of opera in its definitive form—with arias, duets, and choruses—though it was not the first musical drama to engage the classical Greek myth of the semi-deity musician and poet Orpheus. As the story goes, in this version, on their wedding day Orpheus’s beloved Euridice dies from a snake bite, and he charms his way with his music into the underworld to reclaim her, only to lose her again when (though prohibited from doing so) he looks back at her on their journey upward.
It is not unusual to discover similar mythologies in diverse cultures. In Japan, the creation myth from the Kojiki, an 8th-century chronicle, centers around the deities Izanagi and Izanami, who, standing on the floating bridge of heaven, stirred the waters below with a jeweled spear, and the droplets that fell formed solid land. Eventually, their children became Japan’s islands; but Izanami, in giving birth to the fire god, died and went to the land of the dead. Like Orpheus, Izanagi descended to retrieve her and, after being warned not to gaze upon her, fled when he lit a torch and saw she was a decomposed corpse.
These corresponding myths gave a genuine basis to link the two cultures in an opera performance that would combine an exuberant Italian baroque interpretation with the more grave, stately aspects of ancient Japanese theater, music, and dance. To expand the vision, Aaron Carpenè, who based the performance on a facsimile of the 1609 version, revived the librettist Striggio’s original Act Five ending, in which the Bacchantes rip Orpheus apart after his final diatribe against women. (In the substituted ending, a fatherly Apollo appeases his son Orpheus and carries him to heaven.) With no extant music for the Bacchic finale, Carpenè engaged the Japanese composer and conductor Ryusuke Numajiri to complete this portion of the opera preceding Monteverdi’s final chorus with the moresca dance.
To add to this delectable combination, the first performances would take place here at the Tsurugaoka Hachimangu Shrine. As dusk gathered, we took our seats around the thrust stage connected to one of the shrine’s deep red and elaborately gilded open pavilions under a pagoda roof that sheltered the orchestra of period instruments. Above us, a sliver of a moon shone through branches of golden trees as two Shinto priests in white, with ritualistic shiny black hats, came onstage waving boughs of leaves to bless the performance. When the conductor Carpenè emerged, the anticipation in the audience was palpable as the applause died down and the heralding strains of the prologue’s Renaissance trombones (or sackbuts) and trumpets wafted in the air.
As La Musica (soprano Gemma Bertagnolli) entered for her poignant yet seductive aria, setting the tone for songs “happy and sad,” her long, flowing, zigzag-patterned gown revealed one Italian aspect of the performance: The costumes were designed by Angela Missoni and Luca Missoni in their trademark primary-colored-plus-strong-black-and-white stripes of all widths in a floating fabric draped into garments—jackets, skirts, dresses, cloaks—combined with white tops and bottoms (except for Orpheus in black). As the chorus of shepherds and nymphs poured onto the stage in joyous song, these costumes, contemporary yet timeless, literally swirled in twists and turns in dances choreographed by Gloria Giordano with an éclat that carried throughout the production. During the balleto for the wedding celebration, specialists performed the taranta and pizzica, traditional southern Italian folk dances.
When Orpheus (Vittorio Prato, a handsome, lanky Italian baritone) began the romantic aria “Rosa del ciel, vita del mondo” to his bride, he captivated the audience with his tonal clarity and strength of presentation. In response, Euridice (the Japanese soprano Sakiko Abe, a specialist in baroque music) sang with sweet allure. But no sooner were their festivities established than the Messagera (soprano Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli) arrived amidst the rejoicing to announce the death of Euridice (“Ahi, caso acerbo”) in measured tones, all the more bitter in this production in contrast to the ebullience of youth.
Giving Orpheus hope to regain Euridice, Speranza (sung by Bertagnolli) led him to where Caronte, the boatman, ferries the dead to the underworld. Seated in a row behind her as she gathered up the stricken hero, three gagaku performers of imperial court music played bamboo wind instruments: a ryuteki (seven-holed transverse flute), a hichiriki (seven-holed, double-reed woodwind), and the majestic sho, with 17 thin, upright bamboo pipes. The mournful strains of their music blended perfectly with the baroque, two courtly traditions intertwined. At the threshold to the underworld, Speranza, hope personified, could go no farther, singing “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate,” Striggio’s literal twist on Dante’s admonishment—”Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”—from the third Canto of the Inferno.
When Caronte refused to transport Orpheus as a living being, the hero responded with the captivating “Possente spirto, e formidabil nume” aria, the most lyrical of the opera. Each of the first three verses was accompanied by a different instrument, followed by its own melodic interlude: first, the violin; second, the cornetto; and finally the harp—here not only the orchestral harp but an electronic laser harp, 11 bright green beams projected across the stage, created by sound artist Pietro Pirelli, who “plucked” by blocking the beams in succession. The harmony of the two harps vibrating on the night air was spellbinding.
Bypassing the now-sleeping Caronte, Orpheus entered the kingdom of the dead for the regal sequence, in which the singing rulers Plutone and Proserpina were doubled by a performance of masked actors from the Hosho School of Noh Theater. Grand Master Kazufusa Hosho played the female role of Proserpina, though patterned after the female deity Izanami, with her consort Izanagi carrying the giveaway spear. Portraying the royal couple of the underworld, bass Ugo Guagliardo and Mazzulli, dressed in Missoni funereal black and white, sang to one side—she pleading with emotion to release Euridice to Orpheus—while the Noh actors took center stage and, behind them, the gagaku players.
When all was set in motion, the singing, the playing of the sho with the viola da gamba and the archlute, and the solemn, refined movements and minced steps of the Noh actors—he terrifying in luxurious black and gold with wild black hair, she in a pale transparent robe with a gold floral motif—nothing surpassed the beauty of the combination.
Although Orpheus wins his appeal, he loses Euridice out of doubt and love as soon as he turns to gaze upon her, and she fades away with her moving aria “Ahi, vista troppo dolce e troppo amara.” As the final act opens, with Orpheus on the plains of Thrace communicating with his echo—a faint voice coming from a distance through surrounding trees—he turns against love and “vil femina” (a worthless woman), whereupon the original libretto came to life (after a bridge text written by the conductor) with Numajiri’s new music blending seamlessly with Monteverdi.
The chorus of bacchantes entered to take vengeance on Orpheus, the singers, dressed in white, becoming the actual destroyers of Orpheus as they danced in a frenzied circle around him, twirling their double fans that became symbolic knives. Costumed in pastel kimonos with diaphanous overgarments, they appeared to be moving through a swirl of vaporous clouds. Then, in an unprecedented combination of Noh Theater with Nihon Buyo School dance, the Noh Grand Master Kazufusa Hosho entered in bright red silk, wearing the mask of Hashihime, a heartbroken woman-turned-demon who tore Orpheus’s jacket to pieces as a symbolic end. In the background, Noh musicians beat hand drums while a chanter added to the rhythmic fury.
Returning to Monteverdi’s original ending, the chorus of nymphs and shepherds performed the joyous finale—”Vanne Orfeo, felice a pieno”—with the moresca dances celebrating the spirit of Orpheus. The audience rose in affirmation. And so JapanOrfeo was born. Long may it live as an exhilarating marriage of two cultures as it travels around the world.
Paula Deitz is editor of the Hudson Review.
