Orpheus and Eurydice: the song that defied death

Of all the love stories of antiquity, that of Orpheus and Eurydice is the one most bound to the power of music. Orpheus, a singer from Thrace and son of the Muse Calliope, could tame wild beasts and move stones with his lyre. The myth tells that he lost his young bride shortly after the wedding and dared to descend into the realm of the dead to win her back.

The sources: Virgil and Ovid

Virgil tells the story in the fourth book of the Georgics, composed around 29 BC, within the tale of the beekeeper Aristaeus. According to the poet, it is Aristaeus who pursues Eurydice along a river: as she flees, the nymph fails to see a snake hidden in the grass and is bitten. Ovid, in the tenth book of the Metamorphoses, shows her instead walking with the Naiads after a wedding marked by ill omens.

On everything else the versions agree. Orpheus enters the underworld through the gate of Taenarum, soothes Charon and Cerberus with his song and moves even Pluto and Proserpina. Ovid adds that the Furies wept for the first time and that the damned paused their torments: Tantalus stopped chasing the water, Sisyphus sat down on his stone. The gods grant Eurydice's return, but on one condition.

The forbidden glance

Orpheus must not turn to look at his bride until both have left the valleys of Avernus. The path climbs in silence, steep and dark. One step from the light, fearing to lose her or longing to see her, the singer turns, and Eurydice slips back, dying a second time. In Ovid she does not complain: of what could she complain, except that she had been loved?

The ancients already read the gesture in different ways. In Plato's Symposium, Phaedrus argues that the gods showed Orpheus only a phantom of the woman, because he had lacked the courage to die for love as Alcestis had. Others saw in it the image of human frailty before a prohibition, a theme that recurs in many traditions, from Lot's wife to the tale of Psyche.

The death of the singer

After the second loss, Virgil tells us, Orpheus wept for seven months on the banks of the Strymon. He refused every other woman, and this refusal roused the anger of the Maenads, the followers of Dionysus, who tore him to pieces in Thrace. His head, thrown into the river Hebrus, kept calling Eurydice's name; according to tradition it reached the island of Lesbos together with the lyre, and Lesbos became the homeland of lyric poetry.

Ovid grants the lovers a serene epilogue in the eleventh book. The shade of Orpheus goes down beneath the earth once more and finds Eurydice in the fields of the blessed. There the two walk together, now side by side, now he in front and she behind, and at last Orpheus can turn to look at her without any fear.

From the lyre to opera

The myth accompanied the very birth of opera. In Mantua, around 1480, Angelo Poliziano wrote the Fabula di Orfeo, one of the first secular plays in the vernacular. In 1600 Jacopo Peri's Euridice, to verses by Ottavio Rinuccini, was staged in Florence, and in 1607 Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo followed in Mantua. In 1762 in Vienna Gluck presented his Orfeo ed Euridice, with a happy ending entrusted to Love.

The strength of the story lies in its simplicity: a love able to overcome death and lost through a single glance. That is why Orpheus became the symbol of the poet himself, who tries with his song to hold on to what time carries away. His descent also remains one of the oldest models of the journey to the afterlife, taken up in different forms by Virgil's Aeneas and, centuries later, by the pilgrim of the Comedy.