Iván Fischer premieres a new production each year with his opera company. This season, it will be Monteverdi’s first opera, L’Orfeo.

The piece is often called La favola d’Orfeo (The Tale of Orpheus) because this is the original title under which the audience first encountered the opera at its 1607 premiere in Mantua. Its ending, too, was different from the finale widely known today. The original libretto had the opera end not with the descent of the benevolent Apollo and Orpheus’s ascension to the heavens, but with a wild bacchanalia and the killing of the titular hero. We are staging this original version, including Iván Fischer’s reconstruction of the missing music.

The creators of last year’s successful Falstaff performance will be responsible for this production as well; after Budapest, audiences will have the opportunity to see it in Vicenza and Geneva. Soloists will include singers from the world over the Hungarian Emőke Baráth and the Italian Valerio Contaldo are featured in the main roles. The dancers are working with Sigrid T’Hooft, one of the foremost experts of Baroque choreography, who has supported the orchestra’s performances of early music for several years.

Iván Fischer published his thoughts regarding L’Orfeo in a series of blog posts shared on his Facebook page. He is fascinated above all by the figure of this mysterious and magical mythological singer, and the role his cult played in the years of transition between the Renaissance and the Baroque. He describes how Platonic love clashes with people devoted to worldly pleasures, and why he ultimately chose to perform the Renaissance first version of the work.

Bridging Europe festival is the joint production of the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Müpa Budapest.