‘Well, wasn’t that just delightful?’ is seldom the response to the typically tragic tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. It’s a sad song usually, but we can’t seem to stop singing it, from Hades to Hadestown. But this season’s revival of Mark Morris’ 2007 production of Orfeo ed Euridice flips the usual frown around, taking Gluck’s zippy score and turning it into something utterly refreshing.

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In an episode from Mad Men (another excellent piece of art dating from 2007), Roger Sterling says it is particularly American to want a “tragedy with a happy ending.” Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice might be a good candidate for an American favorite, given that’s exactly what it is. We start at a funeral and end at something like a wedding: a celebration of love. Orpheus loses the girl, regains her, loses her again, and (in this version) gets her back. Even the saddest moments are tempered. Eurydice, instead of wandering in the barren mists of the underworld, is found in Elysium amongst the heroes. It’s hard not to think that it might not be too bad if she were to stay there, instead of returning to the land of the living.

Mark Morris’s production is both mythic and modern, more suggestive than specific........

© Observer