Thomas Larson

It may be that the greatest gift humans have given one another comes from the Greeks and their invention of the Muses. About them, Hesiod writes, “They are all of one mind—their hearts are set upon song and their spirit is free from care. He is happy whom the Muses love. For though a man has sorrow and grief in his soul, yet when the servant of the Muses sings, at once he forgets his dark thoughts and remembers not his troubles.” Echoing Hesiod, Edith Hamilton says, “their voices were lovely beyond compare.” Among the nine women was Erato, Muse of lyric poetry, who plays the lyre; Terpsichore, Muse of choral song, who plays the lyre while she dances; Euterpe, Muse of music, who plays the flute. Extending their reach, the Muse Calliope, the goddess of epic poetry, and the god Apollo, a musician who played the lyre and sang, gave birth to Orpheus, the god of song, the Robert Burns of their time. Apollo’s brother, Hermes—the god of boundaries and those who cross them—made the lyre, yoke and crossbar with four strings to pluck and bow and presented it to his nephew. Orpheus’s playing intoxicated the gods. He led the choruses of the Muses. He inspired priests and priestesses of the oracles to, as one historian put it, “cast their utterances into measured language having the form, if not always the spirit, of poetry.” From utterance to poetry—the history of verse.

Though we have no master tapes of tunes or lyrics, only testimony (mine included), his melodies enchant human ears as well as those of animals and the gods, even the inanimate. Thomas Bullfinch retells Ovid’s poem, Metamorphoses, in prose, writing, “Wild beasts were softened by his strains, and gathering round him laid by their fierceness, and stood entranced with his lay.” I love this detail of the tune’s lay: the ear-primed act of full attention, listening. Of Orpheus’s transformative power, Bullfinch says further, “The very trees and rocks were sensible to the charm.” The rocks “relaxed somewhat of their hardness.” And Shakespeare adds in Henry VIII that trees and mountaintops “bow themselves when [Orpheus] did sing,” and “Everything that heard him play, / Even the billows of the sea, / Hung their heads and then lay by.” “Sweet music” kills “care and grief of heart / Fall asleep, or hearing, die.” (Backpocket, if you will, that ominous phrase, “or hearing, die.”)

During one spring dance, Orpheus entices a group of girls. As he herds them with song and lyre, they cavort to the melodies, joining forces with the Nymphs (those “of healthiest hue,” semi-divine, some freshwater born, others salt) in the river-loud woods of Arcadia. A place heaven-like where supernal entities lurk. Orpheus’s voice lolls them further to an insensible state and one, Eurydice, the most vulnerable to his eye, surrenders. His song woos and tames her feral drive, and she agrees to marriage.

Once wed and honeymooned, Ovid says she runs into the woods again. Away from his lash, from her rash decision, from the bride-bed couch, the poet doesn’t say. She wanders. Perhaps, too, from her given-over, her over-given, self. Some days she returns, betrothed, wifely. Other days, she squirms in the stuporous spell, and he pulls her back with song or force. She breaks free, darts off, goatish, insubordinate. Safe in a sunlit glen, she feels the harmony of the lyre, from a child of the gods, shield her from worldly harm. A shepherd boy, lingering beside his flock, ogles her, succumbs to her cavorting beauty, and gives chase. Egged on by his pursuit, threshing through the grass, she steps on a snake. The snake, frightened out of slumber, sinks his tooth-hook venom in her heel.

Told of the sting, Orpheus hastens to her, his linen robes catching on the thistle tops. There on pallet poor, Eurydice lies, stricken. He sings his grief, he sings to revive her, he tightens the strings, he sings to deracinate the poison (knowing it’s traveled deep), and in a verse laments, according to Bullfinch: “Let me again Eurydice receive / Let Fate her quick-spun thread of life re-weave.” She shudders, rising as Orpheus’s melody punctures her, she struggles to stand. The pair pulled, she by death, he by the owls and larks and wolves who mimic him, responsorial, by the water, its flow curbed so as to hear. Now he stops singing and hopes the silence will revive her. Even in the quiet, on-the-music goes in his mind. At last, too soon, she dies, he weeps, his bride, her soul/spirit/body, awakens in the underworld, a shade.

