Düsseldorpheus, 1585

Johann Wilhelm, the Duke of Jülich, Kleve and Berg married at Düsseldorf on 16 June 1585 the countess Markgräfin Jacobe von Baden. The celebration was epic. Well, mythological at least.

On the third day of the event, a huge artificial mountain with two peaks was constructed. Upon each peak a musician representing the mythological musicians Amphion and Orpheus sat, playing. Amphion had applied his musical gifts to the building of the legendary walls of Thebes, charming the walls into place with his music and never lifting a hand. (Ovid Met. 6.146-312; 'most postclassical treatments of [Amphion] in the arts celebrate the power of Amphion's music.' Reid. Cf. Hor. Ars 391ff. Orpheus and Amphion are the first poets to teach mankind.) Orpheus' representative at the Renaissance hochzeit played on the false hilltop among a throng of wild animals assembled for the show.

A woodcut published two years later in Cologne shows the scene.

The allegorical purpose of the scene had something to do with invoking the muses, "in the form of Orpheus and Amphion," as sponsors for the newlyweds. Guests were told by placards posted around the scene how the mythological allusions had anything to do with the wedding. I well might have needed some help in the explication, too!

Orpheus gets top billing in lots of weddings, especially after 1600, when the wedding of Maria de' Medici and Henry IV of France witnessed the premier of Peri's Euridice — a watershed event in the history of opera that joined the forces of Caccini and Rinuccini at Florence's Palazzo Pitti and that is still being talked about. Throughout the 17th Century, Orpheus charmed the nethergods into relinquishing Eurydice in no fewer than 30 operas premiered from Vienna to Wolfenbüttel and from London to Madrid.

And further, Vienna and Graz had witnessed a similar mise en scene in 1571, when an artificial hill was erected — apparently like a parade float, in today's conception, pulled by four white drafthorses — and upon this mobile hilltop sat Eurydice and Orpheus along with representations of the inhabitants of the Underworld who were charmed by Ovid's Orpheus (i.e. Ixion and Tityos, and Tantalus, etc.).

So, particularly in light of that precedent, it is especially remarkable to me that Orpheus is there at the Düsseldorf wedding at the dawn before the 17th Century singing an entirely different tune.

Near contemporaries include Edmund Spenser, whose Faerie Queen (1596) includes Orpheus' music calming strife among the Argonauts (FQ 4.2.1), likely a role similar to that conceived in the company of Amphion at Düsseldorf.

The mythological pastiche is nicely explicated and brilliantly contextualized by E.-B. Krems, "Das Drama des Sehens und der Musik: zur Darstellung des Orpheus-Mythos in bildender Kunst und Oper der frühen Neuzeit," Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 36 (2009) 269 - 300. I owe all my knowledge of the Düsseldorf Orpheus/Amphion to her article, pp. 269 - 71.

OGCMA0785NOTOrpheus_Düsseldorf

Orphic Finality: vous n'avez encore rien vu

A celebrated film maker of advanced years produces a film adaptation of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, and observers quickly surmise that this is the director's "final film." How do they know that it's not merely the "most recent"? He's still working, after all.

OGCMA0797NOTOrpheusEurydice_Resnais

Alain Resnais' Vous N'avez Encore Rien Vu (2012 = You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet) adapts two Anouilh plays, particularly Eurydice. The film competed for but did not with the 2012 Cannes Palme d'Or, and will be released in American art-house theatres in June 2013. My friend Will Brockliss saw that it was showing at the University of Wisconsin student union and drew my attention to it. I hope to know more about it.

Leslie Nesselson's review at rogerebert.com insightfully scrutinizes the critics' hasty assignment of the term "final film" to Resnais' most recent narrative. She wryly notes that Resnais is working on his next film already. Though significantly advanced in years, Resnais may or may not have left his Orphic film as his last piece. If she's right, and Resnais produces something further beyond this Orpheus, then we won't ultimately be able to note how Orpheus narratives seem to cap artists' collected ouevres.

The imbd.com summary of Vous N'avez Encore Rien Vu:

From beyond the grave, celebrated playwright Antoine d'Anthac gathers together all his friends who have appeared over the years in his play "Eurydice." These actors watch a recording of the work performed by a young acting company, La Compagnie de la Colombe. Do love, life, death and love after death still have any place on a theater stage? It's up to them to decide. And the surprises have only just begun...

