Description
In 1956, the play Orfeu da Conceição, by poet and composer Vinícius de Moraes, premiered in Rio de Janeiro, featuring music by Tom Jobim and modernist sets by Oscar Niemeyer, performed by the Teatro Experimental do Negro company. The text, transposed the mythical episode of Orpheus and Eurydice to the Rio carnival and was later adapted into film Black Orpheus (1959), directed by Marcel Camus. The soundtrack, composed by Tom Jobim, Luís Bonfá, Vinícius de Moraes and Antônio Maria, contains elements of the emerging Bossa Nova, and achieved wide transoceanic circulation. The frenetic percussive rhythm stands out in the score, supporting the visual and choreographic frenzy that aesthetically marks the production. Often criticized, and rightly so, as a stereotyped and unrealistic representation of life in Rio, it nevertheless seems consistent with the attempt to relate the ritual dimension of the Orpheus myth (it is worth noting that Marcel Camus had been initiated into Orphic rituals) to Brazilian carnival, interpreted by Camus as a collective trance, spiritually founded on Afro-Brazilian religions.
The Orpheus/carnival connection and the criticism this production enlicited echo another connection that marked musical experimentalism centuries erlier: that between Orpheus and opera. As the tutelary deity of music and poetry, Orpheus lent his persona to decisive experiments in the genesis of the operatic genre, such as Jacopo Peri's tragedia per musica Euridice (1600), Giulio Caccini's tragedy in stile rappresentativo Euridice (1602) and Monteverdi's favola in musica Orfeo (1607), which similarly faced critiques regarding verisimilitude. In our presentation, we will reflect on the aesthetic-musical experimentations to which the myth of Orpheus has lent symbolic force since the onset of Modernity. A figure who traverses the relms of the living and the dead, Orpheus also represented, in his journey between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, as we can see, the transit between the world of speech and the world of song, and between the erudite and the popular.
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