In December 2024, I got to see Hadestown in the West End! IT. WAS. INCREDIBLE. It made me laugh, made me cry, and got me thinking about my opinion on Orpheus...
'the incautious lover'
Orpheus was the son of the King of Thrace and Calliope, muse of ancient poetry and, according to Hesiod, 'the chief of all muses' (Theogony 79-80). He was a bard, blessed by the gods with musical perfection, and gifted by Hermes a magical lyre. He is also the male protagonist of the most famous, most retold, love story of Greek myth, maybe of all time.
Like all good love stories, it starts with two people falling in love. Orpheus met Eurydice, a beautiful mountain nymph, and they fell in love. But when they got married, Hymen, god of marriage, coming directly from the marriage of Iphis and Ianthe, refused to bless the union. Nevertheless, they lived happily ever after, until they didn't.
There are two important ancient versions of what happens next.
In Virgil's agricultural epic, Georgics, Eurydice caught the eye of the bee-keeper Aristaeus who pursued her through the forest (as men in Greek myth and beyond are wont to do). As she fled from his unwelcome advances, Eurydice stepped on a snake, was bitten, and died (4.452-526).
In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Eurydice was wandering through the forest with her fellow nymphs — or dancing with them on her wedding day — when she was bitten by a serpent and died (10.1-10).
(In Pseudo-Apollodorus' version, she just gets bitten by a snake and dies.)
In every version, then, there is a snake who is the downfall of a woman made to love a gifted man. More relevantly, in every version, Orpheus is too heartbroken to accept her death.
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| Orpheus' Lament, Franc Kavčič (1755-1828) |
Orpheus sang his grief with his lyre and everything — humans, animals, gods, trees — felt his pain and bowed to it. But that wasn't enough. He had to go to her, to get her back. So, to the Underworld he goes.
When Orpheus, the Thracian bard, had indulged his grief to the full
in the air above, he felt he must also appeal to the shades,
and dared to descend to the river Styx through the Taénaran gateway.
Making his way through the shadowy tribes and the ghosts of the buried,
he came to Prosérpina, throned beside the Lord of the Shadows
who rules that dismal domain; and plucking the strings of his lyre,
he began
(Ovid trans. Raeburn 10.10-16)
Orpheus does not appeal to Hades (the Lord of Shadows) but to his wife, Persephone (Prosérpina). He says he's not here for glory or to make a name for himself as a hero, he's here because he's a man in love with a women who has died too soon, and he can't accept it, and he can't move on. He says 'I'd hoped to be able to bear my loss and confess that I tried. But Love was too strong' (10.25-6). He says that Persephone should know the power of love, as she is bound to two worlds because of the power of love. He implores her to free Eurydice, promising that — again — this is not about the glory of conquering death; he and Eurydice will both return to the Underworld after living a normal life together. And, 'If fate forbids you to show my wife any mercy, I'll never return from Hades myself. You may enjoy the deaths of us both.' (10.38). He just wants to be with her, in the mortal world or the Underworld.
He played music alongside his speech, and the Underworld literally comes to a halt to listen to him. Tartarus stops swirling, Sisyphus stops pushing his boulder, the eagle stops eating Prometheus' liver, the Furies wept real tears.
Hades and Persephone couldn't deny Orpheus the one he loves.
On one condition.
He has to walk ahead of Eurydice the entire way out of the Underworld, and if he looks back at her even once before they're both out, she will be dragged back to Hades and he won't get another chance to save her.
Whether it was because he worried she was falling behind, or because he felt the sun on his face and assumed she was behind him, or if he simply couldn't take it any more... he looked back. And she was whisked back to the shadows.
It is a beautiful and tragic story, and I do understand why it has been told and retold for thousands of years. I do.
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| Orpheus and Eurydice in 'Hades' (2020) |
But... I hate Orpheus so much. He got a chance that anyone who has lost someone they truly love would sell their soul for, and he squandered it.
Also... the entire story is about him: his heartbreak, his yearning, his quest. But what about Eurydice? She had just gotten married to the love of her life, and was dancing with her friends, or she was fleeing from a wannabe rapist, and she was suddenly, precipitously dead. Then that husband does the impossible, he comes to the Underworld, he stops it in its tracks, and convinces its king and queen to free her. He is given one trial, and he fails. She is dragged back to death, just when life seemed to be in her grasp again.
And the promise that they would spend their death together is massively delayed too, because Orpheus is latterly torn apart by maenads whose advances he had rejected, and his head floats to Lesbos, where it gives prophecies... until Apollo gets jealous and ends the Orphic oracle to maintain the primacy of his Delphic one.
He is, as Virgil calls him, the incautious lover.
***
I have always been quite impatient and dismissive of the Orpheus myth. But, lately, there have been two adaptations that have really resonated with me, for opposing reasons.
Kaos
Netflix did what many considered nearly impossible. They adapted Greek myth for the screen and it was amazing. Many other mythic television shows and films have not faired half so well in reviews from classicists, screen reviewers, and everyday viewers. Yet, for some incomprehensible and idiotic reason, Kaos has been cancelled after one season.
While many people focused (understandably, deservedly) on Jeff Goldblum's Zeus... or the fabulous, gender-bending muses, or Dennis the kitten... there was one character that really caught my attention.
Orpheus. Portrayed exactly how I see him. As infinitely talented and insufferably aware of it. Orpheus, who loves Eurydice beyond a shadow of a doubt, but it is a suffocating, selfish love, predicated on his own feelings with very little regard for her needs or desires.
It was one of those moments where you see your own spicy take echoed back to you, and you feel validated and vindicated. If you're yet to be convinced by my distaste for Orpheus, watch Kaos and get back to me. I think you'll see where I'm coming from.
Hadestown
People have been telling me since the first audio release of Hadestown to listen to it. It's right up my alley, and I'd been waiting for the perfect moment to listen to it, which of course never came. But then I got the opportunity to go to London and watch it in the West End; I decided to put off listening to the score, so my first experience of Hadestown was the show.
I went way down, to Hadestown, way down under the ground.
I came out changed. I know that's cliché, but it truly was breath-takingly brilliant, and I've been listening to the London recording on Spotify pretty much non-stop ever since.
As well as my sudden, inexorable crush on Hermes and Persephone, a score and choreography that keeps me up at night thinking about it, and an ecological message that was as unexpected as it was prescient and well-crafted, Hadestown did something really surprising.
It made me fall in love with Orpheus. He becomes a beautiful dreamer, who sees the world not as it is, but how it could one day be. His heart is infinitely big, worn charmingly and naively on his sleeve, and he has an almost childlike innocence and earnestness that makes me want to wrap him up in a blanket and protect him from the realities of the world.
This was not only complimented but challenged by the streetwise, cynical, smart-mouthed Eurydice, who faces the world with a well-earned disenchanted realism, sometimes erring on the side of nihilism.
He believes the rivers, trees, and birds will help them make their way in the world; she falls in love in spite of herself. They both know how precious that is in a world that is constantly slipping towards catastrophe.
He learns the realities of the world and the necessity of girding your heart in a world that wants to eat it; she learns to love, to dream, to hope for a better world as well as trying to carve out a living in the current one.
I was so excited to see Hadestown, but I never would have guessed that it was this musical that would make me love a version of Orpheus.
It's an old song
I'm always saying that myths are mutable. They have been altered, twisted, and reimagined since their origins in the oral tradition and early adaptation into written word, and these alterations were very much a part of the ancient world, with Homer adapting from an oral tradition, and the Athenian tragedians adapting Homer, and the Romans adapting the Greek myths.
Yet, somehow, I've still been taken by surprise over the last year, when two Orpheus and Eurydice retellings both had something fresh to bring to the story. As they sing in Hadestown:
It's an old song!
It's an old tale from way back when
It's an old song
And we're gonna sing it again.
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