The fictious playwright in this premise clearly has that Orphic role of immortal artist. Presumably, in an autobiographical claim, Resnais is making himself an Orpheus. His use of the Eurydice myth is clearly a smoking-gun reference that pins the narrative to mythological shorthand. When I see the film, I'll be watching with great interest for value the new narrative can add to the familiar myth. Nesselson has convinced me that there's much about Resnais' allusiveness I will not be able to appreciate — like his intertextual references to his entire cinematic corpus. But I hope to be able to appreciate the director's adaptation of the myth itself.

This post is obviously a place-holder in which I hope merely to indicate awareness of a mythological narrative that seems likely to warrant further and deeper investigation. Comments are welcome.

M

It all began with the Argo

The Argonautica was the fore-runner to all western literature. It was the heroic event that happened before the Trojan War. Two of classical literature's greatest works start with reference to the Argo's sailing, the beginning of the end. Events on board the ship started a process that resulted in the end Troy. Jason's assembly of a dream-team crew and their journey to distant Colchis  introduced acquisitiveness and greed to Greece. Long before Agamemnon launched a thousand ships for Helen; and before Paris took her away, the sailing of the Argo pitted West and East in the first international act of aggression. For the son of Achilles is, of course, the famous offspring of Thetis and the argonaut Peleus. Had the Argo never sailed, no Marriage of Peleus and Thetis, no Apple of Discord,  no Judgement of Paris, no Rape of Helen, no Achilles, no Fall of Priam, no Trojan Women... The sailing of the Argo really started it all.

So, before a long flight I rented on iTunes and watched Ben Affleck's highly successful film wondering whether there would be a moment where the screenplay would admit that it was working with the ominous mythological usage. Would there be an allusion to the classical myth?

The situation was laid. For the 1979 storming of the US embassy in Tehran created a real East/West conflict. Stealth, chutzpah, brawn, amazing teammates... In short, all the things that famously allowed Jason to walk into far-away Colchis and ask for the return of Golden Fleece — expecting to get it! — were the essential plot elements of Tony Mendez' brilliant sleight of hand that sprung a clutch of American diplomats from the beneath the noses of their revolutionary captors. The CIA's mission in this high-stakes heist could fairly pass as a sort of Argonautica. And I was sort of hoping to see a moment where somebody said something like "we're gonna storm Tehran, Mr. President, and return from the East with the booty they wrongly possess, Sir." And Jimmy Carter or some cabinet member was going to say something like, "That'd be just like Jason waltzing in and demanding Phrixus' Golden Fleece."

I read the imdb blurb. It looked promissing. I really only know this narrative from the film at this point. I must read Mendez' book. In the cinematic version the screenwriters do tip their hand. They make two mythological allusions and sharply foreground the reference to the classical voyage of the Argo in such a way that the reference is clear and overt.

The film unfolds the process whereby Mendez (Ben Affleck) comes upon the notion of forming a mock film production company which pretends to be earnest in the creation of the world's worst "Star Wars rip-off". Once he hatches the it-just-might-work hair-brained idea of sending a filmcrew to Tehran, in fact Mendez assembles a little dream-team as Jason did. Jason packed the Argo with all the great heroes from the generations before Troy. The film's script show Mendez et co. plowing through mountains of dreadful scripts, looking for that stinker, they happen upon and reject one called "The Horses of Achilles". This is rejected as having to do with the Trojan War, even if Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) thinks it sounds like a western. This overt reference to classical myth, though, is preceded in the film by the appearance of the masterful makeup artist, John Chambers (John Goodman) enters the film on the set of a weird-out sci-fi film at the moment that some shapely "lab assistant" is tending to some operation upon a freakish and virile minotaur. You definitely get the sense that these Hollywood producers are more interested in applying classical myth to sci-fi than George Lucas cared to allow. And they want to tell you they could, if they wanted to.

