page_title: Orpheus
section_title: Film and stage
hierarchical_section_title: Orpheus / Post-Classical interpretations / Film and stage
caption_attribution_description: English: 1 Painting Muerte de Orfeo (Death of Orpheus) by Antonio García Vega[1]
context_page_description: Orpheus is a legendary musician, poet, and prophet in ancient Greek religion.
  "It was believed by Aristotle that Orpheus never existed; but to all other ancient writers he was a real person, though living in remote antiquity. Most of them believed that he lived several generations before Homer"
  Some ancient Greek sources note Orpheus' Thracian origins. The major stories about him are centered on his ability to charm all living things and even stones with his music, his attempt to retrieve his wife Eurydice from the underworld, and his death at the hands of the maenads of Dionysus who tired of his mourning for his late wife Eurydice. As an archetype of the inspired singer, Orpheus is one of the most significant figures in the reception of classical mythology in Western culture, portrayed or alluded to in countless forms of art and popular culture including poetry, film, opera, music, and painting.
  For the Greeks, Orpheus was a founder and prophet of the so-called "Orphic" mysteries. He was credited with the composition of the Orphic Hymns and the Orphic Argonautica. Shrines containing purported relics of Orpheus were regarded as oracles.
context_section_description: Vinicius de Moraes' play Orfeu da Conceição (1956), later adapted by Marcel Camus in the 1959 film Black Orpheus, tells the story in the modern context of a favela in Rio de Janeiro during Carnaval. Jean Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy – The Blood of a Poet (1930), Orpheus (1950) and Testament of Orpheus (1959) – was filmed over thirty years, and is based in many ways on the story. Philip Glass adapted the second film into the chamber opera Orphée (1991), part of an homage triptych to Cocteau. Nikos Nikolaidis' 1975 film Evrydiki BA 2O37 is an innovative perspective on the classic Greek tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice. Anaïs Mitchell's 2010 folk opera musical Hadestown retells the tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice with a soundtrack inspired by American blues and jazz, portraying Hades as the brutal work-boss of an underground mining city. Mitchell, together with director Rachel Chavkin, later adapted her album into a multiple Tony award winning stage musical.
caption: Death of Orpheus by Mexican artist Antonio García Vega
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop 7.0", "Image DateTime": "1904:01:01 06:09:16", "Image ExifOffset": "2174", "Image Padding": "[]", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "587", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "780", "EXIF Padding": "[]"}