ABSTRACT
It is precisely in the midst of sovereign flow of words and sounds surrounded by silence that, still in the prologue, Music utters a strange and arresting expression: mortal orecchio, 'mortal ear'. Indeed, mortal listening is the very motif of Orpheus's disobedience or indiscipline. Already subtly announced on the threshold of the prologue, it is this finite, this weak or defective, ear that makes Orpheus turn around, in the fourth act, after having heard a noise. Mortal ear is the signature of the opera, the mark of its singularity when compared to its antique sources. Echo is a sort of mortal copy of Music itself or expelled from, its sovereignty. Indeed, while repeating fragments of the musical flow, Echo is writing another text, on another sheet or plane. To Orpheus's mortal ear, Echo's repetitions are both musically faithful and secretly subversive in their literality. Echo is perhaps the ultimate and inaudible occurrence of the mortal volte-face in the opera.
