In the footsteps of Orpheus
“Fame unleashed its tongue to speak of the one who braved the seas with a fragile boat and mocked the wrath of the north and south winds.”
Orfeo – Claudio Monteverdi, 1607
Eurydice went out playing with her nymph sisters when she was bitten by a snake hiding in the grass. She fell dead and the nymphs’ howling filled the valleys. Soon, news of the tragedy reached her husband, Orpheus, and he began to mourn her with music that made everyone on Earth cry. The gods even allowed him to retrieve her from the world of the dead, but on one condition.
This is just one of the many variations on the Orpheus story. Like all myths, it is absurd to ask about the antiquity or credibility of this or that version, as a myth is, by its nature, a collection of literary, visual, and ritual variations that complement or contradict each other, and take the form of the era in which they are placed. In the case of Orpheus, most accounts go back to the Roman period, while the Greek Orpheus remains a mysterious person about whom we know little, except that he was a barbarian poet and musician, that is, a non-Greek. His singing and the sound of his lyre enchanted everything from humans, wild animals, and even rivers that changed their course to approach him. In short, Orpheus' music was a miracle that had never been heard before, not even by Apollo, the god of music himself, and according to some, the father of Orpheus.
In the flurry of the Italian Renaissance and the desire to revive defunct Greek and Roman culture and values, a group of Florentines tried to recreate Greek theater in its ancient, sung form, but in reality they were in the process of installing a new form, which was opera. It was not surprising, with the birth of opera and its alleged Greek origin, that the story of Orpheus was the most popular topic for most operas, since their real topic was music. Indeed, when the Italian Monteverdi wrote his opera Orfeo , one of the first of these Renaissance operas, he assigned the role of narrator to the “music” character who opens the opera.
Since the introduction of opera in 1607, no figure, mythological or otherwise, has inspired as many musical works as Orpheus.
Then Eurydice dies, and Orpheus follows her to the underworld, an adventure that only a few legendary figures have ever been able to honor. Orpheus undertakes it not with his physical strength like Hercules, nor with his divine beauty like Aphrodite, but with song, a new model of heroism that is less masculine, and he surpasses Caron , the river navigator. Which separates the world of the living from the world of the dead, just as his singing softens the heart of Pluto, the god of the underworld, allowing him to retrieve the soul of his beloved, on the condition that she walks behind him and he does not turn to look at her until they reach the world of the living, otherwise he will lose her forever. Which is what happens.
Since the introduction of opera in 1607, no figure, mythological or otherwise, has inspired as many musical works as Orpheus, which raises the question of the benefit of writing a new Orpheus every year or two as long as everyone knows the story and its possible endings. The answer is that opera has, at least, remained Until the twentieth century, it was an artistic template controlled by strict conventions, just like Hollywood cinema today, in which what is important is not the repeated story or the stereotypical characters, but the method of presentation: the music, decor, clothing, and linguistic expression, and the challenge lies in the new author manipulating those rules to create an Orpheus that surpasses its predecessor.
In the German author Gluck's version of 1762, for example, more than a century after Monteverdi's opera, the title changes to Orpheus and Euridice. Eurydice, who almost does not appear to Monteverdi, as if from the beginning she was just an elusive specter, here acquires a more complex character, and sings at length on the way to ascending to the world of the living, begging Orpheus to look at her, fearing that he no longer loves her, and that he is betraying her, the thing. Which explains why Orpheus turned around and lost it.
Gluck's operas long maintained their popularity, and continued to match the public taste of the nineteenth century, when everything Greek was associated with purity and simplicity, just like Gluck's music in " The Dance of the Blessed Souls " or Orpheus' song " O Pure Heaven ", which, using the oboe, reflects the loneliness of Orpheus And his innocence, or especially in the death song of Euridice, “ I Lost Euridice, ” which, when compared to its dark counterpart from Monteverdi’s opera, clearly shows us the vast change in taste between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
While nineteenth-century composers like Liszt continued to treat Orpheus as a symbol of music's superiority and power in the face of fate, the Frenchman Offenbach was one of the few who understood that the most powerful aspect of myth may be its ability to turn against the very society that produces it.
In the end, the spectator almost forgets that this entertaining place full of music and dancing is actually hell, sort of like Paris in the mid-nineteenth century.
