An ancient tale takes on a life of its own
Why are we still captivated by certain stories from the myth kitty, while others fade away?
Hello and welcome to today’s edition of What’s the Story? Last time out, talking about the sea, I mentioned James Joyce’s take on Homer’s Odyssey. This week I want to turn to another enduring story, ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’, which dates back to the sixth century BCE. Virgil retold it in the Georgics (29 BCE) and Ovid in his Metamorphoses (1-17 CE). It has remained current through the centuries since, albeit revised and reshaped.
To remind you, the story tells of a semi-divine musician king, Orpheus, whose bride, Eurydice, fleeing another man, is bitten by a serpent and dies. Grieving, Orpheus descends to the underworld where, by the charm of his music, he succeeds in winning Eurydice back on condition that he not look at her until they regain earth. But defying, or momentarily forgetting, Pluto’s command he loses her again.
I first read the tale in the thirteenth century English poem, Sir Orfeo, based on a Breton lay and incorporating elements of Celtic fairy lore. It was edited by one of my college professors, A. J. Bliss, who, in turn, had studied under J. R. R. Tolkien at Oxford. The creator of The Lord of the Rings translated Sir Orfeo from middle to modern English in 1944. For the Tolkheads among you here’s a snippet of that updating:
He played so well, beneath the sun a better harper was there none; no man hath in this world been born who would not, hearing him, have sworn that as before him Orfeo played to joy of Paradise he had strayed and sound of harpers heavenly, such joy was there and melody.
More recently I saw a performance of Eurydice (2003) by American, Sarah Ruhl.[1] The play  has been adapted as an opera (2021-22), composed by Matthew Aucoin, complete with a chorus of singing (but not rolling) stones. Ruhl told Kamala Schelling of the Metropolitan Opera, that having read the story as a child, it is ‘one of those myths that you feel like you were born knowing, or at least I feel like I was born knowing it.’ She returned to it as a means to converse with her father who died when she was eighteen. Her Eurydice is lured to the Underworld by the promise of meeting her father. ‘In some ways she’s not me, she’s an archetype.’ Ruhl says. Meanwhile, the narcissistic Orphée writes letters to his dead wife and eventually makes his way to the Underworld, with the inevitable result.
 Much hinges in the story on the interpretation of that fatal backward glance. Does Orpheus mistrust Eurydice? Or Pluto? Is it a spontaneous expression of joy or excess of passion? Seamus Heaney plays with this crucial moment in his poem ‘The Underground’ when the ‘honeymooning’ poet and his wife run ‘late from the Proms’:
. . . To end up in a draughty lamplit station After the trains have gone, the wet track Bared and tensed as I am, all attention For your step following and damned if I look back.
The ending of the story is also a puzzle. In Virgil’s telling, Orpheus abandons his city, Thrace, and retreats to the hills and forests where the trees, the animals and the stones weep to hear him lament his lost Eurydice. He foreswears the company of women but turns instead to young men. In a drunken frenzy, the Bacchantes, priestesses of the god of wine, rend him apart for spurning women. His head is last seen floating downriver, still calling for Eurydice. Ovid is kinder to him and reunites the lovers in the Elysian Fields:
Sometimes he follows as she walks in front Sometimes he goes ahead and gazes back – No danger now – at his Eurydice. (Trans. A. D. Melville)
Later writers and composers have similarly varied the endings. In Sir Orfeo, husband and wife return to Winchester (Tolkien’s re-location of the original Traciens) and live happily ever after.
The appeal of the story for musicians is obvious and Aucoin’s is only the latest in a long line of Orpheus operas. Among the best known are Monteverdi’s (1607), which has alternate endings, Gluck’s (1762), which focuses on the hero’s grief as epitomised in the heartbreaking aria ‘Che farò senza Eurydice?’, and Offenbach’s ribald lampoon of Gluck, Orpheus in the Underworld (1858) from which dancers at the Moulin Rouge adapted the Can-Can. Someone was having a good time down there.
In Richard Powers’ novel Orfeo (2014) seventy-year old composer Peter Els reflects on his life in music, so well expressed that it is audible as you read, culminating in an otherworldly experiment involving DNA and possibly the music of the spheres, thus turning the ancient story on its head.  Â
Even the trees followed Orpheus, wooed by his sad songs, which, according to Virgil softened the tigers’ mood. The minstrel king’s lyrical gift has inspired many poets too. Rainer Maria Rilke’s (1875-1926) ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’ were written in a creative burst over three weeks in February 1922.[2] They combine sorrow at the death of a young friend with a yearning to transcend life and death through poetry. In this he taps into the esoteric rituals of the Bacchantes whose frenzy was a prelude to union with the divine.