Once Mendez and Siegel and Goodman hatch the plan to produce their film "Argo", they undertake the shameless (faux) promotion of the film. They schedule a big script reading, complete with press coverage. At the reading, a journalist presses the brash Siegel with questions about the Argonautica. Is this script related to the classical myth? Is there a Jason? Does anybody watching know about the Argo? I consider this overt special pleading. Such moments foreground the smoking gun. The moment in the film, though, is played for yucks, when the producer says something really rude to the journalis, something along the lines of "Ar, Go Jump in the Lake." (Only he doesn't really say anything about a lake. It's line that is repeated many times through the film's remainder. I think it's supposed to be funny.)

The screenwriters in that moment reveal that, indeed, they do know something about the classical myth. They want the viewer to know that they know. But, alas, I have to conclude in the end that we were not on the same wavelength. All that code I want to bring to an allusion to Jason's voyage — acquisition, primal violation of human society, the introduction of deceit into the world, etc. — seems to have been lost on them. They did clearly work it in on purpose; but they missed so many opportunities to ...   OK, I guess I need to just write it myself.

On the big question — does the mythological allusion qualify as a "smoking gun"? — the answer is yes. Ergo = OGCMA0617NOTJasonArgonauts_Affleck.
    In case anybody cares, I intend to assign the usage to Affleck, the director, especially because he crafted the smoking-gun scene with the journalist. If Tony Mendez' autobiographical book, The Master of Disguise, uses the mythological allusion, then I'll distinguish between the book and film by listing the book as ...0617NOTJasonArgonauts_Mendez.

To weigh the idea of how the Argo initiates human malady, consider these two instances.

Medea's nurse foreshadows the deepest domestic tragedy ahead when she begins the prologue with the Argo. "If only the Argo's hull had never flown through the deep-blue Symplegades and penetrated the land of Colchis! If only the pine on the slopes of Pelion had never been cut and felled! If only the hands of heroes who went after the golden fleece for Pelias had never seized the oar!" (Eur. Med. 1-6)

Εἴθ’ ὤφελ’ Ἀργοῦς μὴ διαπτάσθαι σκάφος
Κόλχων ἐς αἶαν κυανέας Συμπληγάδας,
μηδ’ ἐν νάπαισι Πηλίου πεσεῖν ποτε
τμηθεῖσα πεύκη, μηδ’ ἐρετμῶσαι χέρας
ἀνδρῶν ἀριστέων οἳ τὸ πάγχρυσον δέρος
Πελίαι μετῆλον.

The Medea by Euripides holds few surprises for 21st-century audiences, because we know the horrifying story. The Nurse foreshadows the tale's tragic end by allusion at the play's outset to the sailing of the Argo, the beginning of "it all."

Catullus 64 begins at the same spot of human history. Pelion's deforestation, plans to steal another nation's treasure, and the sweeping of the sea. "Once the pines begotten upon Pelion's summit, they say, sailed through Neptune's watery waves to the surge of Phasis and Aeetes' lands. Chosen youth, the stock of Argive loins, seeking to steer away the Colchians' golden fleece, dared to hasten the salty sealanes in their ship as they swept the blue deep plane with fir fronds." (Cat. 64.1-7)

Peliaco quondam prognatae vertice pinus
dicuntur liquidas Neptuni nasse per undas
Phasidos ad fluctus et fines Aeeteos,
cum lecti iuvenes, Argivae robora pubis,
auratam optantes Colchis avertere pellem
ausi sunt vada salsa cita decurrere puppi,
caerula verrentes abiegnis aequora palmis.

Before it's all over, Catullus 64 will have led its reader through intensely personal heart-ache — the appalling desertion of Ariadne on the shore —  through an ambiguous prophecy regarding Achilles' tragic fate, and then to a epilogue on overall human degeneracy.

Between Catullus and Euripides a ghostland of literary aftifacts walk like the undead. Apollonius of Rhodes conceived the Argonautica in the spirit of learned Alexandrianism, losing details of his agenda on first-time readers everytime the new-age epic is read. Latin literature's Golden Age masterpieces could not have been conceived without Apollonius, nor without the work of Ennius. His Medea Exul opens with a stunning reappropriation of Euripides' prologue:

Utinam ne in nemore Pelio securibus
caesa accidisset abiegna ad terram trabes,
neve inde navis incohandi exordium
coepisset, quae nunc nominatur nomine
Argo, quia Argivi in ea delecti viri
vecti petebant pellem inauratam arietis
Colchis, imperio regis Peliae, per dolum.
Nam nunquam era errans mea domo ecferret pedem
Medea, animo aegra, amore saevo saucia.

