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1 Hermes, Eurydice, and Orpheus. Museo Nazionale, Naples. DAI, Rome, Inst. Neg. 33.12 (Photo © Deutsches Archäologisches Institut).
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This chapter outlines the stories of several musical heroes and shows how they illustrate various aspects of the conception and reception of music in the Greek and Roman worlds. Enchantment, diversity, exotic customs, and foreign lands played a significant part in the music of the Greek and Roman civilizations. Thanks to its capacity to influence the mind, music was regarded as capable of overcoming various contrasts and contradictions of life. But this unifying power properly belonged to the gods and not human beings, however extraordinary—a contrast that is symbolized by the divine punishments of musical heroes who dared to compete with the gods
In this paper, I analyze two poems from Rainer Maria Rilke's Neue Gedichte in which the act of seeing attains a poetic status, namely “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes” and “Pietà.” This ocular poeticity derives not merely from the visual features of the beheld objects, but more fundamentally from the temporal implications of seeing. In the crucial scene of “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes,” an instance of third-person observation is recounted as narrative retrospection, while in “Pietà,” a first-person observation is narrated in the moment as a subjective concatenation of temporal categories. These valences of the gaze are further traced in two artworks which are thought to have inspired the poems: a Roman bas-relief depicting Orpheus, Hermes, and Eurydice, and Auguste Rodin's Le Christ et la Madeleine. In the poems and their statuary antecedents, it is not what is seen but rather the temporal substrate of seeing that indexes the gaze as variedly poetic, and consequently as intrinsic to subjectivity.