None could destroy your head, or your lyre, How they rushed to attack you, how the sharp Stones they hurled at your heart, were melted In you, and endowed, there, with hearing. Finally, urged by revenge, they shattered you, While your sounds still lingered in lions, in stones, And in birds, and trees. You’re still singing there!   (From I, 26, trans. A.S. Kline)
A year after Rilke composed these poems Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) wrote his play Orphée, which he filmed in 1950. His version is a mirror image of the original, and aptly in the film mirrors are the portals to the Zone/Underworld. Here, the handsome popular poet is seduced by a dark princess becoming first a ‘damned poet’ taking up drink and offending his pregnant wife, Eurydice. Accused of murdering and plagiarising another young poet, he follows the princess to the Zone. His backward look is brilliantly presented as a glance in the rearview mirror of the princess’s Rolls Royce.
Eurydice follows him with the dark angel Heurtebise. Finally, the princess and Heurtebise release the couple to their ‘stagnant’ (but happy) life on earth. Written and made in the aftermaths of two world wars, in the first of which he had been an ambulance driver, Cocteau’s works present the underworld as a bombed-out city where dark-suited men conduct stern tribunals. Of the Orpheus story Cocteau said:
I used the ancient legend only as a canvas on which to embroider a pattern of my own. I gave way to the fascination that the pénombre of mystery always holds for me but I was far from attempting to solve the mystery. I might just have uncovered some of the invisible ties that link life and death.
(Interview with Francis Koval, Sight and Sound, August 1950)
On the last day of filming a despondent Cocteau worried that the film would not appeal to the public but the clapper-boy said ‘Why, Sir, after all everybody has some of his near ones among the dead’ (interview with Koval). Â
In 1912 another French poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, dubbed the paintings of some his contemporaries ‘Orphic art’. The artists included Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Fernand Leger, and FrantiÅ¡ek Kupka, and their quasi-mystical aim was to induce states of feeling in the viewer through the use of colour, its combinations vibrating like music.  Â
A further twist on the story has preoccupied late twentieth and twenty-first century women writers: giving Eurydice a voice. In the title poem of Sujata Bhatt’s 1988 sequence, ‘Eurydice Speaks’ the lost woman reassures her husband that she is not in hell but in Maine, ending with the lines:
Orpheus, I want to stay here With the smooth pebbles, I want to stay here, at the ocean’s edge I have found someone new – No god, but a quiet man who listens. Â
Kathy Acker’s (1947-97) ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’ records her experience of love and of the breast cancer that killed her. Â
Eurydice. Is she nothing Or is she your mirror? I don't know anymore. I am at war. Perhaps that which is given - Being human - Is too hard, And so it is love that brings us, To what cannot be born, To ourselves, And so we must change, Must descend, guided by love, into the unknown.
  Â
Austrian writer, Elfriede Jelinek’s propulsive dramatic monologue Shadow. Eurydice Says (2011) presents a Eurydice who is relieved to be shut of her egomaniac rock star husband, shedding her many pricey clothes till she is but a shadow.
My excesses, which I generated all on my own fit into one closet. Besides me, only Nature knows such excessiveness, though not in me, no more excessive loveliness here; my closet doesn’t know it, it keeps its modest Ikea dimensions, no matter how much I buy, it sticks to its design. (Trans. Gita Honegger)
Her Orpheus’ backward look happens when he turns his smartphone on her to ‘capture a moment’ as her shadow re-enters her body.
Like Richard Powers’ Els, Jalinek’s Eurydice anticipates the next step in AI, grafting human cells onto microchips. She says of her singer-husband’s wishes ‘If he stored them in his nerve cells and downloaded them on his smart phone, as the latest app, maybe they’ll come in handy somehow?’
The ancient sundered lovers continue to inspire new forms of expression. So the story lives on, recreating itself in every generation because of its beauty, its exquisite pain and its vision of negotiation between the living and the dead. Â Â Â
[1] An excellent production staged by graduate students at Lir, National Academy of Dramatic Art.
[2] In researching today’s newsletter I found this essay on Rilke’s ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’, worth checking out at least for the beautiful images, paintings and sculptures of Orpheus through the centuries:  https://www.maramarietta.com/the-arts/poetry/rilke/ . The author, Judith Eleanor Bernstock, argues convincingly that a C15 drawing inspired the poems.
A separate footnote to our recent discussion of Monsters, and specifically Gilgamesh, the latest novel by Elif Shafak, There are Rivers in the Sky, features our hero late of Sumeria. I’ll definitely be reading it soon!
I hope you enjoyed the encounter with Orpheus and Eurydice. I think they’re here to stay with many more changes to be wrung out of their tale - what do you think?
Thank you! It's extraordinary how popular the Orpheus story remains. There's a musical running in London at the moment called 'Hadestown' which is based on the story.
Glad you enjoyed it Laurence. I had fun researching it!