JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

The story of Orpheus the musician who could charm the birds from the trees and tame wild beasts with his songs, who went down to the underworld to try to retrieve his lover Eurydice from Death, has been turning up in literature, music, and art for millennia (more recently in cinema). Everyone’s taken a crack at the story since Ovid (43 BC – 17 AD) wrote it up in his Metamorphoses.

Jean Cocteau’s dreamy Orphée is set in 1940s Paris, with Jean Marais as the famous poet Orphée and Maria Casares as the Princess of Death. Marais is handsome but kind of bland; Casares is fabulous. (I’m reading Camus, A Romance—she was Albert’s longtime lover.)

In a famous scene Orphée passes through a mirror to the otherworld.

Marcel Camus’s exuberant musical Orfeu Negro is set in the favelas of 1950s Rio de Janeiro. His Orpheus does bossa nova. Carnival! It was the first time the outside world heard bossa nova, and they went mad.

The Italian writer Dino Buzzati’s take on Orpheus is a trippy graphic novel called Poem Strip (including An Explanation of the Afterlife). It happens in Milan in the 60s, and can’t help being referred to as “Felliniesque”. Orpheus is a famous pop singer named Orfi, and he’s in love with a girl called Eura. The entrance to the underworld is on via Saterna, a street that doesn’t appear in maps of the city. When Eura vanishes through the door of a mysterious mansion, Orfi follows her to the dimension of the dead and tries to win over the spirits with his music.

The enduring appeal of the Orpheus story: We like to think that Art can conquer Death. And we still don’t get what we want.