Howard Ho · Transcript · · Updated
How Hadestown Works: How Orpheus Fixes the World – Transcript
Video by Howard Ho · Watch the original on YouTube
Summary
AI-generated from the transcript. Verify details against the source video.
- Hadestown features a four-part melody representing the cycle of the four seasons.
- Hades replaces the natural cycles of the world with industrial cycles and linear time.
- Orpheus completes his song to bring the world back into tune by integrating the human world with the melody of the gods.
Use this video with Pro
Reading, copying and transcript downloads are free. Create saved AI results for this video with a signed-in Pro account ($9/month).
Transcript
Search ignores accents. All transcript text stays visible.
Hadestown is a musical about cycles, the virtuous ones and the vicious ones, and how those cycles largely determine the course of our lives without us even knowing it. And this idea of cycles is embedded into Orpheus's love song of the gods, this melody.
Which he is working on completing at the beginning of the show. This video will show what Orpheus actually does to complete the song, restoring harmony to the world using musical harmony. And behind all this musical storytelling is a profound truth, making Hadestown the masterpiece that it is. This is how Hadestown works.
Hadestown introduces the idea of virtuous cycles early on in the show. In the opening number, we're told this story is an old song. >> It's a old song, a old song. >> In other words, the song is itself cyclical, as if the song is on repeat, starting at the beginning as soon as it ends. And in the next song, Anyway the Wind Blows, Eurydice references another
cycle. >> Weather ain't the way it was before. Ain't no spring or fall at all anymore. >> The seasonal cycle isn't just weather small talk, it is an active character personified by Persephone, who brings with her spring and summer when she's living it up on top for half the year.
But as Hades' wife, she also causes fall and winter for the other half of the year when she goes way down to Hadestown to be with her husband. Orpheus explains the Hades-Persephone dynamic in his song Epic I, the first of three epics, which are versions of the song Orpheus is composing in order to bring the world back into tune. Oh, yeah, the world is not in tune.
>> Oceans rise and overflow. It ain't right and it ain't not wrong. >> There are a lot of themes of sort of climate change um based on industrial practices.
>> Oil drums and automobiles, then I kept that furnace fed with the fossils of the dead. >> Hadestown creator Anais Mitchell says that what she wanted Eurydice to be referencing was not merely a change of seasons, but a climate in chaos. What we witness in Hadestown is a world out of balance, and what we're trying to restore is balance. And how is Orpheus going to restore balance to the world
using a melody? Well, it turns out this melody is in four parts, which represent the perfect balance of the four seasons. We start with winter. This first part is in a low register and in the unhappy key of D minor, and its melodic outline even resembles that of the Dies Irae.
Or day of wrath, an ancient part of the Catholic mass that symbolizes death, which is appropriate for a song about the king of the underworld. In fact, if you even out the rhythm, the resemblance to the Dies Irae is uncanny.
Right after Orpheus sings this, Hermes actually explains that this melody comes from Persephone's journey down below. >> Down below and up above.
In harmony. >> But in his next breath, Hermes sets up Persephone's return. This second part of the melody represents spring. First of all, it starts in octave higher, giving it a brighter sound, and it even changes key from minor to major, from negative to positive. What should have been an F natural here in the key of D minor
becomes an F sharp in the key of D major. Symbolizing how spring is the period of abundance, next comes summer. We return to D minor.
But since summer is the flip side of winter, this melody features the melodic shape of the Dies Irae flipped upside down. Finally, we get the fall, which literally is a falling melody going down the D minor scale, symbolizing Persephone at this point going underground, plunging the world
into fall and winter. This falling scale melody does such a great job of representing the journey down to Hadestown that it even comes back later in the song Wait for Me as Orpheus must decide to go down into Hadestown.
Collectively, this four-part melody representing the cycle of the four seasons is sustainable and healthy and thus virtuous. In the song Living It Up on Top, Orpheus explains, >> And if no one takes too much, there will always be enough.
>> Thus, the cycle of the seasons is one which is renewable. In other words, humanity can sing it again and again every year. This virtuous cycle forms a sort of circle that goes round and round in a timeless loop. In fact, the Greek word for cycle actually means circle.
The mythology scholar Joseph Campbell explains the symbolism of the circle like this. >> I suppose the circle represents a totality. The temporal aspect of the circle is you leave, go somewhere, and come back.
>> No beginning, no end. >> Well, round and round and round. Then, not only the year, but the month. The moon cycle, and the day cycle. We are reminded of this when we look on our watch and see the cycle of time is the same hour at the same hour, but another day.
>> And the eternal unending cycles of time are even represented musically in the chord progression that Orpheus uses in the three epics. These two chords endlessly looping with no goal, no resolution, just a perfect representation of cyclical time. We have B flat major, actually in suspension,
and C major. And if you resolve the next chord up to the home key of the song, D minor, you get the exact chord progression of the love song of the gods. And this relationship between the love song of the gods in the chorus and the music in the verses makes sense. If this three-chord chord progression symbolizes the love song of all the gods, then
zooming in on the specific love between Hades and Persephone in the verses would be symbolized by this truncated two-chord version of the chord progression. About them, Hermes even says, >> Hades and Persephone, remember how it used to be, their love that made the world go round.
>> Their love that made the world go round. On stage, this circle metaphor is even symbolized by the centerpiece of the stage, turntables, which spin the actors around. This idea is also symbolized by the show's logo, a single red flower, which is similarly circular in shape and represents the annual blooming of life.
The red flower first appears in the show when Orpheus sings the love song of the gods, causing it to blossom even in the dead of winter. This proves that the song Orpheus is working on has the power of the seasons embedded into it, and that if he can finish composing his song, he can bring the world back into tune and fix the climate crisis.
Unspoken in the show, but implied, is that there is a competing cycle out there in the world that is threatening the stability of the virtuous cycle, one that has been making the winters longer.
I call this cycle the vicious cycle. Now, the idea of cycles was an invention of our ancient ancestors to find order and harmony within the chaos of nature. The book The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe details the depth to which these cycles were part of ancient daily life. Strauss and Howe write, "Cyclical time is endless, yet also endlessly completed and renewed,
propelled by elaborate rituals resembling the modern seasonal holidays." This sense of ritual and renewal is the harmony that Orpheus is seeking to bring back. So, what went wrong? What broke the world? Well, there is a competing view of time that contrasts with cyclical time, called linear time.
Strauss and Howe write, "Linear time is time as a unique and usually progressing story within an absolute beginning and an absolute end." In other words, linearism focuses not on the cyclical and repeating nature of time, but on the direction of time moving forward towards some destination, some goal. The establishment of linear time in society really took hold in the Industrial
Revolution. The West began using technology to flatten the very physical evidence of natural cycles. and who represents this linear time in the show? Someone who uses technology to flatten the natural cycle? That's right, Hades.
Hades preaches progress through industry, aka technology. Anais Mitchell calls his view compulsive capitalism, the unslakeable thirst for more.
>> Lover, you were gone so long. Lover, I was lonesome. So, I laid power grid >> Anais Mitchell writes, Hades' separation from Persephone, the woman he loves but can never fully possess, leaves a hole in his heart. He tries to fill the hole with material wealth and industry and in doing so, he replaces the natural cycles of the world with industrial cycles.