Here is a metaphor of visual and aural note. The visual shades from darker to lighter hue, from the revealed to the hidden; the aural shades the volume from less to more, and the tone, sweet to harsh. Her axis lost, Eurydice is trapped in a half-seen, half-heard realm, there, but barely, her humanness slowly eviscerating, as if elected to office.

All things this side the ground hush in Eurydice’s sudden absence from the field of play. No solace ceases the all-round sobbing. The rulers of Hades have her viced. Here, none can say why there and not in heaven. I reasoned she was innocent, deserving better. What was her transgression? Intoxicated by Orpheus’s music, her fault? Blame the woman for her ecstacy, deny her trial, pronounce sentence? Orpheus, arriving at the River Styx, cries, “Unspell my poor Eurydice, my soul, from Hell.” Others, rallying from the glen’s edge, choir: “Restore, restore Eurydice to life / Oh take the husband or return the wife.”

An idea intrudes, a divine afflatus: Were he to journey there, where Eurydice’s whisked, where intransigent mortals go, where virgins post-embalmed are reinflamed, his song might retrieve her, she, the stray cat, the slithered mouse, he, the pied piper of Thrace.

There he goes, and here he comes.

Orpheus enters Hell through a cavern. Edging down, he stops and arpeggiates the strings. As above, as below, music lights chasms, dries grottos, unfastens chains, eases discipline, bends wills, tempers anger, stirs dozers—tropes of the underworld. Tune pierces where the Furies sconce; the chthonic sisters (yet another female cult) accuse: The fault is hers, you jester, then or now. No sound waters Hell’s fire. Hands laced with snakes, the air aerosols with venom. Winged creatures flutter and attack. At which Orpheus sings: Love is a little thief! A little serpent is Love! He brings pleasure if you let him. He fills you with disgust if you fight. On he lilts, beside a charm of vultures pecking at livers who perk up as if amped. They shiver and defuse, re-rump their thrones. Nearby Sisyphus pauses on his perch. His ceasing, momentarily, steepens the pile. Drear Hell’s doom stalls. Its machinery slumps, its myths refresh. Why, on his way down and in, do hearts nailed to posts pulse, why guards ladder-lowering past the enchained, their agents, their attorneys? Isn’t that the point. Eternity—the worst is yet to come.  

On Orpheus sings, as self-enchanted as his wilting foes. And in an instant, his future hears a thought-dream his adventure foretells—operas and operettas, masques and tone poems, musicals and films, his composer-kin-to-come who’ll deify him: Monteverdi, Offenbach, Debussy (his Orphée begun eight times and never finished), Stravinsky, Milhaud, Krenek, Schuman, Hovhaness, Birtwhistle, Henze, Glass, Aucoin, Antonio Carlos Jobim (Black Orpheus), and the melodic angel Christoph Willibald Gluck whose 1762 Orfeo fuses aria, recitative, choruses, and dance in service to (a version of) the myth. A couple years before Mozart and, perhaps, the first drama in which singers must act what they sing.

From the New Grove Dictionary of Music: “In Gluck’s frequent recourse to the sublime—to close accumulations of plot reversals and revelations, and of the affect-laden musical effects that illustrated them—he also practiced a kind of theatre in which, as in Winckelmann’s account of certain feats of Greek oratory, the audience is powerless (except in retrospect) to identify or analyze the specific means by which it is being moved.”

All this arousal is bit too much for Orpheus to integrate. He stops playing and listens, instead, to the music in his mind. He recalls thinking that Hell is an imagined place where retributive tales of loss rule but never has one sorrow been set to music. For whatever else Hell is, Hell is the banishment of music. All the sodden slog lacks, all it has ever lacked, is him: Orpheus, the tenth muse, the god of sound, of music heard and never unheard again. The hellraisers Orpheus encounters become his audience; they hit pause on their tarmac iPods, silence a moment their loathsome duties, their religious beliefs, their FOX news, which suggests it’s doubtful they’d know a good tune if it snuck up teeth bared and hissing behind them, I’m talking, “Visions of Johanna,” “Billie Jean,” “The Long Black Veil,” “Choctaw Bingo.”