Deforestation, overseas acquisition, deceit. Intercultural love affairs. Without these, Medea might now be happy. This nurse sees it this way. Interesting is that Ennius turns the events into a different order.  But, this is getting way out of hand. Maybe more on another day.....


M

1049NOTTroyFallHorse_Moser

The Brussels Business took me in by its usage of the Trojan Horse. I may be the only person on the planet who would fall for this ruse. But, on the search for interesting classical mythological usages,

you know, I rented the film via iTunes to take on a long flight last week. Then I watched it. (This is more than I can yet say for Argo, which I must watch in the eight days or forefeit my $3.25 rental fee.)

The Brussels Business is a moderately(-plus) interesting documentary that unveils the growing culture of lobbyism that surrounds and pervades the European Parliament in Brussels. Directors are M. Lietaert and F. Moser, two Austrians, I gather from other credits given. While I liked the film, I must say that a viewer like me could have dealt with a less dramatic build-up to the revelation that lobbyists are actively working the backscenes of the EU. A very articulate film lays it all out. A pair of activitsts from the Corporate European Observatory, Olivier Hoedeman and Erik Wesselius, are the principal talking heads, but several lobbyists and politicians and commissioners join in the spinning of the tale. You get the feeling throughout that you would very much like to have dinner with Hoedeman especially. And I feel like I'd like to pat the back of Siim Kallas, the VP of the European Commission, who undertook a three-year uphill struggle to limit the secretive dealings of lobbyists in Brussels. Part of me, however, wanted to ask the participants whether they were actually surprised that there are lobbyists in Brussels. The musical buildups want you to feel surprised.

I think the film could have been half as long and really gripped my interest. As it was, I turned it off a couple of times; but felt drawn back to make it to the end.

Big question for MythMatters: What's the usage?
   About 2/3 through the film — I couldn't rewind because I was a cheap-skate iTunes renter! — the film introduces the usage of the Trojan Horse. It comes about by their citation of a speech delivered in 1945 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a televised speech delivered from the Oval Office in which FDR disclosed legislation that would curb the activities of Washington lobbyists. He had seen through their insidious plans and was warning the American people to join forces against the threat.
  Moser/Leitaert see the lobbyists' siege on Brussels in much the same light.
Whatever it is, I fear lobbyists even when they bring gifts.

That last, of course, is the great line from Vergil's Laocoon in Aeneid 2:
           Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos, et dona ferentis.
The line is sometimes turned into something like "I fear the Greeks bearing gifts." Don't forget, though, to get that wonderful adverbial "et" when you render the Latin into English: "even when they bring gifts!"

Good to see that myth still matters.

I won't say I grappled with the taxonomy of this usage. I was a bit torn as to whether I should assign the usage to Moser/Lietaert or whether I should dig further and get the name of the poster's designer. It's a lovely image. That ominous horse rising over the European Parliament and the besieged town of Brussels. In the end I baled. Perhaps, indeed, the reference should go to FDR. However, I'll snag the YouTube of the Oval Office Speech and give that a separate entry sometime soon. Argo, though, must come next.

Ciao da Napoli.
M

Proserpina's infinite wisdom

Orpheus' dramatic arrival in the underworld might well have resulted in utter failure... at the outset. What if he had descended this enormous depth and failed in his quest for Eurydice entirely? There was no guarantee, when he set out, that he would persuade Pluto and Proserpina to let Eurydice go back.

The first phase of the journey involved the unlikelihood that the singer could even persuade the Powers of Death to relinquish the newlywed bride back into his custody, her plaintive groom. I know of no recorded attempts before Orpheus'. His victory over Hades and Persephone marks him as the first to succeed in that realm. Surely every lover would fain the attempt. Yet, the greatest singer's greatest song was unprecedented.

What made the moment of Orpheus' appeal succeed where others might have failed? Stephen Mitchell imagines that Proserpina's shrewd reasoning made all the difference. Mitchell's brief parable traces intimately the queen's thoughts and then concludes: "She turns to the king. 'Yes, darling,' she says, 'Let them go.'"

