The Art of Looking Back: Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in Athens

L'Orfeo, Monteverdi

Greek National Opera, Athens

30.10.2026

Premiere

Direction: William Kentridge. Conductor: Konstantinos Terzakis

Voices: Christos Kechris, Maria Kostraki, Mary-Ellen Nesi, Maria Mitsopoulou, Marios Sarantidis, Theodora Baka, Petros Magoulas, Yannis Kalyvas, Sotiris Triantis, Angelo Kydoniefs, Georgios Papadimitriou, Nikos Kotenidis.

Remarkably, Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, first performed in Mantua in 1607, has only now entered the repertoire of the Greek National Opera — for the very first time in the company's history.

And what an arrival it is: an international co-production with Glyndebourne Festival Opera and New York's Metropolitan Opera, a director of international renown, an extraordinarily ambitious visual production and a contemporary orchestration. In recent years, the Greek National Opera has made remarkable strides. It has not simply broadened its repertoire, but has embraced the international opera scene with confidence, taking on demanding projects, experimenting and inviting some of the world's most distinguished artists to work with it.

What I find particularly encouraging is that this achievement is about much more than celebrated names and impressive publicity. Behind it lies the dedication of the company's own orchestra, chorus, soloists and entire creative and technical team. One may have reservations about individual productions, but it is impossible not to recognise the tremendous effort being invested in the company's development — and the extraordinary results it is achieving. Its openness to new ideas deserves genuine admiration.

William Kentridge's work, meanwhile, is unmistakable. His animated charcoal drawings, shifting shadows, figures emerging from a tangle of lines, projections and endlessly transforming objects have long since become a visual language entirely his own. And whenever Kentridge enters the opera house, that visual world inevitably becomes one of the principal characters in the performance.

His productions of Alban Berg's Lulu and Wozzeck have already shown just how compelling this marriage of music and imagery can be. Berg's intense, unsettling, psychologically charged music seems almost to invite a collision of images, a kind of visual polyphony. But Monteverdi is another matter altogether.

Three centuries of musical history separate the two composers. In Berg, the orchestra can challenge the action on stage, create a dramatic world of its own and withstand even the most restless imagery. In Monteverdi, drama arises above all from words, from the inflections of speech, from the subtlest shifts in melody. I wondered whether music that stands at the very beginnings of opera as a fully developed art form could so readily share the stage with Kentridge's tireless imagination.

There is a curious paradox here. One might assume that the more opera we have heard, the easier it becomes to appreciate music from different periods. Yet with Monteverdi, perhaps the opposite is true. Our ears have travelled through Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Strauss and Berg. We have grown accustomed to enormous emotional intensity, to orchestras that can tell us as much as the singers, to vocal climaxes that can be almost physically overwhelming.

Monteverdi works quite differently. There is none of the operatic grandeur we have come to expect. Emotion is conveyed less through sheer volume than through inflection, the slightest alteration in a melodic line, the expressive weight of a single word. We have to readjust our ears, consciously setting aside expectations formed over years of listening.

I do not think this is music that comes easily to a modern audience, even an experienced one. Yet perhaps that is precisely part of the pleasure of encountering Monteverdi: the opportunity to hear opera before it became the opera we know so well.

That was what made the Athens premiere of L'Orfeo, opening the Greek National Opera's new season, particularly intriguing to me.

There is also a lovely historical resonance in the choice of repertoire. A work that helped lay the foundations of European opera was born out of an ancient Greek myth. And now, more than four centuries later, the Italian Orfeo seems, in a sense, to have returned to its mythological homeland.

But back to Kentridge.

Something is constantly appearing, disappearing, moving or changing on stage. At times I caught myself following yet another transformation of a drawing so intently that the music seemed to recede into the background. I found myself wishing that the images would pause, if only for a moment, and allow us simply to listen to Monteverdi.

This raises a question to which I have no definite answer: does Kentridge help contemporary audiences find their way into Monteverdi's unfamiliar musical language? Perhaps it is precisely this vivid, restless, richly layered visual world that can draw today's audiences towards music that demands such particular attention and patience.

Yet beneath all this visual abundance, I sensed not so much a determination to modernise an ancient story as an attempt to explore it through the artist's own experience.

Kentridge was born in Johannesburg, where he still lives and works. His productions grow out of a distinctive creative environment, among artists, musicians, actors and dancers with whom he has collaborated for many years. In his studio, drawings become animations, objects turn into characters, and chance improvisations develop into theatrical ideas. L'Orfeo, too, emerged from this world of collaboration and experiment.

