An Eternal Story of Love and Loss: Orpheus and Opera

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This fall the Lyric Opera of Chicago, in collaboration with the Joffrey Ballet, is mounting an exciting new production of the 1774 Paris version of Christoph Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice. But the myth of Orpheus journeying to the Underworld to find his deceased wife Eurydice has inspired composers from the first surviving opera by Jacopo Peri in 1600 to the Canadian composer John Robertson’s recent Orpheus masque, premiered in 2015.

Music experts Linda Austern and David Buch will engage in discussion with Lyric performers and artistic staff to reflect upon the importance of Orpheus in the history of opera and how this story of love, loss, and loss yet again continues to resonate today.

Linda Phyllis Austern, associate professor of musicology at Northwestern University, specializes in sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and early eighteenth-century musical-cultural relations; music in the early modern English theater; gender and sexuality studies; and music as related to the visual arts.

David Buch, emeritus professor of music history at the University of Northern Iowa, has received international attention for his new discoveries and interpretations about Mozart operas, and he often presents pre-opera talks and community workshops for the Lyric Opera.

Cosponsored with the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies.