Orpheus and Eurydice

Music is at the heart of the story since the protagonist is a supremely gifted musician with the divine power to sing and accompany himself on his lyre. Orpheus’s music is like a magical, transformative force of which he is master. It elevates all of nature and spreads harmony in unlikely places. It changes the nature of animate and inanimate things alike, charming wild animals, making trees and stones uproot themselves to approach him, as both Ovid (Book 11, Lines 1-4) and Virgil (Lines 57-58) attest. Orpheus is quite aware of the extraordinary power he wields, and he is undaunted by the prospect of descending into the murky depths of the underworld to retrieve Eurydice, his beloved. It is in the underworld that his music has the most startling effects, even more so than those apparent in the upper world. When he descends to Hades, his mission appears impossible. The dead do not come back from Hades—a gloomy, thankless place where suffering abounds and the rulers are cruel. Yet Orpheus, “as he struck his lyre’s sad chords” (Ovid, Book 10, Line 19), touches the hearts of those that seem not even to have them, like the Furies who weep at his sad song.