Song narrating the innocent wronged soundscapes the Renaissance, and Monteverdi is its initial accelerant. His Orfeo reawakens human longing in music. At the onset of the 1600s, scholars claim that music resets the minds of the living and the dead away from institutional illusions and accomplishes what no priest or politician can—embody a mythic tale, lengthwise, as plain and hill, as journey there and back, as verse unified melody. Marsilio Ficino, founder of the Platonic Academy in Florence, writes, circa 1600, “Remember that song is the most powerful imitator of all things, for it imitates the intentions and affections of the soul and speech, and it also reproduces bodily gestures, human movements, and moral characteristics; it imitates and acts out everything so powerfully that it immediately provokes both the singer and the hearer to imitate and perform the same things.”

Teleported Orpheus downloads these eventual consequences of his musicianship: His tone dampens the psychic danger and gives birth to a new myth, to loving a spouse in death as in life. There is no break, no cross-purpose, of life withering on in death. He steps further down the riprap path until the ground quakes, and, slipping off a precipice, he tumbles, his lyre held aloft, through smoky air to land, with a bounce, before the married couple, Pluto and Persephone, Hell’s stage managers. Now, as if to deracinate him, he beholds the pair decked out in tux and tails and cocktail tutu, Las Vegas schtick. Behind them, hamster cages runged in neon turn in kaleidoscopic gyres. Glitter molecules glisten the dry ice. While Orpheus takes mic in hand and renders a Joni Mitchell tune from Blue, Pluto fronting the reigning lounge octet vamps a saucy intro to a Wayne Newton favorite, “Danke Schoen,” my darling, Pluto, the god of seeds, paying homage to his wife, the goddess of fertility. More Hell to come! Orpheus oars Mitchell’s disconsolate “River” on with pianistic chimes: “It’s coming on Christmas / They’re cutting down trees / They’re putting up reindeer / Singing songs of joy and peace / Oh, I wish I had a river / To skate away on.” The simultaneous blast and counterblast of the two tunes combined, an Ivesian standoff, smears the space like records played backwards. (And me? I’m hanging like an ornament from a craggy ledge, exploited by my own Orphic excitement. “All the voices seemed to form the same song so perfect was their accord,” writes Dante of another place.)

Some rare decency shuts Pluto up long enough to listen to the Orphic song, and the vaulting bloom of his longing ensouls those without into silence. Orpheus says, if his wish is not granted, then he’ll remain below and sing forever, a promise the two P’s know will disbar them. Pluto asks Orpheus his wish. Well, since you ask: That you stop torturing me with your singing; that you take a few music lessons and cut the cabaret crap; that you learn the blessed rudiments of harmony; and that, for Hell’s sake, you release Eurydice. Pluto, cornered, accedes. But under one condition. That as Orpheus leads his bride up and out, he must not look back at her. If he does look, she dies again—and remains. (America’s oracle of the Sixties, Alan Watts, writes that the deities’ standard cruelty is to tempt us with what they know will undo us. “God did not give us the Ten Commandments because he wanted us to follow them; he gave us the commandments because he knew we’d fail to.”)

            At his felt-board table, Pluto, Hell’s croupier, deals. He turns up the Jack of Diamonds. He stands pat. Channeling Amarillo Slim, he plays death’s card, human desire. He’s sure the songster, gloating at his triumphal descent, can’t tamp back her shadow, the way she once was, unfettered and free. That shade of her shade now is radiant, a glowing darkness. That glow he’ll possess, Hell’s lantern. What’s more, on their climb out, Orpheus, Pluto believes, will gaze back at Eurydice to conjure the night before when all of her was skin, dewy from dodging nettles and boys and his lyreless hands, crisscrossing her restless acquiescence, the wedding-night fall of her dress to her ankles, kicked aside in a heap. And neither forget, Pluto surmises, Eurydice’s need: born of dancing chaos, she already is vibrating behind him, hearing her stir what’s coming, their myth-making resurrection, outfoxing death in its realm.

The way up and out is slow and steep; in the dark, jagged outcrops abrade their journey. Each spouse cries—the pain of not looking, of not being seen, knife-edged and irksome. At the top, hearing “the voice of light,” the needy Eurydice touches Orpheus’s back with her nails, I am yours, remember, and he, worried, not whether she’s there (he hears the rustle of her tunic, the calibers of her fear), but again foretelling the author’s conundrum, which stream of which version do I choose?

