Living, Loving and Dying in Song Gluck, ‘Che farò senza Euridice’ (Orfeo), Orfeo ed Euridice, Act III

A century after the premiere of Orfeo, Giuseppe Verdi (then composing Aida) sought to reveal the 'heart of a desperate woman burning for love' that lay beneath Amneris's legalistic words as she attempted to negotiate a marriage with the reluctant Radames: 'Music is splendidly able to succeed in depicting this state of mind and, in a certain way, in saying two things at once. Roger Parker has described how dated that recording can seem in retrospect with Ferrier's 'plummy contralto' and exaggerated diction.11Yet given the wartime context of those early performances, it is not difficult to see why the aria forged a bond with her audiences, many of whom were in mourning for family and friends. Parker found himself reconciled to Ferrier's unique artistry on learning of her final performance in the role at Covent Garden in 1953, when in the grip of metastatic breast cancer she sang the aria moments after shattering her femur on stage.12It was her last public performance.13Yet although no recording exists of that ultimate encounter with Orfeo, it was undoubtedly very different to her earlier effort. The development of her interpretative powers in the role began with a production of Orfeo ed Euridice at Glyndebourne in 1947, conducted by Fritz Stiedry.14It seems plain from her letters that Ferrier, wholly untrained in dramatic art and in the midst of only her second opera production (the first was Britten's The Rape of Lucretia at Glyndebourne in 1946),15struggled with Stiedry's demands to relocate her noble but emotionally muted Orfeo within the more ardent sphere of Italian operatic traditions: