Eurydice (fabric)
The Eurydice material is about the Thracian legendary figure and dryad Eurydice , who is temporarily fetched from the realm of the dead by her husband Orpheus . This material from Greek mythology is found in numerous configurations that deal with the contact of the living with the dead.
myth
Eurydice is portrayed in ancient mythology as the wife of Orpheus who died early and who invented music. There are many variants of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice with a common core. In the original version, Orpheus , son of the god Apollo and the muse Kalliope , is instructed by Apollo in the lyre and singing. Soon his music has such a power that stones start to move, rivers stand still, trees wander towards him, wild animals lie tame around him. Then his wife Eurydice dies - it is not told why (this is only added later) - and ends up in Hades. Orpheus follows her and enchants the ruler of the underworld, the god Hades , and his wife, the goddess Persephone, with his singing and playing on his lyre . He is given permission to go back to earth with Eurydice. So death is overcome through the power of love and the magic of music. In classical Greece, the myth is expanded by the fact that Persephone placed a condition on Orpheus: he must not turn to Eurydice until he had reached daylight. Orpheus breaks this prohibition and Eurydice disappears from him again. It is noteworthy that the myth gives no justification for Orpheus' behavior.
As the famous relief of the Parthenon Temple shows, the messenger of the gods discovered human derailment. Returning to the upper world, Orpheus is slain by maenads in a collective frenzy. Head and lyre were washed up by the waters on the island of Lesbos and Apollo raised them to the status of a constellation.
According to Roman portrayals, Eurydice was bitten by a poisonous snake while fleeing from the stalking of Aristaius , which suggested a parallel to Adam and Eve in the Middle Ages .
Cultural history
The ancient view of Eurydice was heavily focused on Orpheus in Roman times. In the Christian Middle Ages it was overlaid by moral theological ideas, which made Eurydice a subject of warnings. Their radiance was synonymous with the lure of sin. In the 16th to 18th In the 19th century, the material was reevaluated, in that the reprehensible desire for an object was no longer depicted, but the exemplary approach to love. A spiritualistic branch of the Eurydice representations developed since the Romantic period. In the 20th century, atheistic and nihilistic variants emphasized the failure of the relationship with Orpheus, alongside symbolistic, surrealistic and spiritual solutions.
Antiquity
The ascent of a woman from the underworld is an element of many mythical stories, for example about the Sumerian goddess Inanna . The Orpheus figure shows an influence of Orphic with their idea of the transmigration of souls on the Greek religion. In the middle of the fifth century BC The Orpheus representations begin in the narrower sense. Phidias is probably the sculptor of the relief on the Parthenon temple of the Acropolis, in which the moment of turning to Eurydice is depicted.
Textual references to the saga include Pindar's hymns, Plato's Phaedrus, and Diodor's world history. Later it can be found in the library of Apollodorus . In the comedy The Frogs (405 BC) by Aristophanes , Eurydice is made in travesty into the tragedy writer Euripides , who is to be brought back from Hades by Dionysus .
A wall painting, which must have been made in the Roman port city of Pompeii before 79 AD , shows Orpheus as an animal communicator and a bird shower. The Roman art of Orpheus did not pay Eurydice the attention that we know from the classical Greeks.
The modern variants of the material are mainly based on Roman sources. These are Virgil's Georgica ( Canto IV), which speaks of Eurydice's death by a snakebite, and Ovid's Metamorphoses (X, 1–85), which focus on her unsuccessful rescue from Hades. Both versions are androcentric: a man succeeds in persuading the deities to release his beloved, the man fails to turn around on the way back, and the man experiences the fate of the execution by Thracian maenads and the transfiguration into heavenly form. Eurydice remains passive and has no negative traits. In the case of Virgil, even inanimate nature complains of her death. At Ovid, when she disappears again, she calls out “farewell”, which remains her only action in the course of the rescue.
From the time of the persecution of Christians there is a depiction of Orpheus as the prophet of Christ (Marcellus Petrus catacomb). Here too there is no trace of Eurydice.
middle Ages
The medieval Christian veneration of the female deceased is for Mary , and the veneration of Mary finds numerous artistic, musical and poetic expressions. It usually lacks the sensual component of the Eurydice material. It is also a sinful thought that human art can gain dominion over life. Boëthius ' depiction of the Orpheus saga at the end of the third book of his Consolatio philosophiae (524) forms the source for numerous medieval commentaries on Eurydice, for example that of Wilhelm von Conches (approx. 1080-1154), in which Eurydice epitomizes the carnal Pleasure will.
