Director Marcelletti will seek to fuel the fantasy of young people with the opera Orfeo ed Euridice

I am concerned that youth continue to have dreamssaid Lanfranco Marcelletti Jr., who enjoys being a conductor, but I am a teacher before everything.

The musician of Brazilian origin is in charge of carrying the baton in the staging of the opera Orpheus and Eurydice, this weekend, at the National Center for the Arts (Cenart), in a modern version that takes the tragic story of the two lovers to a refugee camp on the banks of a river.

Opera for me is a great way to introduce a very young audience to music, he said in an interview, and what better than a love story to make us dream.

Sound art is an abstraction, he points out, but many of us are losing that capacity, because we are on messages all day, he explains while showing the cell phone in his hand. “We don’t have a moment to say: ‘I’m going to be there’, either thinking nonsense or something important,” but without being in front of the screen.

The ability to pay attention that is being lost has become more difficult to teach, he agrees. Do you know what all that is ending? The imagination. We cannot live without dreams or imaginations, and making music is imagination, and many young people do not have that internal world, there is no fantasy of beauty. For me it is very worrying.

This Saturday and Sunday, the version of the Greek myth by the German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787), with a libretto by Ranieri Calzabigi (1714-1795), about the journey of a musician to recover his love from the darkness in which has fallen, was transferred to a contemporary stage and costumes; The protagonists flee from a place with violent situations to look for a better place.

The conductor and pianist of Brazilian origin Lanfranco Marcelleti took a break from rehearsing with the musicians and opera singers of Texas Tech University for the interview with The Day. Minutes before, between instructions, he was also proposing some modifications that he imagined in the course of repeating the notes of the work originally premiered in Vienna in 1762. Doing the math, there are more than 40 or 50 operas written about the myth, but the original does not have a happy ending..

Difficult job, but I love it

In the Cenart theater the story of the lovers Orpheus and Eurydice, who cross lands devastated by war and poverty, will be sung in Italian, with Spanish subtitles. Upon reaching the coast, she disappears into the darkness. The gods take pity on Orpheus and with the power of song and the lyre they give him the opportunity to enter the underworld to recover his wife, on the condition that he does not turn to see her or explain anything to her.

While in the theater the actors have everything in their body and in their way of speaking, in the opera the music does the work: my role is to find these elements. Normally I don’t have to do much, because when the composer is good, especially in this classical period, the music adapts to the feelings; It depends on how you sing. The notes and rhythm are the same.

With joy and notable enjoyment in his work with music students, some 18 years old, others with doctorates, already 40 years old, Marcelletti recognizes that it is a difficult job, “but that’s why I love it. I get excited when I see the orchestra and understand that it must play a note louder because it is saying: ‘what horror!’; That’s why they see me so happy. “I am making them understand why we are here, why we are important.”

It is an accessible genre

Orpheus and Eurydice It has the artistic, stage direction and projection design of Alan E. Hicks, who since 2023 has been director of the Opera Theater of Texas Tech University, where this production premiered in November and is now presented on the other side of the border.

The problem we have with this type of music is that it is not part of our daily lives. I am Brazilian, we have very beautiful popular music, the carnival, and you have fantastic music, but it does not mean that opera is a genre that people would not listen to, it is that they do not have the opportunity to listen. So for me the great challenge, in our countries mainly, and I will be more honest, even in first world countries, is to bring people to the theater and do something really interesting.

A symphony is very abstract. In the Brazilian professor’s opinion, the advantage is that opera has words and a story, action, so there is more than one thing to connect; It is a genre with more access. The symphonic world is much more difficult and there is no preparation for children to listen to abstract music.

Orpheus and Eurydice It will be presented in two performances this weekend at 6 p.m. at the Cenart Arts Theater (Río Churubusco and Tlalpan). Admission is free and tomorrow’s performance will be broadcast live on the Cenart’s YouTube channel.