Orfeu da Conceição: Variation on a Classical MythAuthor(s): Celso de OliveiraReviewed work(s):Source: Hispania, Vol. 85, No. 3, Special Portuguese Issue (Sep., 2002), pp. 449-454Published by: American Association of Teachers of Spanish and PortugueseStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4141107 .Accessed: 12/06/2012 09:52

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Orfeu da Conceigdo: Variation on a Classical Myth Celso de Oliveira

University of South Carolina

Abstract: The popular French film Black Orpheus (1959), with its enchanting music, was actually based on a serious poetic drama, Orfeu da Conceiqdo, by the Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes. It was produced in Rio de Janeiro in 1956. This happened during a period when other versions of the Orpheus myth (by Stravinsky, Cocteau, and Tennessee Williams) were being shown in the United States and Europe. In recent years a Brazilian film called simply Orfeu (1998) has been made and shown in Brazil. It pays homage to some of the music in the original film. Although it is based directly on Vinicius' play, it is updated to the 1990s. This paper is a comparative study of the different versions of the Orpheus myth mentioned here.

Key Words: Orpheus, Moraes (Vinicius de), Stravinsky, Cocteau, Williams (Tennessee ), Eliot (T. S.)

The period after the Second World War marked the point where the great modernist artists became popular, where traditional themes were interpreted for a mass public. A

I good example of this is the film Black Orpheus, which was first seen in 1959. The enchanting background music by Ant6nio Carlos Jobim and Luis Bonfd has almost guaranteed its success, and millions of listeners have had a kind of auditory impression of life in Rio de Janeiro from the soundtrack. Its popularity has been deserved. But it might be well for the literary public, not just in Brazil, to recall that Vinicius de Moraes wrote Orfeu da Conceiqdo, the poetic drama which is the source for Black Orpheus, as a serious work with a certain dimension that is perhaps lost in the film. His drama is also very characteristic of its time, which is the decade after the Second World War.

Vinicius, who was born in 1913, was a very precocious poet; his first collection, O caminho para a distdncia, came out in 1933 when he was only twenty. He mentions this in a delightful self- portrait of a poem that he wrote in 1956 to read on TV Tupi. In this same poem he tells us that "Em Oxford, na Inglaterra / Estudei literatura / Inglesa, o que foi / Para mim fundamental." Almost from the beginning he was influenced by the great European modernists, including T. S. Eliot, as some of his poems, especially the Cinco Elegias, show. But he has his own kind of style with more than a hint of frivolity about it. This is a snatch of "A iltima elegia":

Dost thou remember, dark love Made in London, celua, celua nostra Mais Linda que mare nostrum?

quando early morn' Eu vinha impressentido, like the shadow of a cloud Crepitate ainda dos aromas emolientes de Christ church

Meadows Frio como uma coluna dos cloisters de Magdalen Queimar-me a luz translficida de Chelsea?

It was Eliot who, in discussing Joyce's Ulysses in 1923, made an important formulation about the use of classical mythology in modern literature:

In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method that others must pursue after him [...] It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history [...]

Oliveira, Celso de "Orfeu da Conceigdo: Variation on a Classical Myth"

Hispania 85.3 (2002): 449-454

450 Hispania 85 September 2002 Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modem world possible for art [...].

This famous statement of Eliot's is very useful in approaching Orfeu da Conceivdo. For some years after the Second World War Vinicius belonged to the diplomatic service; he was in Los Angeles as Vice-Consul by 1946, and this post evidently led to a number of friendships in artistic circles in southern California. In those days Los Angeles was more than the center of the film industry. A number of eminent European writers and composers (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, Isherwood) were on the scene at least part of the time, and Vinicius no doubt found the five years that he spent there to be a rewarding period in his career. He seems to have begun Orfeu da ConceiFdo even earlier than that. According to his account of the play as he describes it in a prefatory note, he finished Orfeu in Los Angeles but lost the last act, which he rewrote in 1953, perhaps in Paris, where he was Second Secretary at the Brazilian Embassy. In the following year the play was published in the revista Anhembi. At this point his friend Joio Cabral de Melo Neto urged him to submit it to the Concurso de Teatro do IV Centendrio de Saio Paulo. It was first performed, however, and very successfully, at the Teatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro in 1956. It was a considerable artistic event which engaged the talents of several well-known figures: Oscar Niemeyer and Carlos Scliar, who designed the settings; Jobim, who composed the incidental music; and the guitarist Luis Bonfi, who played the guitar for the part of Orfeu, which was taken by Aroldo Costa.