In the A. D. Melville translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Orpheus worries that in the unsteady gloom his wife might faint. And “longing to look, / He turned his eyes—and straight she slipped away.” “And she, dying again, made no complaint / (For what complaint had she save she was loved?)” How sweet to die again! To die twice is to have lived twice, which I’d wager is less than half bad. Thomas Bullfinch echoes Melville but adds his own turn: “Stretching out their arms to embrace each other, they grasped only the air! Dying now a second time, she yet cannot reproach her husband, for how can she blame his impatience to behold her?” (Why wouldn’t impatience be fatal?) From Charles Martin’s translation in 2004, I note the sheer verve of holding onto nothing while nothing is denied its being though as air it’s also present as well: “She slipped back to the underworld / and he, because he wanted to embrace her, / or be embraced by him / stretched out his arms— / but seized on nothing, that unlucky man, / unless it was the abnegating air.” And with a fragment from Seamus Heaney who first notes of Orpheus’s speech to Pluto that “though I have tried to suffer on my own / And outlive loss, in the end Love won,” which he follows with these lines, glorifying Eurydice’s innocence: “She died again, / Bridal and doomed, but still did not complain / Against her husband—as indeed how could she / Complain about being loved so totally?”

For Gluck’s opera, the librettist Ranieri de’ Calzabigi adds a major twist to the couple’s parting. Pushing Pluto off the stage, Calzabigi writes Amore (Eros, Cupid) into the casting-out role who warns Orpheus not to look back. He creates a lover’s spat to accompany their climb out. Since Eurydice did not hear the injunction foisted on Orpheus (she was elsewhere, pining), she is angry once they ascend that he refuses to glance at her. She sings that he has “put out the torches / Sacred to the Gods of Love and Marriage.” She calls him “Traitor!” he who abandons her, who will not console her. Which is to say he’s been unfaithful in thought or deed, though when he would have found the time during his battle through Hello to stray is a stretch. Eurydice declares she’d rather remain below, content in her “peaceful oblivion.” Her hypochondriac confession, ringing with spite, halts Orpheus’s step. Why has he been singled out? What false charge is this? (We are told Orpheus is loyal to her, but is he? Eurydice may know more about him than we do—his penchant, his pattern. Or, she’s making it up.) Defamed or unmasked, he turns back to look at his accuser. And, in that instant, no matter which version we follow as likely or reshape for our ends, Eurydice disappears multiply. She dies. She vanishes. She vanishes and leaves a trace, an odor, a sizzled outline. She is in league with Amore who wants her for his own. (What a loving devil!) She is imprinted on Orpheus’s visage. She tendrils before him as vapor. She tendrils the Platonic ideal of vapor. She is, as Augustine says of the dead, not gone but there, invisible. She can never die for she lives on as mythic estrangement. If only.

Again, his gal is gone, and there’s a moment of abject despair, suicide as salvation. But the anti-Ovid Calzabigi has planned an exit, no doubt, massaging Gluck’s ego with a charged final scene. Perhaps Gluck, as well, wanted this; an opera’s legend stuck by its end. He serves the audience who are more important than any story’s putative verity. True love denies the death of an innocent; true love lives on, rewarded, transcendent like music itself. Opera may stop time and, to confirm it, Gluck writes his great Mahlerish tune, “Che farò senza Eurydice,” Orpheus’s final swoon. As if Amore’s intent subverted by song, he brings Eurydice back to life. Our pudgy cherub posts the reunited to a marriage bed, and there the lovers sing their burdensome joy in harmony, for one night more.

One more perspective on Orpheus’s misdeed. I think Orpheus realizes, the moment he loses his wife, his failure. He should have been singing as he climbed out. Had he, his song would have convinced him of her unfaltering presence. He would have known that she was in lock-step as he sang. The idea is that without desiring Eurydice with song, she does not exist, her desirousness does not evince saving. We have all beheld Jeanie with the light brown hair. We know there is a Rose in Spanish Harlem. We know women inspire ballads. Human love, even in art, fuels our character, so we are loved in return. Transactional, tit-for-tat.

