About the work
Orpheus (full title "Die wunderbare Beständigkeit der Liebe oder Orpheus") is an opera by Georg Philipp Telemann to an anonymous text based on Michel Du Boullay's 1690 libretto "Orphée." It premiered on 9 March 1726 at the Hamburg Oper am Gänsemarkt; long thought lost, the score was rediscovered in the 1970s and given a modern premiere in 1994 at the Berlin State Opera under René Jacobs.
Plot
Orasia, the widowed Queen of Thrace, loves the singer Orpheus, who rejects her because he loves Eurydice. Rather than a happy ending, Telemann has Orasia bring about Eurydice's death out of jealousy, deliberately withholding the era's fashionable lieto fine.
Cultural significance
Unusually, the work is trilingual: German recitatives drive the plot while arias and choruses shift between German, French and Italian — reflecting the cosmopolitan Hamburg Gänsemarkt opera and its internationally mixed casts of singers.