This connection is particularly evident in the production's physical language. The choreographer Gregory Maqoma is a longstanding collaborator of Kentridge's, while the dancers Thulani Chauke and Nosiphiwo Samente bring a distinctive physical expressiveness to the performance. This is not conventional operatic ballet, but an independent language of movement, sometimes following the music, sometimes unfolding alongside it.

Perhaps most interesting of all, the action takes place as though inside an artist's studio, where the story of Orpheus is not merely performed but brought into being before our eyes.

In an interview for the programme, Kentridge explains that he imagines the allegorical figure of Music, who opens the opera, as an artist in her own studio. She seems to set the story in motion, drawing, erasing, projecting images and populating the space with characters.

This gives rise to the entire visual aesthetic of the production: charcoal drawings, sketches, projections, moving structures and people who seem to belong simultaneously to the myth and to the process of artistic creation.

And several fascinating ideas emerge from this.

First, Orpheus is himself an artist. In the myth, his instrument is the lyre, but in Kentridge's staging of the celebrated Possente spirto, he approaches Charon with a sketchbook. It is as though Orpheus's music has been translated into the language of visual art — Kentridge's own language.

Second, the studio becomes a space of memory. The artist creates an image, erases it, tries to recover it — but can never restore it exactly as it was. This is almost a literal expression of Orpheus's attempt to bring Eurydice back from the past.

And finally, there is an intriguing ambiguity: who is actually creating what we see — Orpheus, Music or the artist himself? Kentridge deliberately brings them close together. All three are trying, through art, to summon into existence something that is no longer there.

Echoes of early twentieth-century European art, the aesthetics of the Bauhaus and, of course, Rainer Maria Rilke all inhabit this artistic world.

The central idea Kentridge seems to draw before us is that we cannot erase the past. We cannot undo what has happened. And perhaps there is no need to search for some previously undiscovered meaning in the myth of Orpheus. It is enough to look at it through contemporary eyes, bringing with us everything we have experienced, both historically and personally. After all, we can no longer hear Monteverdi as his audiences heard him in 1607.

But the thought I kept returning to during the performance was simpler still.

Orpheus refused to accept the most inescapable fact of human existence: the inevitability of death.

Sooner or later, we all experience loss and are forced to acknowledge that some things cannot be changed. Orpheus refused to accept this. He dared to challenge the very order of the universe, to reverse what cannot be reversed. And, astonishingly, he almost succeeded.

His only weapon was music. It moved the rulers of the Underworld to compassion and persuaded them to set aside their own unbreakable law. But at the decisive moment, Orpheus looked back.

Why? I am not particularly drawn to elaborate interpretations suggesting that, deep down, he did not really want Eurydice back, or that an artist somehow needs loss as the source of creativity. To me, it is much simpler, and much more tragic. Orpheus looked back because he was human. He could not bear the uncertainty. He needed to see, to reassure himself that Eurydice really was following him. His music had almost conquered death, but he could not overcome his own human nature.

There is a personal dimension to this story for Kentridge, too. In a recent conversation, he recalled his father's ageing, the gradual loss of his sight and memory, and his diminishing connection with the world around him. This, too, is a kind of disappearance, even while a person is still alive. And here the ancient myth suddenly feels very contemporary: sometimes we lose someone we love gradually, watching them drift further and further away, powerless to stop it.

Yet L'Orfeo is, above all, an opera about the power of music. And fortunately, in the Athens production, the music was not swallowed up by the director's visual imagination.

The tenor Christos Kechris, who sang the title role, made a fascinating observation in an interview before the premiere: ordinarily, an operatic character acts, while the singer expresses their emotions through music. Here, singing itself is the action. Orpheus tries to win over Charon with his voice — and at that very moment the singer must win over the audience.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the famous Possente spirto. It is not merely a virtuoso aria, but an attempt to achieve the impossible through music. A beautiful voice alone is not enough: the singer needs freedom, a feeling for style and the ability to make every musical phrase convincing.

I must admit that when I saw the cast announced in the summer, I was a little disappointed that the company had not invited singers specialising in historically informed performance. I would particularly have loved to hear someone from the French early-music tradition, which has given us so many remarkable interpretations of the Baroque repertoire over recent decades.

But Christos Kechris proved to be a convincing Orpheus. He rose to the demands of a difficult role, preserved its musical expressiveness and, perhaps most importantly, never disappeared amid the constantly shifting images around him. This was a man who begins by believing wholeheartedly in the power of his love and his art, only to find himself utterly defenceless in the face of loss.

His acting was equally important. In a production where figures are constantly moving around the singer, images are changing and new visual meanings are emerging, it would be all too easy to become just another element in the director's composition. Kechris avoided that trap. His natural stage presence, inward concentration, gestures and reactions kept our attention firmly on the human story of Orpheus.