Rising from Hell, foolish Orpheus had not played his lyre. Why, I keep asking myself. Because he hears the music in his head. Such “head” tunes—I hear them, too—convince him his body is sounding, though neither his mouth opens nor his strings plucked. Not the thing itself, which, Arthur Schopenhauer says, is our experience; he should know that live music is the purest of the arts. “Music does not express this or that particular and definite joy,” he writes, “this or that sorrow, or pain, or horror, or delight, or merriment, or peace of mind. . .. Music is joy, sorrow, pain, horror, delight, merriment, peace of mind themselves.”

Song lulls others as deeply as it lulls the singer. (It may be heard on Judy Garland, Live at Carnegie Hall, 1961.) As a poet-musician, Orpheus believes himself immune from the curses of those he has charmed. He is invincible; his gift protects him, nothing bad can happen. However, he lingers too long in the love, in being loved for his gift, that he fails to remember he, too, needs to be charmed—the safest passage out of where his gift has landed them.

What is so odd about the myth of failing to defy death is that neither husband nor wife feel in Hell the need to use what put them there—the power of song—to be, in turn, the torch and staff with which they ascend. In a sense, song has already coerced them into the quieted aftermath music leaves in its wake. Either way, music ceases and, in its absence, music demands to be heard again.

Charles Martin’s translation describes that without Eurydice but up and out and on solid ground in the light, “He longed, he begged, in vain to be allowed / To cross the stream of Styx a second time. / The ferryman repulsed him. Even so / For seven days he sat upon the bank, / Unkempt and fasting, anguish, grief and tears / His nourishment, and cursed Hell’s cruelty.” I note the delay Martin shapes in this fabulous rendering: The poet slows the moment of Orpheus’s seven days by highlighting his internal pain, which was “nourishing” the anguish, the grief, the tears.

Only by losing Eurydice does he discover the end of his talent. Where a choice rises in importance: Die or extend his impatience to behold her again his remaining days. With the latter, he can waste away, and it won’t hurt as much. He drags himself through the fields of his yesteryears; his self-regard tanks. He pines like a schoolboy; he desultorily reads self-published Amazon Bestsellers; he binges Hulu (“The Bear” is particularly good, he says). He lives on like a cactus in an unsexed, needled state, though Ovid quips that Orpheus, his urges repressed, ripens on young boys for the occasional fluid release.

As the rest of the story, Orpheus begins disabling his funk, the post-trauma trauma, working at “a language / Untouched by pity,” working a language “out of the unsayable,” according to Mark Strand’s poem “Orpheus Alone.” The rest is the part Gluck in his opera did not dramatize though Ovid did in his poem does not go that far. The songman renews his wandering as if he’ll fine her, Eurydice. For three years, Orpheus shuffles through the rocky terrain, in sour mood, moaning and kvetching, writing pop tunes that hold unaccountable women accountable for the man’s lust (her-skirt-was-too-short sort of thing). One flock of silken-briefed girls, the Maenads, are fed up with his whining and woe; as he molders across a meadow, they pebble him with clods of earth. Shut the Fuck Up! they holler, incensed. Members of an orgiastic cult, these men-hating women attack his enervated enchantment. We are told in Martin’s translation how they wall him off: “And still his singing / Would have charmed every weapon, but the huge / Clamor, the drums, the curving Phrygian fifes, / Handclapping, Bacchic screaming drowned the lyre. / And then at last, his song unheard, his blood / Reddened the stones.” (Greek Phrygian was the name of the Dorian mode, the key with which Miles Davis enchanted Kind of Blue.) The Maenads silence him. They draw his appendages. He’s quartered, his severings tossed in the river. They pitch in his lyre, thoughtful accompaniment. Downstream his remains, flotsam and jetsam, bob to where the Muses of Lesbos winter. They hear a voice, weary but warm, from a mossy pool. They gather up his bits, arms, legs, penis, and his limp lyre, too. They raise and cradle his head. Their hearts soften hearing him still sing.

At last, we walk along the tale’s highest wire: Once heard his song keeps singing, whether attached to his life or his life in death.