In his opera Orpheus in Hell (1858), Offenbach presents a satirical reading of the myth. Eurydice lives a miserable life with the annoying Orpheus, whose music she can no longer stand and prays to the gods to rid her of him. When the gods respond and Eurydice dies, in the midst of her husband's happiness, a character appears who introduces himself as “Public Opinion,” forcing Orpheus to follow his wife to the underworld to retrieve her and avoid the words of the people. To the sound of Offenbach's entertaining and intelligent music, the gods participate in the seduction of Eurydice, who is eventually handed over to their elder Zeus when he comes to her in the form of a fly , an ironic allusion to his constant transformations in myths into various types of animals.
Offenbach's opera constitutes a fierce criticism of the mentality of the French bourgeoisie, and of the empty speeches about returning to authentic Greek values, which are used as a mask for a hypocritical and greedy society based on marriage of convenience and contempt for women. Eurydike appears to be a victim of the whims of human men and gods who claim chastity and morality, while the famous condition of not turning around A way to trick Orpheus, so that he can turn around and rid himself of his wife and public opinion.
Offenbach extends his satire on bourgeois society to include also their musical amusements: to persuade the gods to help him, Orpheus sings the song, famous at the time, “I have lost his Eurydice,” in direct mockery of Gluck's operas, which had come to represent fossilized taste, and Orpheus here no longer plays the lyre but the The violin , in a clever update of the myth, because the violin was the most important performance instrument in Offenbach's day, which allows him to attack the phenomenon of star players who turn music into a technical show devoid of any aesthetic content. And at the end, when the gods dance a Parisian cancan , the spectator almost forgets that this entertaining place full of music and dancing is actually hell, sort of like mid-19th century Paris.
Some might think that the twentieth century would strip Orpheus of its magic, but what happened was exactly the opposite. With the end of World War II, some continued to invoke it in search of a lost purity and beauty, as in Stravinsky’s elegant ballet Orpheus , while others used it to pose more complex problems, such as Authors Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henri in their joint work Orpheus 53 .
Orpheus sings alone on stage to the accompaniment of a pre-recorded, pre-processed tape of concrete music , repeating scattered words that sound like a nightmarish version of Gluck's "I've Lost His Euridice" (1:15), before entering into dialogue with the tape recorder (3:17), who speaks in German. While Orpheus answers him in French:
“I am no longer Orpheus.”
"who are you then?" The voice asks him.
“Nobody, I faded into the crowd.”
“Everyone is Orpheus,” the voice answers. Giving the key to the entire action and legend.
In the Descent into Hell clip (6:37), between the groans of metal machines echoing on deaf concrete walls, or the chirping of a baby rubber duck, a voice calls Oridike’s name (8:50) as if he is trying to wake her up, as if everything that is happening is part of a dream she is having. . All of these sounds represent the true monsters of the twentieth century, the machines and everyday objects that consume Orpheus in his weakest moments, staring at him as he sinks into his underworld like someone passing out in a bathtub or lost in deserted, bottomless cellars, and as the final monologue emphasizes (14:35), The only solution for Orpheus to regain himself and his Eurydice is to dive inside himself, into the hell of his subconscious.
Orpheus returns as an ordinary human being after losing his lyre and his legendary aura, perhaps as a metaphor for myth losing its role in our modern world, or losing inspiration as music exhausts its ancient components of maqams, rhythms, and melodies and returns to its primitive state: sounds, which is the principle upon which concrete music is based in its treatment of sounds. From everyday life. With their radical renewal, the authors declare that the condition for saving music, like Auridike, is “not to look back.”
Indeed, then, “Everyone is Orpheus”: the Renaissance musician who tames ferocious beasts and conquers darkness, the romantic musician who turns his lost love into art, the fraudulent musician who became a legend because of his audience’s poor taste, and the musician whose voice was lost in the hustle and bustle of the modern world. All of these, like any legendary character, “live more than one life and more than one death, unlike the novel’s characters who are restricted to one action. In every life and death, all the other versions are present and resonate at the same time,” says contemporary thinker Roberto Calasso. To this day , composers find their personal voices through Orpheus. If Lévi-Strauss defines myth as “an imaginative solution to a real problem,” composers achieve through Orpheus what they would never achieve in their reality: changing the course of the universe with music.
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