Glass’s Orphée – composed in 1991 and premiered in 1993 – is very unconventional and bears the unmistakable mark of the composer. As far as the libretto is concerned, Glass did not look back: he jumped over classical sources and over 400 years of operatic tradition and took as his starting point the film Orphée (1950), by Jean Cocteau, which, with generous doses of freedom and irreverence , transposed the scenery of Thracian meadows and woods to mid-20th century Paris and made Orpheus (played by Jean Marais) a poet struggling with a creative crisis. The choice of Glass arose from the fascination he had experienced as a teenager when discovering Cocteau’s cinema and which led him to adapt two other works by Cocteau, La belle et la bête (1994) and Les enfants terribles (1996) to the chamber opera format. .
In the case of Orphée, the reality of 1991 would end up lending a new perspective, quite painful, to the mythological plot. In 1981, while on a transatlantic plane trip, Glass ran into Candy Jernigan, a graphic designer, and it wasn’t long before they were living together and Jernigan took over the design of Glass’s record covers – but in 1991, while Glass was working at Orphée, Jernigan discovered that he had liver cancer at an advanced stage of development. It is tempting to draw a parallel between Orpheus’ pain over the abrupt loss of Eurydice and Glass’s situation over the abrupt loss of Jernigan, who died a few weeks after his diagnosis – and the truth is, some excerpts from Orphée reveal an emotional intensity and a lyricism unusual in a composer known for the coldness and mechanics of his music. – Jose Carlos Fernandes
Source: https://www.ccb.pt/evento/philip-glass/2022-01-29/