Orpheus is a thirty-minute neoclassical ballet in three tableaux composed by Igor Stravinsky in collaboration with choreographer George Balanchine in Hollywood, California in 1947.
The original cast consisted of 30 dancers: Orpheus; Eurydice; the Dark Angel of Death; Apollo; the leader of the Furies; the leader of the Bacchantes; eight women Bacchantes; nine women in various roles (Friends to Orpheus, Furies, Pluto, Satyr, and Nature Spirits); and seven men as Lost Souls.
There is a wide dynamic range (reaching fortississimo, fff, at the moment when the Bacchantes seize and dismember Orpheus); but mostly the orchestra plays quietly, seldom rising above mezzoforte.
This economy in the scoring is, like the quiet dynamics that predominate in Orpheus, in stark contrast to the composer's The Rite of Spring of 35 years before.
Stravinsky's neoclassicism occasionally extends to parody; one of the most extended examples in his work is to be found in the Air de Danse (Orphée) of the second tableau, in which an elegant "Siciliana" for reduced forces of harp, timpani, strings, and oboe duet (with cor anglais replacing one of the oboes after the interlude) evokes the slow movement of a late Baroque concerto.