BIOGRAPHY: Orpheus: The Song of Life,By Ann Wroe, Jonathan Cape, 256pp. £17.99
THIS IS a most remarkable book. Ann Wroe has, in the past, written – among other works such as a highly-praised study of the poet Shelley – biographical accounts of such figures as Pontius Pilate (1999) and Perkin Warbeck, pretender to the throne of England (2003), two gentleman about whom not too much is known, but at least they existed. The same, pretty certainly, cannot be said of Orpheus, but this does not cramp her style at all – and indeed it must be said that she does a fine job on him, all things considered.
The consensus, I think, of the scholarly world is that Orpheus was some kind of mythical, semi-divine figure in the mountains of Thrace, to the north of Greece, who has some connection with the origins and development of music. He also presents many of the characteristics of a shamanistic priest, such as we know was a feature of Thracian religion. In Greek tradition, he is presented as the son of the Muse Calliope, who counts at least as a demigod, and possibly of the God Apollo, which makes him largely a god (although he counts rather as a "hero", in the Greek sense), and very well got in the area of music. His favoured instrument is the lyre, and with that he could charm not only the birds off the trees, but the trees themselves. His greatest adventures were joining in the voyage of the Argo, to secure the Golden Fleece for Jason (which would place him effectively in the generation prior to the Trojan War – around 1250 BC); and his desperate journey down to Hades in an effort to recover his wife, Eurydice, a project which ultimately ended in failure when he was tricked into looking back at her before clearing the boundaries of the underworld. His end was violent and nasty: torn to pieces by maenads, female worshippers of Dionysus, maddened by his disdain for the female sex.
All this and more Wroe takes on board, and develops with great vividness, and a lyrical, almost dithyrambic, enthusiasm. She divides the book into seven “strings”, taking her cue from the lyre itself. Each of these focuses on one aspect or the other of his life and times, from the myths surrounding his birth and early upbringing, through his Argonautic adventures and his “harrowing of Hell”, to his death and various forms of immortality.
To do justice to this theme, Wroe has not only conducted wide research in the relevant literature, but has taken it upon herself to tramp through the Rhodopian Mountains of southern Bulgaria – where the inhabitants have plainly realised that Orpheus is good for tourism, and are promoting him vigorously. We are therefore treated to much first-hand description of his presumed stamping grounds, but given a comprehensive survey of secondary authorities, from the (thoroughly bogus) Orphic hymns and theogonic poems themselves, through ancient authors such as Vergil and Ovid, Strabo and Pausanias, though mediaeval and early modern authorities such as the Anonymous Sir Orfeo, the Scottish poet Robert Henryson, Calderón ( El Divino Orfeo), the Florentine Platonist Marsilio Ficino, John Milton and the composers Gluck ( Orfeo) and Monteverdi, to moderns such as Anouilh, Cocteau ( Orphée, the movie!), Jung, Milosz, Tagore, and Rilke.
Indeed it is with Rainer Maria Rilke, and his composition of The Sonnets to Orpheus– done in a sort of creative frenzy, in the month of February 1922 in the Chàteau de Muzot – that she begins and ends her meditation. He did this, oddly, in memory of a young dancer, a friend of his daughter's, Vera Kloop, who had died two months before from a wasting disease. Wroe takes off from this, and leads us a merry dance through European literature, music and art, combining impressionistic "biographical" sketches with reflections on the significance of Orpheus and Orphism culled from various stages of European culture. In a way, the work is as much about "Orphism", in the sense of the ordering of the world through harmony and poetic inspiration, as about Orpheus himself, and should be celebrated as such.
This book is not, perhaps, the easiest of reads – it comes across rather as a sort of prose poem – but it is a most rewarding one, and one that will surely enhance Ann Wroe’s already considerable reputation.
John Dillon is regius professor of Greek (emeritus) in Trinity College Dublin. His most recent publications include The Heirs of Plato: A Study of the Old Academy; Salt and Olives: Morality and Custom in Ancient Greece;and Platonism and the World Crisis