By the way.... just in case you arrived here looking for the Glasgow Orpheus Choir, you'll find what you want by linking to the Glasgow Phoenix Choir web site.
Orpheus
Orpheus sits, singing and playing a four-stringed, european lute, with an audience of swans and lions (both famous for their love of music). The production of this piece, which is one of the representations of the quadrivium, is a markedly renaissance idea in a medieval environment. The date coincides with the arrival of Gemistus Plethon in Florence (1438).
It is the opinion of some eminent philologers of later times, that there never was any such person as Orpheus, except in Fairy land; and that his whole history was nothing but a mere romantic allegory, utterly devoid of truth and reality. But there is nothing alledged for this opinion from antiquity...
Ralph Cudworth: The True Intellectual System of the Universe, 1678, referenced in Charles Burney: A General History of Music, 1776.
The Orphic teachings doubtless were associated with much superstition and priestcraft, but, together with Pythagorean mysticism, they helped by their imaginative parables to keep alive in the hearts of many the beliefs that lie at the root of all true religion.
Cotterill: Ancient Greece, referenced in Charles Burney: A General History of Music, 1776.
If I have selected with too much sedulity and minuteness whatever ancient and modern writers furnish relative to Orpheus, it has been occasioned by an involuntary zeal for the fame of this musical and poetical patriarch; which, warm at first, grew more and more heated in the course of enquiry; and, stimulated by the respect and veneration which I found paid to him by antiquity, I became a kind of convert to this mystagogue, and eagerly aspired at initiation into his mysteries - in order to reveal them to my readers.
Charles Burney: A General History of Music, 1776.
The great obscurity and uncertainty in which the history of Orpheus is involved affords very little matter for our ibnformation; and even renders that little, inaccurate and precarious. Upon surveying the annals of past ages, it seems that the greatest geniuses have been subject to this historical darkness; as is evident in those great lights of antiquity, Homer and Euclid, whose writings indeed enrich mankind with perpetual stores of knowledge and delight; but whose lives are for the most part concealed in inpenetrable oblivion. But this historical uncertainty is no where so apparent as in the person of Orpheus, whose name is indeed acknowledged and celebrated by all antiquity (except perhaps Aristotle alone); while scarcely a vestige of his life is to be found amongst the immense ruins of time. For who has ever been able to affirm any thing with certainty, concerning his origin, his age, his parents, his country, and condition?
Thomas Taylor: in his introduction to The Hymns of Orpheus, 1787.
Mythology has left us no tangle more intricate and assuredly no problem half so interesting as the relation between the ritual and mythology of Orpheus and Dionysos.Jane Ellen Harrison: Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, Cambridge, 1903.
It is when we try to be a little less poetic and a little more historical that we find our difficulties beginning. As we try to trace him back through the ages he becomes more shadowy, more elusive, more Protean in his aptitude for slipping away from any-one who tries to lay actual hands on him and make him tell just what he is and what he stands for.W.K.C. Guthrie: Orpheus and Greek Religion; Famous Orpheus (1935)
W.K.C. Guthrie: Orpheus and Greek Religion; Orphism (1935)
W.K.C. Guthrie: Orpheus and Greek Religion; Orpheus and his Story (1935)
W.K.C. Guthrie: Orpheus and Greek Religion; Orpheus Vases (1935)
The reality of Orpheus is to be sought in what men thought and said about him.
I.M. Linforth: The Arts of Orpheus, University of California Press, 1941.
Orpheus, however, is one thing, Orphism quite another. But I must confess that I know very little about early Orphism, and the more I read about it the more my knowledge diminishes. Twenty years ago, I could have said quite a lot about it (we all could at that time). Since then, I have lost a great deal of knowledge; for this loss I am indebted to Wilamowitz, Festugière, Thomas, and not least to a distinguished member of the University of California, Professor Linforth. Let me illustrate my present ignorance by listing a few of the things I once knew.
E.R. Dodds: The Greek Shamans and Puritanism from The Greeks and the Irrational, 1950.
In the late third or early fourth century, Orpheus began to take on attributes specifically associated with Christ, and a new figure - a figure we may call for convenience Orpheus-Christus - began to take shape.
J.B. Friedman: Orpheus-Christus in the Art of Late Antiquity, from Orpheus in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, 1969.
Certainly, we have much to set straight if we could. Orpheus was a Greek who in Thrace tried to substitute the quietude of the Greek Apollo for the frenzy of the Thracian Dionysus, and met his death at the hands of the Maenads, the followers of Dionysus. Or he came from Crete and introduced the orgiastic cults into Greece from Asia. There is a tradition that he visited Egypt, which is interesting. He went down to Hades to recover his wife, Eurydice, and sailed with the Argonauts to Colchis. Who is to separate out the facts from such charming legends? In all events, the Orphic tradition is a confusion - there are at least three versions of the cosmogony, f'or instance - -but one which consists of an intermingling of ordered structures; many themes are interwoven, and the consequent suggestiveness is immense. We have to pick our way delicately, seeking out features which we can discern most clearly, remembering all the while that we are dealing in Orpheus more with the name of a tradition than with a single influence, or rather with a single influence over which has become encrusted an entire tradition.
James K. Feibleman: The Influence of Orphism from Religious Platonism, 1971.
There are several quite distinct ways in which Orpheus was important during the Renaissance. It is indeed this richness of meaning that makes him stand out against all the other Greek mythical heroes, religious teachers, philosophers, and poets, who play such an essential part in the thought and poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. For Orpheus could be one, and often was all, of these.
D.P. Walker: Orpheus the Theologian, from The Ancient Theology, 1972.
Orpheus entire or Orpheus dismembered. The figure is fascinating however we take him.
Emmet Robbins: Famous Orpheus from Orpheus, the Matamorphosis of a Myth, University of Toronto Press, 1982.
With these two richly different views of Orpheus, the products of the two greatest poetic talents of Rome, I shall be concerning myself in this essay. These views mark the beginning of a tradition of reinterpretation of Orpheus and Eurydice, which has shown extraordinary vitality well into our own century.
W.S. Anderson: The Orpheus of Virgil and Ovid from Orpheus, the Matamorphosis of a Myth, University of Toronto Press, 1982.
The identification of Ficino and Orpheus might be dismissed as a mere literary compliment appropriate to the contrived pastoral setting, if it did not recur with such frequency in a wide variety of literary forms and contexts.
John Warden: Orpheus and Ficino from Orpheus, the Matamorphosis of a Myth, University of Toronto Press, 1982.
Orpheus' name: that is what it all comes down to. It is a name that no amount of trivial application or cold-blooded scholarship robs of its fascination.
M.L. West: The Orphic Poems, Oxford, 1983.
