Talk:Orpheus/Workpage

=In literature

• Chunk on Ovid, Metamorphoses
• Chunk of Virgil's georgics, Aristaeus and the bees
• Rilke
• Lycidas?

something from earlier?

In music

The Orphic myth had a great impact on Western classical music, and particularly on opera. The myth had a double attraction for composers: not only did it offer a dramatic story of love overcoming death (particularly as in many operatic retellings, Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice most notably, a happy ending where Orpheus and Euridice are reunited after all is grafted on to the myth), but the status of Orpheus as divinely-inspired composer par excellence whose music's charms know no limits allowed the composer his own claim to artistic immortality. At the birth of opera the key figures of Peri and Monteverdi (most famously) composed Orphic operas, and in 1762 Gluck resurrected the myth in the first of his "reform operas", which for himself and his librettist, Calzabigi, represented the rebirth of "dramatic" opera after the domination of opera seria.

Perhaps the most famous 19th-century musical adaptation of the myth was Offenbach's Orphee aux enfers, a satirical take on the myth and on Gluck's earlier opera. More serious works include a symphonic poem by Liszt and, in the 20th century, Stravinsky's ballet Orpheus (choregraphed by Balanchine) and Birtwhistle's The Mask of Orpheus.

chunk on peri chunk on monteverdi, chunk on gluck offenbach? birtwhistle stravinsky