"We define myth as consisting of all its versions; or to put it otherwise, a myth remains the same as long as it is felt as such."—Claude Levi-Strauss

The gnawing, tortuous question asked by The Mask of Orpheus isn't at all clear; it's immanent but unavailable, omnipresent but indistinguishable, here but there. It is, one might venture, an unanswerable question with too many answers, an intractable knot of contradictions not unlike Levi-Strauss' idea of myth "consisting of all its versions." The opera itself, a collaboration between composer Harrison Birtwistle and librettist Peter Zinovieff, is already a twentieth-century masterwork, the parent of its own myths (about opera, ritual, rebirth), and so perhaps it doesn't need a "solution." But as it unfolds in three hours of omni-directional, stratified waves of symbols, The Mask of Orpheus sinks into spectator's bones with a deeply disquieting chill of paradox—the paradox of myth, of Orpheus, of Birtwistle himself. It shows a wise but maddening node of faces, like Janus in a hall of mirrors, enchanting and terribly multiple. Perhaps one can visit the opera briefly only by registering indexes of these meticulous antilogies: myth, Orpheus, Birtwistle.

The myth-paradox is best plotted as the infinitely-versioned story; for Birtwistle and Zinovieff, as for Levi-Strauss, myth is inseparable from history, is a specific history of itself, perpetually locked in chains of repetition, error, and revision. Hence The Mask of Orpheus' extraordinary structure: each of its three acts retells the myth; the second actually dissects Orpheus' own memory, as he retells the story in 17 symbolic "arches." One thinks of James Joyce's Ulysses, another modernist mirror-play, in which two protagonists unfold a Dublin day in 18 chapters and 24 hours; here, as there, linear historicity is splayed out into circular sequence and labyrinthine deviation.

So vital to the opera, the paradox of Orpheus is perhaps the paradox of music itself: the abyss between music as resurrection-force and symbol of tragic transience—music as swan-song, living while it dies. Thus does Orpheus sing his way into the underworld, and sing his dead wife back to life; and thus does he kill her with a single backward gaze, that moment when sound becomes image, when music concedes to space's security. Orpheus is a fatal nexus of auditory and visual, a sensory skein, and his predicament becomes fodder for Birtwistle's greatest obsession, with repetition and difference, the musical circle and line, "stasis in progress."

And the paradox of Birtwistle? Perhaps the paradox of any creator dealing with myth: it deals with him. His beautiful, harrowing score, a huge arching line drawn single-breath from some infinite lung, is the work of a man who "wanted to invent a formalism that does not rely on tradition...a formal world that was utterly new." But of course, the Orphic myth casts its shadow far past Birtwistle's valiant efforts; it devours his versioned vision as only one of many, including Monteverdi's Orfeo—which birthed the opera-genre in which Birtwistle himself participates.

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