Mitchell's vignette sets itself apart from the thronging Orpheus narratives by thinking through what  motivated Hades to break the bands of immortality and relinquish Eurydice's shade to live again on earth. As men might, Pluto seems not to weigh the ramifications of Orpheus' song. The narrative opens with his favorable reaction to a "beautiful ... ah, beautiful" performance.  Mitchell's most provocative contribution to this myth is his formulation of Proserpina''s desire to liberate the young bride from those Orphic ties. 

Proserpina has not always been so perceptive. She came to the world of the dead against her will. A child "birde". "She has ripened." "Now she can see clearly..." Perhaps most poignantly, Ceres's daughter came here once wholly against her will, but having grown accustomed to this place, she has learned the risk of retrospection. Wiser now, if she used to, she won't be looking back again. 

Mitchell's wise young queen scrutinizes the attitude of Orpheus. She sizes up his readiness "to be in harmony with a woman." She regards Orpheus' presence in her realm, lyre in hand, as a manifestation of "fear protected by longing." So, thanks to Mitchell, our comfortable praise for Orpheus' loving heroism is turned on its ear. The champion of rhetorical longing is really a frightened poser. "No wonder Eurydice took the serpent's way out." 

Mitchell's dive into the female psyche achieves new depths with this suggestion that Eurydice has entered the Underworld by calculated choice. The dramatic moment conceived by Mitchell omits Eurydice herself. This is all about Orpheus and his judges. Two men and one woman articulate opinions about Eurydice's immediate fate; all three are figments of one man's (Mitchell's) imagination. Only one of them forms a rational reaction to the matter at hand. For, Orpheus is singing his heart out in longing, hoping to reset the world, and Pluto responds naturally to the most passionate song anyone has ever heard. It is all about the greatest lovesong ever sung and the divinities' reception of it. As automatic as the male response was, so insightful is the queen's anticipation that Orpheus will only learn from Eurydice's loss, if he will "lose his lover again and again." And that loss, she sees, must be gut-wrenching ("precipitous") and incessant. The parable has a structure to it: Pluto spoke briefly at first, and Proserpina speaks briefly at last. She has the final word, really. Accordingly, fresh ideas from the gods imparted and the queen's take on the whole event intimated, Mitchell gives Proserpina voice: "'Yes, darling,' she says. 'Let them go.'"

Classical mythology provides narrative frames in which marvels like Mitchell's vignette germinate.
Where will the next really deep consideration of Eurydice's predicament lead?

Stephen Mitchell, "Orpheus" in Parables and Portraits. HarperPerennial, 1994; reprinted in Nina Kossman, ed., Gods and Mortals: poems on classical myths (Oxford University Press 2001), 106 (OGCMA0797NOTOrpheusEurydice_Mitchell).

M

Actaeon again

Early in the Fall semester I made an OGCMA slide for Gary Moira's brilliant film short, "Metamorphosis." It is a 3-minute film made to promote the British National Gallery's Titian exhibit during the Olympiad hype last summer. If you remember the film, you'll want to watch it again. Here's the YouTube link.

OGCMA0018Actaeon_Titian2

Maybe you'll be happy merely to revisit the (left) vignette that captures the mythological usage in one frame. That's Anna Friel hosting a dinner. She never utters a word in the film. No one does. But Gary Moira, the director, has put Friel beneath Titian's "Diana and Actaeon" for dramatic effect. If you've seen the film, you'll know a) what she's eating and b) why we can see her over that empty chair in our foreground.

Titian's painting narratesgraphically the story that Ovid tells in his Metamorphoses. Actaeon stumbles upon Diana and her nymphs one day while hunting. The chilly stare with which Titian has Diana pierce Actaeon deserves close attention. Poor old Actaeon. He is soon torn apart by his own dogs.