The musical interest of the Athens production, however, went beyond the casting.

At Glyndebourne, where Kentridge's production was first presented in the summer of 2026, Monteverdi was performed by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, an ensemble playing on period instruments. In Athens, by contrast, we heard a contemporary orchestration by the American composer Nico Muhly, first performed at Santa Fe Opera in 2023.

Muhly did not simply set out to replace historical instruments with modern ones or give Monteverdi a conventional symphonic sound. His aim was more subtle: to preserve the dramatic structure of the original while expressing it through the resources of a modern orchestra. The basso continuo required particularly delicate handling. Rather than reproducing the historical ensemble literally, Muhly created a small chamber group within the orchestra, including harp, keyboards and woodwind.

The result is an intriguing situation: in this Athens L'Orfeo, Monteverdi is presented through two contemporary interpretations at once. Kentridge offers his own visual language; Muhly provides a new instrumental sound. Both are attempting to bring a work written more than four centuries ago closer to us without destroying its inner logic.

Not that Monteverdi needs to be artificially modernised. He was a genuine revolutionary in his own time, and his musical language can still surprise us. The question is simply how to allow us to hear that boldness today.

What I appreciated in Athens was that the orchestra, conducted by Konstantinos Terzakis, never became a neutral accompaniment to Kentridge's projections. But it was the Greek National Opera Chorus that made a particularly strong impression on me.

In Monteverdi, the chorus often recalls the chorus of ancient Greek tragedy. It does not merely participate in the action; it comments on events and becomes the voice of a shared human experience. The pastoral joy of the opening scenes, the horror at Eurydice's sudden death, the reflections on human fate — all acquire a particular depth through the choral writing.

The chorus in Athens sang with wonderful cohesion and expressiveness. And perhaps it was in these passages that I felt most strongly that behind all the drawings and projections lay Monteverdi's music itself — immediate, alive and deeply affecting.

Mary-Ellen Nesi sang the roles of Hope and the Messenger. The figure of Hope is particularly moving: she accompanies Orpheus to the threshold of the Underworld, but cannot go any further. She can show him the way, yet cannot make the journey with him. At the entrance to the realm of the dead, even Hope must stop.

Maria Kostraki combined the roles of Music, Eurydice and Echo — a choice I found particularly effective. After all, in this story, music, love and memory are almost inseparable.

Echo is especially fascinating. In Act V, after losing Eurydice for the second time, Orpheus pours out his grief to the natural world, while Echo answers him with fragments of his own words. At one point, his lament that he has not yet wept enough is returned to him as a single word: 'Enough!' A simple reflection of his voice suddenly sounds almost like a contradiction, as though nature itself were urging him to stop.

How expressive it is that Music, Eurydice and Echo should all have the same voice. First it brings the story into being, then it belongs to the woman Orpheus loves, and after she has vanished, it returns only as an echo.

Both singers left a wonderful impression. Together with Orpheus, the orchestra and, above all, the chorus, they provided the musical foundation without which all the splendour of Kentridge's imagination would have remained little more than an impressive spectacle.

I would also like to single out the countertenor Angelo Kydoniefs, who sang the Third Shepherd and a Spirit. His beautifully delicate, distinctive timbre immediately caught my attention. It was a pleasure to discover that he had studied at the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles and worked with leading figures in the French tradition of historically informed performance. So the French Baroque tradition I love so much had, after all, found its way into this production — through a young Greek singer.

And now I want to return to the Greek myth itself. For the story of Orpheus has a continuation that makes it more extraordinary still.

In one of its best-known versions, after losing Eurydice for good, Orpheus returns to the world of the living but finds no consolation there. He is killed and torn apart by the Bacchantes, the female followers of Dionysus. Yet even after his death, his severed head continues to sing, and his lyre continues to sound. The river carries them away towards the sea.

What an extraordinary image: a man can be killed, but his music goes on.

Incidentally, Monteverdi's opera itself has two different endings. In the original libretto of 1607, the Bacchantes appear, bringing the action towards the tragic conclusion of the myth. In the published score of 1609, Apollo appears instead and raises Orpheus to the heavens. Two very different responses to the same human tragedy.

And yet what moves me most in the Greek myth is precisely this detail: Orpheus could not conquer death, but his music outlived him.

Art cannot abolish death, but it can outlive us.

And suddenly Kentridge's drawings come back to mind in a different light: drawings that are erased but never disappear without a trace. Every new image retains something of the one before it, just as memory preserves traces of what is no longer there.

Victoria Ivanova