Song, the tune playing on the radio when you met, the prom, the cotillion, the concert in the round, Artie Shaw’s version of “Begin the Beguine” when he and his orchestra played it, acoustically, aboard a ship in Pearl Harbor just after the war in the Pacific had ended and the boys, due home soon, produced a deafening gonadal roar as they swayed to the sirenic tune, which Shaw never forgot (I hear it in my mind now, the soundtrack of my parents’ lives), these sailors fresh from cots of squirming loneliness, of Betty Grable’s gams, of Hedy Lamarr’s enigma (the greatest inventor of the twentieth century who wasn’t a man), of squeezing their girls, their promises in pocket, entangled in sweaty sheets, imbibing every shimmy, shake, and wobble of Shaw’s clarinet obbligato on and off the beat, or Horace Silver’s soulful percussive chords on his “Song for My Father,” or Pete Seeger’s exhortation of “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and the Damn Fool Said ‘Push On,’” or the most blisteringly sorrowful of all songs, the B side of Orpheus’s first 45 in 1951, the tale Lord Gregory sings when he recognizes the girl he once loved, impregnated, and left, “The Lass of Aughrim.” This lament sung from a second-floor room by Frank Patterson changes the marriage of Gabriel and Gretta Conroy near the end of John Huston’s pinpoint film of James Joyce’s The Dead.

Music’s nature is to deceive, to be listened to so as not to be heard, which is music’s wont and one allowance for a few of us who get to live and die and live and die again by playing our guitars and singing McCartney-ish love songs in the poet’s honor.

The end of the tale is narrated in the painting “Nymphs Find the Head of Orpheus” (1900) by John William Waterhouse, a pre-Raphaelite who cast most of his mythic female subjects as virginal idols. Two Muses on the isle of Lesbos gaze into a pool of water as the up-faced Orpheus and his lyre float by. Their guileless gazes at the singer’s bobbing for breath captures my attention. The Muses embody the theme of male-summoned dependency, agented attraction, women enthralled by a lover’s tragic sensuality—his groans fading, his melody untuning. The moment possesses transcendent mystery and kernelled eroticism. One Muse beholds Orpheus with comely curiosity; the other seems triggered by reticence and fear. Yet despite their difference, they are imprinted by a music they cannot escape, which, as song, continues to enchant. Like a Billie Holiday record, the song and its spell live on.

Here’s where I’ll begin letting go—as Orpheus had to once his limbs were sundered. Listening again and again to “The Lass of Aughrim,” I can’t help but feel the tenderness of the melodic line ranking up feelings of nostalgia for her, the woman, she, the love of my young lost life and the mystery I still adorn her with. But then when I listen to the words and the story of Lord Gregory’s promise to have and hold, to love and honor, his rape forgotten, I sense my own discord as a man who wants a woman to be more than she is at all. So, I’m left. To which Orphic charm do I pay attention? Sometimes I listen to the words and not the melody and feel hopeless; sometimes I reverse course and sense I’m being pulled into the tune’s spell from which I hope never to leave, where I wish to be, come what may, as music, abandoned of words and their straining to be this, not that.

Yet here I am, like Orpheus, my good times are all gone, writing words, not singing, not listening to anything but my own internal ribbon of language. If I hear a melody, it’s faint at best. Instead, the words bold themselves like waves, carrying me ashore. I also sense an answer to where I’m bound lies between the melody and the lyrics, between the wind and the sea, in what Walter Pater calls the “condition of music” all the other arts aspire to.

Once a myth is made as language, is sung as music, and is returned to language, much like the journey of our fallen hero, I hear Rainer Maria Rilke portray its genesis in his first Sonnets to Orpheus, translated by Robert Bly. Mind you, these poems are not about Orpheus but to him.

A tree rising. What a pure growing!

Orpheus is singing! A tree inside the ear!

Silence, silence. Yet new buildings,

Signals, and changes went on in the silence.

Animals created by silence came forward from the clear

And relaxed forest where their lairs were,

And it turned out the reason they were so full of silence

Was not cunning, and not terror,

It was listening. Growling, yelping, grunting now

Seemed all nonsense to them. And where before

There was hardly a shed where this listening could go,

A rough shelter put up out of brushy longings,

With an entrance gate whose poles were wobbly,

You created a temple for them deep inside their ears.