Skillfully Adapted

A few months ago, on the occasion of a production of Orfeo e Euridice at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, I discussed the two different operas composed by Christoph W Gluck for Vienna in 1762 (in Italian) and for Paris in 1774 (in a French translation and adaptation) (Orpheus versus Orpheus, 14 June 2014). There are at least two other versions of Gluck's Orpheus, which is the only eighteenth century opera to survive in the repertory, in spite of the changes in taste and style of the nineteenth and twentieth century. There is a revision provided by nobody less than Hector Berlioz for the Parisian Théâtre Lyrique in 1859 (in French, to suit the musical costumes and habits of the French Second Empire) and an 1889 edition published in Italian by Ricordi where all the previous versions were somehow merged. Whereas until the 1960s the Ricordi edition was that normally staged, in recent times, theater managers and artistic directors have tended to revert to Gluck's two original versions...