Dante's Vita Nova (1293) in the tradition of minstrel is a glorification of Beatrice, who died early. The work thus approaches the ancient Eurydice motif.
An English story by Sir Orfeo (around 1400) describes the robbery of the Heurodis (corresponds to Eurydice) by a fairy king. Orpheus moves into this fairy world with his lyre and actually gets his stolen wife back. The story bears the name Orfeo, but is not identical in essential features with the Orpheus myth. With regard to Eurydice, there is even no identity of names.
Renaissance
With the Renaissance , the Orpheus representations become more numerous again, but are still strongly tied to the moral theology of hell, witch and devil. To depict a human and thus sensual “love from the hereafter” would hardly have been possible. So the late Eurydice cannot yet take shape as a positive figure. Even in Jakopo del Sellajo (alias di Arcangelo, 1441–1493) Eurydice is depicted as the victim of the serpent and thus remains a visualization of the Fall .
Orpheus art focused on depicting the infernal torments when Orpheus visits the underworld. This can be found in Tizian (1490–1576), Ambrosius Francken the Elder (1544-1618) or Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625).
In literary terms, too, the hereticizations of Eurydice as a victim of carnal lust predominate in the 15th and 16th centuries. Parallels to this conception of the Eurydice figure can be seen, for example, in the figure of Helena in early versions of the fist material : She does not yet represent a revived Greek culture , but is a symbol of pagan reprehensibility. Angelo Poliziano's Favola di Orfeo (approx. 1470), on the other hand, already shows a new image of man: After a tragic outcome, a praise of love is initiated. She overcomes the line of death.
Baroque
Only Benedetto Gennari the Elder (1570–1610) succeeded in getting a new perspective on the young couple in the face of the underworld deity. The loving care of the otherworldly becomes the theme of the Eurydice images.
In Ottavio Rinuccini's and Jacopo Peri's opera L'Euridice (1600), Eurydice is made the main character. However, Claudio Monteverdi's setting of L'Orfeo (1607) is better known. At the end of the opera, Apollo rises from the sky to lead the artist into the world of the stars.
Peter Paul Rubens puts Eurydice at the center of his painting. The light falling from the right from the direction of the gods makes Eurydike's half-naked body shine.
In the painting by Alessandro Varotari (1588–1648) the naked deceased eludes Orpheus' desiring arms. It can only be achieved through song and imagination.
classicism
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The classicism of the 18th century prepares the breakthrough of a new Eurydice conception. Especially in the French-speaking area, art has been celebrating the power of love since around 1700. In the cantata Orphée (1721) by Jean Philippe Rameau, there is a departure from the moral theological reproach of sin by celebrating love as overcoming the death bar.
While a few painters in the German-speaking area still present the moralistic message of hellish torments and criminal justice (e.g. Heinrich Friedrich Füger ), Christoph Willibald Gluck in particular succeeds in taking this new view with his opera Orpheus and Eurydice (1762/74). This opera is avowedly about Eurydice, who provides the motive for the fateful turning of the gaze: she accuses Orpheus of apparently no longer loving her enough, because he does not even consider it necessary to look at his beloved. Finally, Gluck and his librettist Ranieri de'Calzabigi have the deceased who had been brought back from Hades raised by the god Amor. The love from the hereafter encourages the sensual attention of the living, it is no longer their own sinful gaze that they should be warned against. At the same time Orpheus's request for the return of Eurydice is one of those supplication scenes in which the pre-revolutionary absolutist prince can find himself sovereign : as the ruler who makes use of his right to pardon and whose generous grace is celebrated in the final apotheosis . The privilege of making things alive passes from God to the worldly ruler, who sets many things in motion on his own initiative.
This reinterpretation of Eurydice's existence on the other side goes hand in hand with attempts to overcome baroque vanitas thinking . From early Christianity to the first half of the 18th century, the idea of the nothingness of the sensual (Latin vanitas ) dominated. Above all, readers, picture viewers and music listeners were reminded that sooner or later they would have to let go of everything sensual ( memento mori ). With the allegorical resurrection of Eurydice by Amor , Gluck's opera becomes a document of the newly unfolding idea of a blessed community of lovers (“Round Dance of Blessed Spirits”). Art no longer warned the viewer of their divisive greed, but on the contrary was supposed to unite them.
While classicism was often overshadowed by motifs from hell and criminal court, the 19th century shed new light on the spirituality of Eurydice representations.