At the same time the film of Black Orpheus was underway. It was of course a French film, directed by Marcel Camus, and when it came out in 1959 it was highly acclaimed in France and the United States. Its fame was such that it soon eclipsed the local fame of Orfeu da Conceiiiao. Vinicius, after his success with the play in Rio, hoped that it would be translated and performed elsewhere, perhaps in New York, but this has never happened.

More than forty years later, Orfeu da Conceigdo looks like an impressive but neglected literary work. It also seems to be part of an international tendency of the postwar period: a preoccupation with the myth of Orpheus. In 1948, while Vinicius was still living in Los Angeles, Igor Stravinsky, also living there, finished composing his ballet in three scenes called Orpheus. It was first performed in New York with choreography by George Balanchine and sets by the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi-a rather impressive artistic collaboration. Stravinsky's Orpheus was actually intended as part of a trilogy of ballets based on themes from Greek mythology-the others were Apollo (1927-28) and Agon (1953-57), also with choreography by Balanchine. Stravinsky himself recorded Orpheus in 1949, and the New York City Ballet has frequently performed the three ballets during the last fifty years. Vinicius would certainly be aware of Stravinsky's Orpheus, even if his own work turned out differently.

1949 was also the year of Jean Cocteau's film Orphee, which was adapted from his earlier play of the same title. The film, although clearly not intended for a mass audience, had an international success in "art" movie houses, and it can certainly be considered a classic of the period. Cocteau had worked in the theater during much of his career, and the idea of presenting a Greek myth in modern dress was well accepted since the 1920s in such works as The Infernal Machine (Cocteau's surrealist version of the Oedipus Rex). But the cinematic medium made possible a version of the Orpheus myth very different from Stravinsky's neoclassical ballet. (Stravinsky and Cocteau had worked together somewhat earlier when they had collaborated on a version of Oedipus Rex with a libretto in Latin.) Now we are to suppose that the story of Orpheus is taking place in the postwar period of"existentialism," where Death is driven in a Rolls Royce accompanied by a pair of motorcycles. Indeed part of it was filmed in St. Germain des Prrs itself. This must have appealed to Vinicius, who set his play in the morros of Rio de Janeiro. Cocteau's film uses music only incidentally, but the music is drawn from Gluck's 18" Century opera of Orpheus andEuridice, often performed in Paris. The result is a film that is both neo-classical and very contemporary. Cocteau, like Stravinsky, was mainly interested in Orpheus as the figure ofthe poet-musician and the way in which he finally attains an apotheosis. Something of this theme

Orfeu da Concei(Wo 451 finally emerges in Vinicius' play.

We should also consider another work of the period, Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending (1957). This play, like Vinicius', went through several versions before it was finished. It was actually produced under the title of Battle of Angels as early as 1940, but this production was a failure, and as Orpheus Descending it had a limited success at first mainly because it was by the author of The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, now very famous. This variation of the myth is set, as one would expect, in a small Southern town of the present time, and the Orpheus figure is a guitar player named Val Xavier. His Euridice is Lady, the wife ofJabe Torance, who becomes the figure of Death, a violent and unloving man who keeps a dry goods store. At the end of the play, on Good Friday, Val, the illicit lover, is captured and burned to death with a blowtorch by Jabe and his friends. In some respects this horrific finale resembles the ancient myth more than the versions by Stravinsky-Balanchine and Cocteau. In other ways the romantic Tennessee Williams depends on the power of human love to challenge the general violence of the scene. But how different it is from Gluck's opera, where the tragedy is transformed by the figure of Amor, who intervenes on behalf of Orpheus and Eurydice, just when they seem to be doomed.

It might be well to keep in mind the outline of the ancient myth in its original form. Orpheus, the poet-musician from Thrace, is such a splendid performer on his lyre that he enchants even the savage beasts and the trees. He marries Eurydice, a Dryad, but she steps on a snake, is bitten, and dies. Orpheus descends to the underworld to recover her; he charms Persephone, the queen of the underworld, who agrees to free Eurydice on condition that Orpheus must not look back at her. But as they approach the daylight world, he looks at her in an access of love, and she is taken from him forever. The later part of the story, which is sometimes overlooked, involves the death of Orpheus. He is torn to pieces by the Maenads, those fierce female worshippers of Dionysus, perhaps because of the hatred for women that he assumes after the death of Eurydice. Orpheus himself is a follower of Dionysus, who probably sets the Maenads on him. It is this aspect of the story that Williams tends to emphasize in Orpheus Descending.

