Hearing an Old Myth in a New Form
Before Covid shut down the American arts scene, audiences were flocking to Broadway’s newest hit, the chilling Hadestown, a musical fable about a lonely songwriter forced to contend with American plutocracy and the pressure to abandon his artistic dreams for more lucrative work. With music and lyrics by the folk-influenced artist Anaïs Mitchell, Hadestown took thirteen years to make it to Broadway, but once it made it to the Walter Kerr Theatre on the north side of Broadway, it was received with huge acclaim, dominating the 73rd annual Tony awards with fourteen nominations and eight wins, including Best Musical.
Hadestown stands out from recent hit musicals in a number of ways. While many recent hits are based on successful films, such as The Band’s Visit or Mean Girls, Hadestown retells the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus. And unlike musicals such as Fun Home and Dear Evan Hansen, which powerfully contend with issues like mental illness by humanizing their characters and dramatizing powerful emotions, Hadestown has been described, even by sympathetic critics, as cold and remote. This remoteness, however, has not seemed to diminish the work’s incredible success among both critics and audiences.
In an attempt to differentiate Hadestown from these mainstream musicals, it has been advertised instead as a “folk opera.” Historically, the rare works that have been labeled “folk-operas” mix popular with classical styles. Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha (1911) and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935) have both been described as folk operas, likely because of the way they blend elements of opera and popular music, particularly American folk music. Similarly, the score of Hadestown makes use of numerous musical styles, such as American folk music, jazz, and blues.
But more interestingly, the term “folk opera” draws attention to Hadestown’s connection with other Orphean music dramas, placing it in a genealogy with earlier operas that take the myth of Orpheus as their subject. As novel as it is to see an Orphean Broadway musical, in the history of the music drama as a whole the myth is quite common, even downright foundational. There are three operatic works based on this story that have entered the canon: Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607), Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), and Jacques Offenbach’s operetta Orphée aux enfers (1858). Of these, the first two are watersheds in the four-hundred-year-old history of the modern music drama.
The genesis of opera begins in late sixteenth-century Florence when a group of intellectuals, poets, and musicians called the Florentine Camerata contemplated what the great Greek tragedies would look like in their day. Their product, a synthesis of music, drama, and poetry, came to be known as “opera,” which means “works.”
Overwhelmingly, the first stage works we would designate “operas” were based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Giulio Caccini wrote one of the earliest operas based on this story, and Jacopo Peri wrote the first surviving opera, Eurydice, in 1600. Seven years later, Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) contributed the first bona fide operatic masterwork to the canon, L’Orfeo, the earliest opera still regularly performed today. These opera pioneers were overwhelmingly drawn to the Orpheus story, and for good reason: tragic conclusion aside, the myth portrays music as something so powerful that it can, in essence, reverse death.
Orfeo ed Eudice Playbill 1774
The popularity of opera continued to grow in Europe for the next 150 years. As with all early art forms, it evolved immensely during this time, so much so that Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787), a German composer, considered the genre to have strayed too far from its roots. For Gluck, operatic plots had become too complex and convoluted, the singing too showy and self-indulgent, and the music eclipsing the poetry in importance or not complementing the general emotion of the poetry closely enough. In his eyes, the genre had lost its authenticity and had become too artificial. He aimed to change this and chose the Orpheus story as his subject for the monumental Orfeo ed Euridice, a work that aimed to restore the “noble simplicity” of ancient Greek drama and the earliest operatic experiments and return opera to its seventeenth-century roots. Chief among Gluck’s goals was the subservience of the music to the the drama. He believed that the music should everywhere enhance the poetry’s power and not distract from or hinder it. The theatre-going public loved this new work, and Gluck’s ideas went on to influence the great operas of Mozart and later the operas of Weber and Wagner. Paradoxically, Gluck created a groundbreaking new work by returning to opera’s founding myth, that of Orpheus and Eurydice.
The musical, as a relatively new genre, generally prefers to employ narratives from films, books, historical events, or fairy tales; a musical based on an ancient myth is rarer. My Fair Lady, a retelling of the Pygmalion story, is the closest analogous work to Hadestown, but even this musical is filtered heavily through George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play. Disney’s Hercules, the beloved animated film, is only now gaining traction on the stage. Besides these, Stephen Sondheim’s The Frogs (1974), and Lewis Flinn’s Lysistrata Jones (2011), I can think of few examples.
Orpheus Vase 450 BC
Like Gluck, Mitchell has managed to create something completely original by returning to the origins of European music drama and transforming it for a new context. In the case of Hadestown, the myth is reimagined in modern America: set in a stylized, alternative history, in which a post-apocalyptic industrial landscape meets the Great Depression, Hades becomes a wealthy industrialist and hell an underground factory. Greek myth used to explore distinctly modern American themes and dilemmas all while drawing on America’s rich musical heritage—it’s a powerful combination, one that has not been explored enough on the musical stage. Off the top of my head, I would love to see a Southern folkish interpretation of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia, Niobe’s hubris, or Ajax’s madness and fall set against the same Southern industrial backdrop, perhaps with some morbid twists worthy of Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner. Ganymede, Atalanta, Elektra, Oedipus, Tiresias, Achilles: my mind runs wild with the possibilities of what the American versions of these characters would look like if given a “folk-opera” of their own.
Jean Baptiste Corot Orpheus leading Euridice
Hadestown has proven that these ancient myths can still move us, that these stories are still relevant to contemporary life. I hope that Anaïs Mitchell, a modern Orpheus in her own right, finds the opportunity to turn another one of these myths into a folk-inspired musical. She has hit on an incredible formula, and the world needs more works of the same type. We can never tire of hearing an old myth in a new form. As Hermes, who serves as the narrator in Hadestown, sings, “It’s an old tale from way back when / it’s an old song and we’re gonna sing it again.”
Jacob Martin is a freelance oboist and English hornist in the Cincinnati area. He regularly plays with orchestras in Columbus, Dayton, Evansville, Owensboro and Anderson.