Goethe's Faust II is central to a new human self-confidence towards the hereafter. In the second act Goethe alluded to the Orpheus tragedy by recommending Faust when entering the underworld that he should assert himself better in the hereafter than Orpheus at the time (7494). In his early sketches he also referred to his Faust as the "second Orpheus". The classic Walpurgis Night (3rd act) is over. Faust stands in the clouds of a high mountain range and experiences the vision of his Eurydice (Gretchen):
Does a delightful image deceive me
as a youth, the first long since deprived, at most good?
Later in the fifth act, “worry” breathes on the dying man, so that he becomes blind. Faust notes:
The night seems to penetrate deeper,
only bright light shines inside.
In the last appearance, spirits appear who were once Gretchen. You regret having been captured early. But now the joy of reliving the loved one in youth is expressed. They no longer pull their viewers into the abyss of sin.
Marianus: Here the view is free,
the mind is exalted.
Women pass there,
floating upwards.
The splendid, miteninn,
in the wreath of stars,
the queen of heaven,
I see it in the shine.
And so it comes to the result of the re-encounter with the two closing verses: "The eternal feminine draws us."
Novalis' (Friedrich Hardenberg) fifth hymn to the night corresponds to Faust's vision. Beyond and enjoyment of life no longer contradict each other.
Life confidently advances
to eternal life;
Broadened by inner glow,
our meaning is explained.
The star world will melt
into the golden wine of life,
we will enjoy it
and be bright stars.
The painter William Blake (1757–1827) remembers the beloved deceased of the Italian poet Dante: Beatrice in the coach addresses Dante (1824/7).
In the painting by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796–1875) Orpheus guided Eurydice from the underworld, there is no longer any trace of agony in hell. The young couple strives towards the rising sun. In the fog still lies the past of an unredeemed human race with all the quisquiles of punishing gods and impossible conditions. The young couple are sure to strive for the realm of love and the viewers will be drawn into it.
Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) also shows the way up to the light. Eurydice collapses, but the light of God has already enlightened them. It is not the failure of the human being due to conditions that cannot be fulfilled, but the rescue of lovers through the omnipotence of light.
Pre-Raphaelism
The Pre-Raphaelites in Victorian England dealt intensively with the subject of Eurydice and released this figure from its traditional passivity. This had the following historical background: Queen Victoria , who had lost her husband at an early age, asked the spiritual medium Robert James Lees before the throne to convey messages of the deceased to her. These meetings had to be kept secret from the Anglican Church. But for the artists of the Royal Academy of Arts it was an occasion to concern themselves with ideas of the afterlife. They painted numerous pictures about Orpheus and his afterlife communication.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) shows the praying poet Dante as he gazes into the afterlife with his eyes closed to become aware of his deceased Beatrice (1864).
Frederic Leighton (1830–1896) shows Eurydice desperately trying to find love in Orpheus' face (1864). Sir Edward Poynter (1839–1919) portrays the reluctantly following Eurydice. The preceding Orpheus tugs at long arms. Eurydice follows tormented. The right path does not lead out of death to the light of the incarnate, but the path leads into the light of the blessed, where Eurydice remains. Orpheus strives in the wrong direction in vain.
John William Waterhouse (1849 to 1917) dealt with the Eurydice theme in several paintings. In a sketch from around 1900, nymphs on the island of Lesbos kneel in the moor to look at Orpheus' head in the depths. It is crucial that one only sees the gazing girls, while the beyond lies outside the picture.
20th century
In his opera Orphée aux enfers (1858) Offenbach completely inverted the love of Eurydice into the double standards of Parisian society. Eurydice, who has been associated with other men for a long time, only follows Orpheus, who is also alien, because her reputation could be unfavorable. In this way, the alienation of Eurydice love, as it should occur in the 20th century, is anticipated. The romantic conception of Eurydice love is drastically suppressed in the 20th century. It is characterized by strongly differing representations of Eurydikes. They range from atheistic-nihilistic to spiritual.
Rainer Maria Rilke's poem Orpheus, Eurydike, Hermes (1904) in particular depicts Eurydike's rapture in death as an alienation:
And when suddenly
the god stopped
her and said
the words with pain in his exclamation : he has turned around -
she understood nothing and said softly: who?
On the other hand, the late Rilke showed a clearly changed view in The Sonnets to Orpheus : "But even in the silence / a new beginning, hint and change took place."
In Germany, the view supported by Friedrich Nietzsche's overcoming of nihilism was mainly followed by the expressionist Gottfried Benn . The first stanza of his poem Orphic cells (1927) depicts the vision of love in the hereafter as an illusionary construct in malformed cells: "Orphic cells are slumbering / in the brains of the Occident."
And finally at the end of the last stanza:
"His [Orpheus] trembling pain and damage
in his head that nobody knows,
bathe the surf birds,
the victim burns."
