“I always liked words,” reminisces a wistful Eurydice, title heroine of Matthew Aucoin’s new operatic retelling of the classic mythic tale, its words crafted by playwright Sarah Ruhl. “Words and books and stories. Words were my music. But … Orpheus never liked words. He had his music.” That’s an in-a-nutshell statement of a problem facing this conflicted, dead-on-her-wedding-day bride, recollecting their relationship from the Underworld: she’s a bookworm, he’s a musician.
It’s a problem faced, too, by the audibly gifted Aucoin, Orpheus to Ruhl’s Eurydice, in creating a musical world for her terse, verbally evocative play of 2003. Ruhl’s play inspired him, he asserted in an interview before the opera’s premiere in Los Angeles in 2020: “You tap almost any word, and there are wells of emotion underneath it. It’s…