William Kentridge Turns Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo Into a Four-Dimensional Drawing
What does an opera look like when a visual artist treats the stage as a sheet of paper? For South African artist William Kentridge (b. 1955), the answer is not realism, but accumulation: music, text, image, and time folded into a single theatrical field. This summer, he will direct Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo at the Glyndebourne Festival in Sussex, bringing one of opera’s foundational works into the hands of an artist who has spent two decades testing the form’s limits.
Kentridge has long said that his practice is “essentially one of drawing,” and he extends that logic to opera. In his view, the stage becomes an “extraordinary canvas,” while time supplies the fourth dimension. The result, he argues, is a kind of drawing made not with graphite or charcoal, but with movement, sound, and sequence. Opera, as he sees it, is valuable precisely because it can hold more than the eye can comfortably take in.
That idea places him squarely in the tradition of Gesamtkunstwerk, the “total work of art” associated with Richard Wagner. Yet Kentridge’s approach is less about monumentality than about layered perception. He has worked in opera since 2005, when he directed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute at La Monnaie in Brussels. Since then, his productions of works by Dmitri Shostakovich and Alban Berg have appeared at major houses including The Metropolitan in New York and La Scala in Milan.
Details of his new L’Orfeo remain closely guarded, but his previous Monteverdi production offers a clue to his method. The Return of Ulysses, staged at Lincoln Center in New York in 2016, used life-size puppets and rapid video edits, much of it drawn from x-rays, MRIs, CAT scans, and other diagnostic images. The result, according to a review cited in the article, was “absolutely thrilling.”
Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, first performed in Mantua in 1607, ends with Apollo promising Orpheus both immortal life and Eurydice’s eternal presence “in the sun and stars.” Kentridge’s version, running from June 14 to July 25, arrives with that same tension intact: the pull between loss and transcendence, between what can be seen and what must be imagined. In Kentridge’s hands, opera becomes less a reconstruction of the world than a way of making its instability visible.