In Picasso's Orpheus, the murderous Thracian women stare over the body of their victim into the depths. Horror is written on their faces. What they see is nothing but death.
Charles de Sousy Ricketts (1866–1931) paints a sleeping and a climbing Orpheus in the style of symbolism . He holds on to a framework that seems to come from heaven and performs the feat of a pull-up - as a sign of meditation or lucid dreaming . In this way the white figure of Eurydice becomes visible behind his back.
Marcel Camus ' film Orfeu Negro (1959) was hailed as a breakthrough in bossa nova , because the entire plot is embedded in an ongoing carnival ceremony in Rio de Janeiro . The scene of the underworld song is decisive for the communication of the deceased with Eurydice. Orpheus, asked to sing now, closes his eyes and opens his lips as if he were singing. He brings about Eurydice's appearance through meditation.
Orpheus and Eurydice have also been shown as a cartoon . MacBride shows a little musician who has to give way to the violence of a hellish monster. Despite all the pessimism of the violent God of Hades, the white of love shines in the depths of the prison: one recognizes Eurydice, who does not escape Hades, but brings her light of love to the underworld.
Davreux depicts Eurydice as a motorcycle bride. She is sitting naked in the grass. Her hair seems to have fallen out from cytotoxic drugs: a picture of misery, possibly shortly before death. Orpheus rattles up on a motorcycle. Confidently he holds a huge key in his hand, and the spider's web of a universe spans over him, into which the journey seems to lead. A human face of God looks down.
The surrealism of Jean Cocteau presents Eurydice's love as misguided illusion of a stupid singer is:
“Orpheus, your screams come along as a melody.
The fairy harp doesn't make it too difficult for you.
Only one pattern torments your foolish behavior.
Rip your leg off! You want to kill the turtle!
Orpheus, the ode, screamed loudly with the mouth of a carp,
paired with the gold of the gods
.
The swallow tilts and screams in a different way
than the one who will read you, for the sake of its love
and its name Geist (that was too easy to develop),
on slate, wiped away with a few flaps of its wings.
No, no, and once again no."
Margaret Atwood , on the other hand, shows a Eurydice who accuses Orpheus of only having perceived his ideal image of her: "You could never believe / that I was more than your echo."
Ingeborg Bachmann's Eurydice poem also speaks in Eurydike's words. The invigorating imagination does not exclude it, but it walks over the string of the lyre to the side of death, which life consciously includes.
But like Orpheus I know
life on the side of death,
and
your eyes, which are closed forever, are
blue to me.
The term string also gives her an association with Nietzsche's great person in Also Spoke Zarathustra , who walks across the market square as a tightrope walker, succumbs to death and - standing in a tree - is kept by Zarathustra:
Theoretical aspects of religion
The polytheism of Greek myth has experienced various reinterpretations in later times. At first it was Clemens of Alexandria who called Orpheus the prophet of Christ. This view was rejected in the time of Emperor Constantine the Great. At the same time, the Socratic or Gnostic theory of reincarnation , which played an important role in the early Christian faith, was banned under the death penalty. Clement of Alexandria was removed from the list of church fathers.
Above all, the Old Testament prohibition on making a portrait has meant that the Middle Ages did not produce any theology of art that would be related to the perception of Eurydice's love. However, the veneration of Mary in the Middle Ages and the ensuing poetry of Hohen Minne are in principle comparable to Eurydice theology. The worship of Isolde in the Strasbourg epic Tristan also bears traits of a love of the hereafter that is characterized as mystical-heretic. The theology of Dante's "Vita Nuova" is also to be used for an appreciation of medieval communication in the hereafter.
With the Renaissance, the theology of Eurydice love is, so to speak, reborn. First of all, the moral theology of a sinner suffering in purgatory is in the foreground. The work of art becomes a tool for ecclesiastical moral instruction: Memento mori - or: Remember that you can fare like Eurydice!
At the same time - especially under the influence of Monteverdi's opera - the idea of an artist exalted by God emerges, whose bond with love in the hereafter becomes a shining example of human qualification before God.
While the baroque age is still largely committed to the moral theology of the memento-mori conception, a breakthrough that is decisive for the modern age is developing in classicism. The allegorical interpretation of Eurydice's resurrection in Gluck's opera already reveals the new perspective on the old theme of the "eternal feminine". Especially in Goethe's late work, this conception achieved a breakthrough:
Everything ephemeral
is only a parable.
The inadequate:
This is where the event takes place.
