Ashton’s Orpheus - two entries on a production I never saw
This sublime photograph of the opening tableau of Frederick Ashton’s 1953 anglophone Covent Garden production of Gluck’s “Orpheus” - specially for my new Facebook friend Ben Katz, whom I have never met in person, and for those who joined me in emotion over my recent Kathleen Ferrier post - is by Houston Rogers, one of the great London theatrical photographers of the postwar era. It shows Ashton’s superlative skill at giving physical dimensions to Gluck’s neoclassical composition; the marvellously poetic neoclassicism of Sophie Fedorovitch’s stage designs; and the great Ferrier in the title role.
Gluck’s “Orpheus” transcends the tragedy of the Orpheus myth: Orpheus reclaims Eurydice from death not once but twice. The opposite happened with this production: tragedy afflicted it twice over. Ferrier herself, perhaps the most beloved singer Britain had ever produced, was known to have advanced cancer at the time of this production; Ashton gave her considerable stillness, but she broke a bone in her leg at this time, and managed to sing only two performances, never performing in public again. More tragic yet, Fedorovitch, Ashton’s closest artistic friend for twenty-eight years, was found dead from a gas leak on the day of the dress rehearsal. More than twenty-five years later, the critic Mary Clarke told me how she and others watched the production through a mist of tears. Two years before, Ashton’s other closest artistic colleague, the musician-composer Constant Lambert, died too; Ashton spoke in 1979 of these deaths “as of the ground has opened under my feet”.
The 1953 “Orpheus” was Ashton’s fifth staging of an opera in the years 1947-1953; these included the world premiere of Benjamin Britten’s “Albert Herring”. Gluck’s “Orpheus” contains extensive dance music: Ashton gave the celebrated flute-solo Dance of the Blessed Spirit to Svetlana Beriosova, just twenty years old, with a dove on her wrist. He subsequently choreographed the dances for a 1958 italopjone production of the opera for La Scala: the Blessed Spirit there was the young Carla Fracci. Then in 1978, as I wrote in June, he returned to the Blessed Spirit music, giving it now to Anthony Dowell as an independent solo.
Saturday 11 July.
One of the lost productions for which we have far too little information is Frederick Ashton’s 1953 Covent Garden production of Gluck’s opera “Orpheus”. Ashton staged quite a number of operas in these years, from “Orpheus” and “La Traviata” to the world premiere of Benjamin Britten’s “Rape of Lucretia”. Although Gluck called it “Orfeo ed Eurydice” in Italian or “Orphée et Eurydice” in French, this production - conceived for the great Kathleen Ferrier as Orpheus - was given just the name of the poet-singer hero. Ferrier had previously sung the opera in Italian; here she sang it in English.
Like George Balanchine’s 1936 far more controversial Metropolitan Opera production (designed by Pavel Tchelitchew, with Hell as a concentration camp), the three-act opera was arranged in a two-act version; but whereas Balanchine’s shared the evening with Mascagni’s one-act opera “Cavalleria Rusticana”, Ashton’s filled the whole evening, running at two hours and a half. For very different reasons, Balanchine’s and Ashton’s had only two performances each. Balanchine’s was simply too radical as theatre to be accepted by the conservative Met establishment; Ashton’s, conducted by John Barbirolli, was far more musically distinguished and substantial, but was curtailed for truly tragic reasons.
It was known at the time of the “Orpheus” premiere that Ferrier, an internationally beloved singer since her emergence during the Second World War, had terminal cancer. At the second performance she injured herself, after which there were no other performances. She died later that year. To double the sorrows of the occasion, the great designer Sophie Fedorovitch, Ashton’s closest friend and longest collaborator, died on the occasion of the dress rehearsal due to a gas leak.
Fedorovitch remains famous for her designs for Ashton’s ballet “Symphonic Variations” as well as such other surviving works as his “Valses nobles et sentimentales” (1947) and Andrée Howard’s “La Fête étrange” (1940). She also designed operas: my first visit to the Royal Opera House was to see “Madama Butterfly” in a production originally directed by Robert Helpmann in 1950 with her designs. That “Butterfly” not only survived as the house’s often-revived production until 1988, but was then revived in 1993 after another production had a short shelf life.
The dance highlight of the Gluck “Orpheus” (he composed it only for francophone version) is the flute-solo Dance of the Blessed Spirit, for a spirit sharing the Elysian Fields with the dead Eurydice. In 1953, Ashton choreographed this for the young Svetlana Beriosova, who remained a favourite dancer of his for many years. With a dove (presumably artificial) attached to her wrist, this solo featured running steps around the stage; I wish we knew more of it. Ashton re-choreographed this solo in 1958 at La Scala, Milan, for the young Carla Fracci; and then in 1978 for Anthony Dowell at an English National Opera gala at the London Coliseum. With Dowell, it had only one performance in London - he gave it a few times in New York in 1980 - after which it seemed lost for thirty years. Fortunately since 1980 it’s entered the male repertory, with notable performances by David Hallberg and Vadim Muntagirov.
Today I found this photograph (by Duncan Melvin) of Beriosova and other members of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet. Above all, I’m fascinated by what it tells of Fedorovitch’s poetic vision of the Elysian Fields, with two vast parallel harps. (I have sometimes posted a better-known photo of Fedorovitch’s decor for the mourning scene that opens the opera, with Ferrier, the chorus, and many stairs in front of a vast lyre.) Is Beriosova clutching the dove? I think so.
Mary Clarke wrote in “Ballet Annual” that Ashton’s production “showed how much good dancers can contribute when imaginatively presented. The sorrowful maidens laying their tributes before the bier set an atmosphere of poignant, yet exquisite, grief and in the Dance of the Blessed Spirits a solo for Svetlana Beriosova, based on the simplest of running steps, translated everything into calm and light. More than any dancer, however, one remembers the Orpheus of Kathleen Ferrier, as with an instinctive nobility and grace she moved over the great stage.”
Tuesday 3 November
