‘The two great gifts of the Greeks to humanity, said the poet Hölderlin, were Orpheus-Love and Homer-Song.’
‘The two great gifts of the Greeks to humanity, said the poet Hölderlin, were Orpheus-Love and Homer-Song.’ The great German poet’s statement shows him as belonging to our own phase of Western civilisation. For us Orpheus — born probably a generation before Homer, who never once mentions him — is eminently a lover. His grief at his wife Eurydice’s death (generally ascribed to snake-bite) drove him to the Underworld itself, to find her and bring her back. His love for her made him accept the harsh injunction never to look at her during their return-journey — and, tragically, caused him also to disobey it. ‘I can restrain myself no longer’, he cries out in Gluck’s ravishing opera of 1762, and consequently sees her die again. ‘Che faró senza Euridice?’ What shall I do without Eurydice?’ he laments in one of the most loved arias in the repertoire.
‘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.
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