Orfeo's Machines

Most depictions of the Orpheus story privilege the moments that musicians like best. Typically, he stands with his mouth wide open in song, strumming his lyre, taming the wild beasts, and charming even the trees. Bernard Salomon's emblems that in 1557 reduced the Metamorphoses to a collection of 178 woodcuts with brief summaries are no exception (see fig. 1).¹ The text instructs viewers to take note of Orpheus's fabulous skill at singing and playing. This mirrors what has long been assumed to be the take-home message of Claudio Monteverdi and Alessandro Striggio's L'Orfeo. Ovid's version, however, paints a more complex picture; despite his musical charms, Orpheus meets an unseemly end when the bacchantes tear him to bits:

Another threw a stone, which, even as it flew through the air, was overcome by the sweet sound of voice and lyre, and fell at his feet as if it would ask for forgiveness for its mad attempt. But still the assault waxed reckless: their passion knew no bounds, and fury reigned. And all their weapons would have been harmless under the spell of song, but the huge uproar of the Berecyntian flutes, mixed with discordant horns, the drums, and the breast-beatings and howlings of the Bacchanals, drowned the lyre's sound; and then at last the stones grew red with the blood of the bard whose voice they could not hear.²

Orpheus earns his bloody demise because his music cannot compete with the noise of the bacchantes.³ Ovid characteristically offers gruesome details, depicting in the final moments the bard's head floating down the river, mouth still singing, accompanied by the disembodied lyre. "The poet's limbs lay scattered all around; but his head and lyre, O Hebrus, thou didst receive and (a marvel!) while they floated in mid-stream, the lyre gave forth some mournful notes, mournfully the lifeless tongue murmured, mournfully the banks replied."⁴ For Carolyn Abbate, "Orpheus's head is a musical instrument, an object given life as long as a master plays it."⁵ She understands the Orpheus story with its original ending as a tale of dismemberment and music that does not come from the body.

Monteverdi and Striggio's L'Orfeo was first performed at the ducal palace in Mantua in 1607 for members of the Accademia degli Invaghiti, but the score was not published for two years.⁶ The published version does away with Orpheus's severed head altogether, perhaps because musicians cannot bear to have their patron saint fail so violently, and instead sends him up to the heavens with his father Apollo for a dramatic musical apotheosis. The 1607 libretto suggests that the first performance did in fact stage the bacchantes and allude to Orpheus's fate. It reads, "he shall not escape, for the later Celestial anger descends on guilty heads, the harsher it is."⁷ Four hundred years after the fact, despite many

Figure 1.

Gabriele Simeoni, La vita et Metamorfoseo d'Ovidio, figurato et abbreviato in forma d'epigrammi (Lyon: Giovanni di Tornes, 1559), 135.

convincing suggestions by scholars, we cannot know exactly why Monteverdi wrote a new ending, but we can be sure that readers would have been familiar with the bloodier version.⁸ Not only were Ovid's stories well circulated in print, but Angelo Poliziano's Fabula d'Orfeo, the first dramatization of the Orpheus myth in Italy, was performed in Mantua in 1480 and concluded with an offstage decapitation followed by a parade of the head onstage. The head also made an appearance in Giovanni Andrea dell'Anguillara's popular and widely disseminated reworking of the Metamorphoses, first published in Venice in 1561 and reprinted frequently for the next half century, a source likely known to most literati.⁹

Even without the severed head, Monteverdi and Striggio tell a story of music that does not emerge from the human body alone. L'Orfeo does not need the bacchantes to demonstrate the potency of musical instruments of both the human and mechanical varieties; this power becomes audible...