The soul of Gretchen - and finally that of Faust - lives on in the love that gives meaning to the world. Incarnation means the obligation to learn and thus to perfect the soul until it has, so to speak, reached the level of love of Jesus, Mary or Eurydice: the level of the eternal feminine.
The natural mysticism of Romanticism continues the conception of Eurydice love initiated in Classicism and is exaggerated by the spiritual inclinations of the so-called Victorian Age.
With the spread of atheistic philosophies (e.g. Marx, Engels, Nietzsche, Feuerbach, etc.), Eurydice interpretations are favored that are based on pessimism and finally even nihilism (e.g. Benn: it is innate in man, illusory Eurydice's love to believe).
However, through Hesse's “Siddharta” or “Glasperlenspiel”, religious-theoretical approaches to the artistic afterlife encounter were developed in the 20th century, which lead to New Age theology and the comparative religious studies of Hans Küng and a world parliament of religions. Against this background, a new spiritual art is developing that gives Eurydice love new expression.
literature
- Wolfgang Abelard: Eurydice. Confessions of a Leukemia Husband . Norderstedt 2008
- Elisabeth Frenzel : Orpheus . In: Dies .: Substances of world literature. A lexicon of longitudinal sections of the history of poetry (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 300). 10th, revised and expanded edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-520-30010-9 , pp. 702-709.
- EM. Knittel: Orpheus on the horizon of modern sealing concepts . 1998
- T. Leuker: Angelo Poliziano: poet, speaker, strategist; an analysis of the “Fabula di Orpheo” and selected Latin works by the Florentine humanist . Freiburg 1996.
- Klaus W. Littger (Ed.): Orpheus in the arts . Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2002.
- Albrecht Schöne (Ed.): Faust: Text and Commentary . 2 vols. Frankfurt 2009
- Stefan Schreiber et al. (Ed.): The Hereafter. Perspectives of Christian Theology . Darmstadt 2003.
- Wolfgang Storch (Ed.): Myth Orpheus. Texts from Virgil to Ingeborg Bachmann . Reclam, Leipzig 1997.
- JRR Tolkien (Eg.): Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo . Translated by JRR Tolkien. New York 2003.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Walter Gutdeutsch: Orpheus and Eurydice - how love and music can overcome death . ( nyakropolis.dk ).
- ↑ See Tolkien 2003
- ↑ z. B. Robert Henryson (1425-1506)
- ↑ See Leuker 1996
- ↑ Ivan Nagel , Autonomy and Grace. About Mozart's operas . Munich, 1985
- ^ François Perrier (1650); Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665); Frederico Cervelli (1625-1698); Giovanni Antonio Burrini (1656-1727), 1697; Jean Restout (1763); Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1750) and Heinrich Friedrich Füger (1751–1818)
- ↑ Schöne 2009, vol. 1 p. 643
- ↑ a b Johann W. v. Goethe: works . Hamburg edition. Ed. Erich Trunz. Munich 1981, Vol. 4. Verses 12194 ff.
- ^ Novalis: Works, diaries and letters of Friedrich Hardenberg . Vol. 1. Ed. Richard Samuel. Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1978, p. 172.
- ↑ rjlees.co.uk ( Memento of the original from November 29, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ memory-fish.com
- ^ Rainer Maria Rilke: Works in 3 volumes. Ed. Horst Nalewski. Vol. 1. Leipzig 1978, p. 456.
- ^ Rainer Maria Rilke: Works in 3 volumes. Ed. Horst Nalewski. Vol. 1. Leipzig 1978, p. 617.
- ↑ uni-saarland.de ( RTF ; 48 kB)
- ↑ Gottfried Benn: Samtl. Works. Stuttgart edition in connection with Ilse Benn. Edited by Gerhard Schuster. Vol. 1. Stuttgart 1986, p. 72.
- ↑ muenster.org
- ↑ images.bridgeman.co.uk ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ rastko.org.yu ( Memento of the original from June 11, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Jean Cocteau: Works in 12 volumes. Edited by Reinhard Schmidt. Vol. 6, transl. Andrej Jendrusch. Frankfurt / M 1988, p. 53
- ↑ Margaret Atwood: Poems 1976-1986 . Virago, London 1992, pp. 106f. Translated from the English by Roland Erb. Reclam, Leipzig 1997
- ↑ Ingeborg Bachmann: Selected. Works in 3 volumes. Ed. Konrad Paul et al. Munich 1978, vol. 1, p. 12.
- ↑ Christoph Riedweg: Mystery terminology in Plato, Philo and Clement of Alexandria . Berlin etc. 1987.
- ↑ See Smith 2007, Roethlisberger 2006, Hasselmann / Schmolke 2005
