Matthew Aucoin is a man of many talents. A recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant at only 28, Aucoin is a true musical wunderkind; a successful conductor, composer, poet, librettist, critic, and pianist. In addition to his new opera “Eurydice” which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera Tuesday night, he has a newly released retrospective disc from the Boston Modern Orchestra Project in which he conducts and plays the piano with members of the American Modern Opera Company, an organization he co-founded with director Zack Winokur. On top of all that, he has a new book of essays coming out next month about his obsessions and ruminations on the operatic art form. Though a follower of his career as a composer and conductor for a few years now, it is his thoughtful writings on music that I find particularly inspired.

Aucoin’s opera “Eurydice” tackles the operatic tale of Orpheus and Eurydice which depending on who you ask inspired the earliest surviving opera, Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. Based off of Sarah Ruhl’s contemporary retelling of the myth from 2003, the opera focuses on Eurydice’s side of the story and her time in the Underworld which is largely absent from your average Orpheus opera. Ruhl, who penned the libretto for the opera, creates a timeless story about loss, memory, language, and communication; red meat for a composer/poet such as Aucoin.

In what has been highlighted as a bold stroke in the opera is Aucoin’s choice to give Orpheus a double. Orpheus, played by baritone Joshua Hopkins, is doubled in key moments with a shadow Orpheus sung by the countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński. Though indeed bold and innovative, there is a clear precedent for this theatrical device. And it is in another opera about Orpheus and Eurydice: the composer Harrison Birtwistle’s own three member personification of Orpheus in his 1986 opera “The Mask of Orpheus.” In it, Birtwistle represents the character with two singers (Orpheus The Man and Orpheus The Hero) and one silent dancer/mime (Orpheus The Myth). This double Orpheus in Aucoin’s interpretation is somewhat less successful than Birtwistle’s. In the Birtwistle, the opera is presented more as an ancient frieze frozen in time rather than a piece of theatre. “The Mask of Orpheus” is about the Orpheus myth rather than a dramatic retelling of it. In the case of Aucoin’s opera, the vocal doubling never quite fuses together. The baritone is always winning over the timbral game and leaving the poor countertenor as a distant vocal aftertaste.

Throughout “Eurydice,” one can tell which opera composers of the past and present Aucoin reveres the most: Verdi, Stravinsky, Britten, John Adams, Kaija Saariaho, Thomas Adès, etc. Though some of this knowledge can be gleaned from his writings about the operatic form, the score to “Eurydice” gives it away. The piece is wildly eclectic and agile, but sounds at times like a pastiche of his favorite composers. Indeed, interrogating the art form from various perspectives — as a conductor, writer, critic, pianist, and composer — there runs the risk of using this vast knowledge to create a new work of operatic quilting; a little atmospheric, wordless Saariaho chorus here, a triadic bit of harmonic slippage from Adès there, a hellish romp of neoclassical Stravinsky sprinkled about when Hades enters the picture. Composers of course construct their own musical languages atop the composers of the past, but Aucoin manages to present each of these found objects on their own without synthesizing them into a coherent musical whole. In short, an operatic language unique to Aucoin comes to the surface only in fits and starts.

Often times, the opera comes off as an opera about opera from a composer who clearly knows a great deal about the art form. It checks every box as if the opera were less a theatrical event and rather a book report about writing opera. Choosing the Orpheus and Eurydice myth as the subject matter for a new opera is already a decision which forces one to contend with the operatic tradition head on. Additionally, with Ruhl focusing so much on the nature of words as Eurydice relearns language, the poet side of Aucoin comes to the fore. Indeed, the text of the opera is projected onto the set. Some arias seem like etudes on particular types of text setting, as Aucoin discussed in a recent New York Review of Books piece analyzing Stravinsky’s setting of W.H. Auden. These various devices are rarely tied to a specific character or scene and occasionally disrupt the dramatic flow of the work. I would have rather these be integrated into the language of the work much like in the operas of George Benjamin where a character’s speech pattern and way of singing is both flexible and consistent.

In the end, it seems that this robust knowledge about the art form which I admire a great deal in the composer gets in the way of the opera. At times, “Eurydice” comes across as a series of successful sequences that work in older operas welded together to create a new one.

I wish Aucoin took his heroine’s advice to heart — keep going forward and don’t look backwards so much.

Matthew Aucoin's "Eurydice" - An Opera About Opera

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