Vinicius quotes a version of the myth, somewhat along these lines, in the preface to the text of his play. In his interpretation Orpheus is the son of Apollo and Clio, the muse of history, and in fact these deities appear at the beginning and near the end of the play. They certainly complicate the action. Vinicius' Orfeu da Conceipao is a young black man, a guitar player and composer; he is in love with Euridice, a black girl who also lives in the morro, but he is not married to her. (Vinicius, like Williams, departs here from the traditional version of the myth.) Clio opposes the love affair and tries to convince Orfeu not to marry his girl. As in the original story, Orfeu has a rival, Aristeu the beekeeper, who lusts after Euridice. In Vinicius' play Aristeu stabs her out of jealousy; in the traditional story the snake bites her.

After the death of Euridice the world of Orfeu collapses. He becomes desperate in his search for his dead mistress, whom he laments in song. A group of women of the morro, armed with knives and razors, attack him. At this point Vinicius introduces an allegorical figure that is called the Dama Negra, somewhat analogous to the figure of Death in Cocteau's film. She talks to the dying Orfeu as if she were his beloved Euridice; he begs her to take him with her. One of the angry women who have stabbed Orfeu in their rage takes his guitar and throws it away. Suddenly his music begins to be heard and the Dama Negra covers his body with her mantle, just as she did with the body of Euridice at the end of the first act.

Vinicius calls his play a "trag~dia carioca em tr~s atos." As he has arranged the sequence of events, the first act, much the longest, ends with the death of Euridice. The relatively brief second act is dominated by the women, the fierce Maenads of the morro, who will eventually bring Orfeu down. It takes place during Carnaval in the interior of a club called "Os Maiorais do Inferno," presided over by Pluto. As Orfeu wanders in, calling for his lost Euridice, the women surround him with their assertive rhythms:

Ciranda, cirandinha

452 Hispania 85 September 2002 Vamos todos cirandar

Jid bateu a meia noite Carnaval vai acabar.

ORFEU (os brapos para alto) Nfo ndo morreu!

AS MULHERES Tinha uma, tinha duas Tinha trds, tinha um milhdo Tanta mulher ndo cabria Dentro do seu coraqdo.

The third act, which, like the first, takes place in front of Orfeu's barracdo on the morro, brings the drama full circle, and again Apollo and Clio come forward to state their claim on their son. Clio wants to die; her feelings run very strong:

Ah, Deus do cdu! Me leva bem depressa Que 6 pra eu encontrar aquela negra Que endoidecu o meu Orfeu! Me leva Deus ...

In this play the human characteristics are very immediate: the characters are dominated by love, hate, and jealousy. Clio's strength of feeling is equal to that of Medea:

Por caridade! NMo me levem daqui! Ah, ndo levem De junto de meu filho. Eu quero ele Doido mesmo, 6 meu filho, 6 meu Orfeu Por caridade, vso buscar meu filho

Voces sabem. Orfeu da Conceigdo Sujeito grande, viollo no peito 'TA sempre por ai ... Voces conhecem E o meu Orfeu ... Dizem que endiodeceu Mas 6 mentira, eu sei. Orfeu 6 mfisico Sua mlisica 6 vida. Sem Orfeu

NIo ht vida. Orfeu 6 a sentinela Do morro, 6 a paz do morro, Orfeu. Sem e1e NAo hA paz, nLo hA nada, s6 o que hi E uma mle desgragada, uma

mte triste

Com o coraglo em sangue. E tudo isso Por causa de uma suja descarada Uma negrinha que nem graga tinha Uma mulher que ndo valia nada! (subitamentepossessa) Descarada!

Vinicius has further complicated the ancient story by introducing another character, Mira de Tal, a woman of the morro, who develops a passion for Orfeu at an early stage of the drama. During the first act she enters just as he is singing the last lines of his song inspired by his love for Euridice:

Se todos f6ssem iguais a voc6 Que maravilha viver! Uma cangdo pelo ar Uma mulher a cantar

Umra cidade a cantar A sorrir, a cantar, a pedir A beleza de amar ... Como o sol, como a flor, como a luz Amar sem mentir nemr softer Existiria a verdade Verdade que nimgudm v4 Se todos frssem no mundo iguais a voc&!

Orfeu da ConceiCdo 453 But when Mira understands that Orfeu has transferred his affections to Euridice, she turns jealous and tells Aristeu the bee-keeper that Euridice is carrying Orfeu's child. She is thus responsible for her rival's death, and it is Mira who instigates Orfeu's death as well by setting the Maenads against him. In truth she was once the object of Orfeu's attention; he had composed a samba for her, as she reminds him. So the motives are entirely set out in this play, which, like Carmen or Porgy and Bess, is a study in elemental passions.

