Acis and Galatea

“Heart, the seat of soft delight,

Be thou now a fountain bright!”

One of the highlights of my career as an arts writer was the week I spent interviewing Mark Morris when he was in Boston preparing for his dazzling 1996 production of Gluck’s “Orfeo.” We talked about everything – life and love and art. He was so funny and charming, and yet so deeply serious about music. So I was thrilled to learn that he was back in town for “Acis and Galatea,” another mythical tale of love, loss, and metamorphosis.

There was much to enjoy in “Acis and Galatea,” especially the music, which was composed by Handel in 1718, re-orchestrated by Mozart in 1788, and beautifully performed by musicians from Handel and Haydn’s wonderful orchestra and their splendid Chorus. The story comes from Ovid, and the libretto is real poetry, written by John Gay, with help from Alexander Pope and Dryden’s translations of Ovid. The dancers were lovely, fluttering across the stage, as nymphs and swains frolicking in a forest glade, dappled with a pale green light.

Sadly, with "Acis and Galatea" Mark Morris seemed to be working against the music. Has he lost his faith in art?

Of the four soloist singers, only the jealous monster Polyphemus was given stage directions that added expression to his singing. The other soloists had to rush around the stage or gesture unconvincingly, while wearing the cruel and comic costumes that Isaac Mizrahi designed for them, in high contrast to the slim and lovely dancers swirling around them in flowing, diaphanous gowns. The dancing was beautiful, but purely decorative, on endless replay. Worst of all, the Chorus of singers, so central to the opera, was kept muffled and hidden in the orchestra pit; they were notes from the underground.

The opera is full of water imagery, written by Handel, the master of water music -- yet the stage was set in a forest; it’s landlocked. The story, the words, and the music, sing about transformation, yet the staging was both cluttered and strangely static.  Galatea sang her beautiful aria “The bubbling fountain, Lo! It flows!” standing completely still, while the dancers swirled around her, their gestures of grief in the final act no different from their gestures of joy in the first. The libretto repeats the word “flow” over and over again, but only the Chorus, concealed underground like the river that Acis becomes, conveyed a real sense of flow: the flow of the music, the flow of the water, the flow of the heart chakra opening into joy.

“Acis and Galatea” takes place in Sicily, in a mythical Arcadia. Galatea is a sea nymph, who loves Acis, a shepherd. After some back and forth, they sing a ravishing love duet (“The flocks shall leave the mountains/the woods the turtle doves/the nymphs shall leave the fountains/ere I forsake my love.”) But when Polyphemus, a giant one-eyed monster who wants Galatea for his own, sees them together, he flies into a jealous rage and hurls a huge rock from Mount Aetna at Acis.

This was the best choreography: Polyphemus sent a dancer as the rock he hurled at the lovers; she tumbled over the other dancers until she reached Acis. But the death of Acis, so poignant and powerful in the poetry and the music, was choreographed without passion, as a set change instead of a sea change. Only the Chorus, hidden underground, expressed the mournful moment: “Ah, the gentle Acis is no more!”

As the music moves from grief to mourning to consolation, the Chorus inspires Galatea to call upon her divine powers: “Cease, Galatea, cease to grieve!” She transforms Acis into a river god, a “gentle, murm’ring stream”, a river forever flowing, slowly, to the sea: “Heart, the seat of soft delight,/Be thou now a fountain bright!”


The tragic love of Acis and Galatea was a theme beloved of painters, and there’s an amazing 19th century sculpture of it in Paris in the Jardin du Luxembourg, showing the happy lovers intertwined, blissfully unaware of their cruel fate, as the raging giant lurks above them, about to strike.

In retrospect, I found it fascinating that Mark made Polyphemus the center of the production – the spurned gigantic lover who deliberately destroys something beautiful because he cannot have it for his own.

Polyphemus is certainly a comic character, but he is also a malevolent force, a snake in the garden, the shadow of death. “Et in arcadio ego,” as Virgil says: Death is present, even in our happiest hours.

Mark Morris was once the most beautiful of dancers – as Ovid tells us Galatea was the loveliest of nymphs. But it was not just his beautiful dancing; it was also his profound understanding of music that made Mark’s best work so brilliant. His “Dido” and “Orfeo” were meditations on the eternal themes of art and nature, tragedy and transfiguration, love and death. This is the first time I've ever seen him miss a step.

“Acis and Galatea” has gone through many metamorphoses since Handel first wrote what he called his “little opera” three hundred years ago. This production is travelling and there is still time for a change. Bring the chorus back onstage, where it belongs. Drape the soloists with the dignity they deserve. Listen to the music’s message of consolation through love and art.

Let it flow.

"Acis and Galatea" at the Shubert Theatre, Boston, May 15-18, 2014.
Mark Morris Dance Group with Handel and Haydn Society Period Instrument Orchestra and Chorus.