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‘Imagine anyway going [to the infernal regions] to get your wife!’ was the cynical reaction of 1st-century Roman wit, Martial. But Gluck’s librettist, Calzabigi — already defying tradition by moving the lovers from Thrace to Lake Averno, a place he knew — could not bear to think of poor, great-hearted Orpheus suffering a second bereavement. Proving his essentially modern sensibility, he made Amore (Love) step in to effect reconciliation and restoration to the upper world.
Jean Anouilh’s Eurydice (1942), a work Ann Wroe clearly (and rightly) admires, reveals similar attitudes and priorities to Gluck’s, while sticking somewhat more faithfully to the mainstream story. Accordion-player Orpheus is devastated by the death, from a bus, of shop-soiled, travelling actress Eurydice, encountered at a railway station. But when allowed to fetch her from the beyond by the mysterious
M. Henri, he can’t forebear probing her past, and, in his lover’s anxiety, looks at her. So this French Eurydice also dies anew, but so bereft is French Orpheus that reunion with her is granted — but only inside irrevocable Death.
But it wasn’t until the 5th century BCE that Orpheus was accorded Eurydice, and, even then she didn’t much concern Orphists. Of these there were many, though with successive eras their emphases changed. Orpheus was never thought a god, though (the going gets difficult here) he was often considered the son of one — bright Apollo’s, by the muse Calliope. He emanated from Thrace, possibly was the son of its king Oeagros, but belongs less to its bleak plains, so despised by Virgil, as to the now Bulgarian Rhodope mountains to the north, vividly evoked by Wroe. He was gentle, though the rites — Dionysiac at first — could be savage, was vegetarian and tree-loving, though on board the Argo with Jason did not dissociate from hideous sacrifices. And of course everywhere he took his lyre. Each of the instrument’s seven strings dictates the subject-matter of a chapter in this richly worked, originally constructed book. Orpheus inspired music and poetry wherever his presence could be felt. Increasingly, both in himself and in the ways of his devotees, hindsight related him to important aspects of Christ, both in life and in teachings.
Anne Wroe attempts a composite portrait of a human being who, tinged with the divine, the eternal, has never lost intellectual and imaginative appeal. While she does full justice to complexities and contradictions, it is Orpheus’s singular, in both senses, identity that comes over strongest. In the confrontation in his life’s climactic event of Eros and Thanatos, he was always going to fascinate those Germanic masters of the classics, Freud and Jung — and so it was.
His greatest 20th-century celebrant also wrote in German, Rainer Maria Rilke. Fittingly, Wroe begins and ends with Rilke’s reception (there’s no other word) of the Thracian ancient, in February 1922. Within three days Rilke wrote 26 sonnets addressed to him; another astonishing 29 soon followed. ‘Praising is what matters! He was summoned for that,/and came to us like the ore from a stone’s/silence’ (translation by Stephen Mitchell).
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