Despite certain naturalistic details, especially at the moment of Orfeu's death, when the women slash at him with their knives and razors, Vinicius controls the events of his play by con- stantly referring to the ancient myth. As Eliot said, it is a way of "manipulating and controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." One instance of how Vinicius can easily manage this parallel is that many of the names in his dramatispersonae would be likely to appear in Brazilian Portuguese today, whereas they would be unusual in English and would sound forced and unnatural if an American dramatist used them for his characters.

In Greek tragedy, violent death is never depicted on the stage. But in this "trag6dia carioca" first Euridice and then Orfeu are savagely attacked before the eyes of the audience. This dramatic procedure, however, has been acceptable ever since the Elizabethans. Vinicius brings the tragedy to a firm conclusion with Orfeu's death, but it is not simply an act of violence, because a Chorus, which has had no part in the action up to this moment, ends the play with a brief commentary:

Juntaram-se a Mulher, a Morte e a Lua Para matar orfeu, com tanta sorte Que mataram Orfeu, a alma da rua Orfeu, o generoso, Orfeu, o forte. Pordm as trds ndo sabem de uma coisa. Para matar Orfeu nao basta a Morte. Tudo morre que nasce e que viveu S6 ndo morre no mundo a voz de Orfeu.

Therefore, Orfeu da Conceigdo is a tragedy in every sense, but there is finally a kind of apotheosis of the poet; his music survives his death. (This is precisely the theme of the Stravinsky-Balanchine ballet, composed at the same time in Los Angeles as Vinicius' play.)

Although Vinicius is first thought of as a sonneteer and a songwriter, and he is not usually associated with drama, he does have the dramatic instinct. This has been very well explained by Eduardo Portella in an essay called "Do Verso Solitairio ao Canto Coletivo," which appears in the volume of Vinicius' Obra Poetica published in 1968:

Vinicius de Moraes 6 um poeta fundamentalmente dramftico. Explica-se sua adesdo aos contrfirios, esse cultivo das oposi96es. O poeta dramitico, pela circunstancia mesma de que aposta tudo no jogo das emog9es, 6 mais o int6rprete dos conflitos que das coisas. Vinicius nio

estir interessado numa representaFgo intelectiva do mundo

mas numa participacdo nos acontecimentos. E um poeta de biografias mais que de id6ias.

As in the case of his Orfeu, Vinicius' poetry survives his death. He died in July 1980, and the day after his death Carlos Drummond de Andrade said in the Jornal do Brasil: "Vinicius became the most exact figure of the poet that I have ever seen in my life. He was a poet in books, in music and in life. Three forms of poetry."

Vinicius was never really happy with the French film, Black Orpheus, despite the fact that he wrote the lyrics for "Felicidade," one ofJobim's most attractive songs in that film. He died in 1980 without any further developments in producing the play in New York or elsewhere. But now we have Orfeu, a Brazilian film that is based on Vinicius' text and at the same time boldly updates the action to the late 1990s. It has been shown in New York but evidently has not gained the popularity of Black Orpheus. Although it pays homage to some of the familiar music, it is not a highly lyrical work like the earlier work. The favelas are now dangerous places controlled by drug gangs and frequently raided by the police. The director, Carlos Diegues, obviously wants to take the

454 Hispania 85 September 2002 audience closer to these brutal realities than Marcel Camus did. His fierce Maenads are truly frightening as they move in on Orpheus. The Orpheus, a well-known pop singer named Toni Garrido, actually came from one of these slums and portrays him with great authenticity. In a sense he plays himself. He composes his poetry on a word processor. His music is a means of rising above his harsh background; in this sense he is typical of many popular musicians in Brazil, or for that matter, in the United States. The director introduces the most famous of all contemporary Brazilian musicians, Caetano Veloso, in person, and in fact Veloso composed a notable song for the film.

Carlos Diegues has clearly had some advantages in considering the different versions of Orpheus composed during the last half century. His film was unusually popular in Rio de Janeiro, and it has even been shown in some of the favelas where it was shot. One likes to think that Vinicius would be happy with this newest variation of the myth as it makes its way in the world.

WORKS CITED

Moraes, Vinicius de. Obra Podtica. Rio de Janeiro: Jose Aguilar Edit~ra, 1968. -. Orfeu da Conceigio. Rio de Janeiro: Desenhos de Carlos Scliar, 1956. Eliot, T.S. "Ulysses, Order, and Myth." James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism. Ed. Sean Givens. New York:

Vanguard, 1948. 198-202. Griffiths, Paul. Stravinsky. New York: Schirmer Books, 1992. Steegmuller, Francis. Cocteau: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970. Williams, Tennessee. Orpheus Descending. New York: New Directions, 1958.