Orpheus and Eurydice, hand in hand, walk down from the fiery netherworld and its deities, Pluto and Proserpine. Orpheus, singer, musician and poet, carrying a lyre on his shoulder, had recently wedded Eurydice, but on the day of their marriage, ‘ in the truly bloom of her life ’, she was stunk by a serpent and failed of its venom. distrait with grief, Orpheus descended into the netherworld determined to restore her to mortality.
He contended with Pluto and Proserpine for her return and his poetry ‘ melted the hearts of the gods and the denizens of the netherworld, and all fell silent ’. Indeed Cerberus, the fierce three- headed canine that guards the gates of Hell, lies meanly at Proserpine’s bases.
The gods agreed to Eurydice’s return Proserpine no doubt sympathetic as she recalled her own forceful kidnapping by Pluto. The only caveat was that Orpheus must not regard back at Eurydice until she was safely ensconced in the upper world. However, she would descend formerly again into Hell, If he broke his word.
In Peter Paul Rubens ’ oil painting, Orpheus is depicted floundering to look ahead soon after the deities have agreed to her return. On leaving the netherworld, the suckers mounted a steep and misty path and, as they neared the earth’s verge, an anxious Orpheus looked behind for his bride, who fell and murmured a final farewell before dying again. ‘ No reproach passed her lips ’, according to Ovid in his metamorphoses, because Eurydice now knew for certain that Orpheus loved her unconditionally.
The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has inspired numerous factory of art in literature, a cast as different as Boethius, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Pynchon and Carol Anne Duffy have created variants on its themes, while the filmmakers Jean Cocteau, in his triad – The Blood of a Poet( 1930), Orpheum( 1950) and Testament of Orpheus( 1959) – and Marcel Camus, with Black Orpheus( 1959), have captured its sonorous tragedy.
Rightly, it’s in music that the myth’s topmost heritage lies. L’Orfeo, Claudio Monteverdi’s pieces, the form’s foremost surviving masterpiece, composed in 1607, came the first of multitudinous musical plays to attack the story Christoph Willibald Gluck(Orpheus and Eurydice 1774), Jacques Offenbach( Orpheus in the netherworld, 1858), Harrison Birtwistle( The Mask of Orpheus, 1986) and Anais Mitchell’s current Broadway megahit Hades town, set in America’s Deep South, are among those to have added to a canon that continues to expand.
Rubens ’ generally pictorial Orpheus, which reveals the artist’s deep understanding of classical myth and allusion, was painted in the late 1630s.
