Orpheus: A Retrospective

Course Description:

Musician, poet, prophet, vagabond, religious leader, widower, queer icon: for millennia, Orpheus has blurred the lines between perpetrator and victim, fact and fiction, straight and gay, pagan and Christian, even life and death. Our task is to understand how this mythical chameleon has changed through different millennia and media. Central to our inquiry will be the story of Orpheus and Eurydice from Virgil’s Georgics as well as Ovid’s Metamorphoses (read in translation). We shall also read receptions of Orpheus (and Eurydice) through Angelo Poliziano, Rainer Maria Rilke, Don Paterson, and Margaret Atwood. At our course’s end, we’ll meet Orpheus, Orpheus-Christus, and Eurydice herself through film, sculpture, painting, and music via work such as Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607), Jean Coteau’s Orphée (1950), the controversial Orfeu Negro (1959), Arcade Fire’s Reflektor (2013), the colossus of Orpheus in Baltimore, and more. We will try to understand why this ancient Mediterranean myth continues to have such gravitas in the modern world. How does Orpheus shift to meet the needs of different artists at different times? In what ways is Orpheus seemingly unchanging?

Texts & Media

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the First Poets “Orpheus."

Orphic Hymns (selections)

Orphic tablets

David Ferry, Georgics (Book 4)

Ovid's Metamorphoses 10.1-85, 11.1-66

Angelo Poliziano, L'Orfeo

Rainer Marie Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

Don Paterson, Orpheus

Claudio Monteverdi, L'Orfeo

David Ferry, Bewilderment

Margaret Atwood, "Orpheus and Eurydice cycle"

Orphée (dir. Jean Cocteau, 1950)

Orfeo Negru (dir. Marcel Camus, 1959)

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (dir. Céline Sciamma, 2019)

Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus, Vince Guaraldi Trio

Reflektor, Arcade Fire