In Gary Moira's short film, Friel plays the role of Diana with calculating coolness. When today's Actaeon sees her at the bath, he has actually sought her out. There is no mistake on his part. But his miscalculation is fatal. She seems (to me) not at all surprised that he has come to gaze. (below)

OGCMA0025NOTActaeon_Moira

One reason why this film is on my mind is I'm bidding farewell this week to thinking about Downton Abbey for the next several months. The young man who plays the Actaeon role in this short film is unknown to me, except for a part he played in this last season, James.  Recognizing the actor immediately, I began hoping for Julian Fellowes to craft a great usage of Actaeon or build another  mythological usage, like his Perseus. He didn't.

Ed Speleers plays Actaeon in Moira's "Metamorphosis"

I'll close with the gaze of Moira's Actaeon (left).  As this handsome victim eyes his quarry, he has no idea that he's as good as toasted already. Great irony. So, watch the film.

Moira brashly turns the Actaeon story inside out. This man willfully steps into the trap laid for him, quite unlike Ovid's (ergo also Titian's) Actaeon. No surprise. No withdrawl, til it's way too late.

Ovid takes a moment at the end of his tale of Actaeon/Diana and says that the gods are still quibbling over whether the punishment meted upon poor Actaeon's head was too harsh. (Ovid Met. 3.251ff.) Did she justly defend her chastity against the mistaken intrusion of a wayward hunter? Did she overstep the line between justice and rage?

You might well think differently about the myth after you watch Moira's little film... or really consider Titian's painting.

Again, if you've seen Moira's film, you'll note that I show the images above in reverse order.

M

Downton Withdrawl

In the early days of their relationship, Lady Mary Grantham and Matthew Crawley had a momentary flirtatious brush shorthanded with the Perseus and Andromeda myth. Go back and watch for Episode 2 of the 2011 season (Season 1) of "Downton Abbey".

Romantic sparring between the then presumptive heir of Downton and Lady Mary led him into a ripe classical mythological allusion.

Begun in a formal dinning-room conversation, the allusion was continued in at least one subsequent interchange between Mathew and Mary later in the same episode. Bear in mind that in Season 1, Mary and Matthew were hardly affectionate toward one another, though Julian Fellows was supercharging their relationship:

Mary: “I’ve been studying the story of Andromeda. Do you know it?”
Matthew: “Why?”
Mary: “Her father was King Cepheus, whose country was being ravaged by storms. And in the end, he decided the only way to appease the gods was to sacrifice his eldest daughter to a hideous sea monster. So they chained her, naked, to a rock-“
The Dowager Violet: (laughs) “Really, Mary, we’ll all need our smelling salts in a minute.”
Matthew: “But the sea monster didn’t get her, did he?”
Mary: “No. Just when it seemed he was the only solution to her father’s problems, she was rescued.”
Matthew: “By Perseus.”
Mary: (surprised) “That’s right. Perseus. Son of a god. Rather more fitting, wouldn’t you say?”
Matthew: “Well, that depends. I’d have to know more about the princess and the sea monster in question.”

— "Downton Abbey", Episode Two

I call this mythological allusion OGCMA0883NOTPerseusAndromeda_Downton

As with any mythological usage, the fun part is spotting that the usage is overt. The greater fun, though, comes from analysis, explaining the why.

It is interesting to me that Lady Mary's version of the Andromeda story includes the self-referential detail that Andromeda is 'the eldest daughter' of Cepheus and Cassiopeia. Frankly, I've never considered whether "classical" Cepheus and Cassiopeia had any other children. Maybe, indeed, Andromeda was in the same family-spot as Lady Mary.

Within the context of this allusion, it is noteworthy that the episode does bring a very handsome and dangerous seducer into the relationship of Mary and Matthew. Downtonists who came in later may not recall the Turkish ambassador whose sudden death in Mary's bed caused no small shock waves and threatened to bring the most vile scandal upon the House. Matthew does indeed learn more 'about the princess and sea monster in question" as the episode unfolds.

Which of Mary's male interests, Matthew or the Turkish ambassador, fits the mythological allusion as
the Cetus, which the Perseus?

Not wanting to call sour grapes on the working of Downton, I will say that I was hoping for a good deal more classical mythological shorthand as the story went on. In fact, I can only recall a couple of moments in the collective series (now at the end of another season) where classical mythology came into play. I had hoped for more from Julian Fellows. (See my recent post on Julian Fellows' usage of Neleus in Mary Poppins.)

M