Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Orpheus.
The gallery
Orpheus
Gustave Moreau, 1865
A Thracian girl cradles Orpheus' severed head where it has come to rest on his own lyre, head and instrument fused into a single relic. Moreau turns the myth's most violent moment into still, jewelled mourning; the painting entered the French state collections in his lifetime and now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, 1861
Corot's silvery twilight catches the pair mid-passage: Orpheus lifts his lyre like a lantern while Eurydice follows a half-step behind, the fatal backward glance only moments away. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
On screen
Orphée
Jean Cocteau
Cocteau moves the poet to postwar Paris, where Death rides in a Rolls-Royce, messages come over car radio, and mirrors are the doors to the underworld — the central panel of his Orphic film trilogy.
Black Orpheus
Marcel Camus
The myth replayed across Rio de Janeiro's Carnival to the bossa nova of Jobim and Bonfá: a tram-driver Orpheus, a country-girl Eurydice, and Death in a skeleton suit. It took both the Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
In music & on stage
L'Orfeo
Claudio Monteverdi
Monteverdi's favola in musica for the Mantuan court is the earliest opera still in regular repertory — the newborn art form chose the singer who could move the underworld as its founding subject.
Orfeo ed Euridice
Christoph Willibald Gluck
Gluck's Viennese 'reform opera' strips the myth to its grief and lets the drama drive the music; the lament 'Che farò senza Euridice?' became one of opera's most famous arias.
Hadestown
Anaïs Mitchell
Mitchell's folk-and-jazz retelling grew from a concept album into a Broadway musical, setting Orpheus' vow against Hades' industrial underworld; it won eight Tony Awards including Best Musical.