Over the weekend, my daughter took me to see Hamilton, and it prompted a discussion about our favorite musicals. We both agreed that Hamilton was our third favorite, and we even agreed on which others were the top two, only varying in the order we placed them.
For me, the second place spot went to Come From Away, which we saw in London and then again in St. Louis. It’s the true story of a small town in Canada with a mostly forgotten airport that suddenly became the redirect-of-choice on 9/11.
When discussing my number one pick, Christiana remarked that Hadestown isn’t discussed enough. It seemed to have fallen out of public consciousness. I rolled out of bed at 3:30 this morning, determined to change that.
The music, lyrics, and books of Hadestown were written buy Anaïs Mitchell, an American song-writer and musician from Vermont who has released eight studio albums.
In 2004, Mitchell was driving alone to a gig to play for tips. She’d recorded one album and was writing her second, and as she drove, she was missing the man who would become her husband. She began to sing something new—
Wait for me, I’m coming / In my garters and pearls /
With what melody did you barter me / From the wicked underworld?
This was more than the birth of the song, Wait for Me. With those lyrics, the song connected itself to one of Mitchell’s favorite stories since childhood: the tragedy of Eurydice and Orpheus.
You can read about the the thread of development of Wait for Me in this excerpt for her book, Working on a Song.
Hadestown began as a song cycle and became a DIY musical that debuted in Barre, Vermont in 2006. The journey to its Broadway debut on April 17, 2019 is an artistic odyssey of rewrites and changes and seemingly endless labor, mirroring more the story of Sisyphus than Orpheus, one every creative can relate to.
As a result, there’s a clear difference between the Broadway production and the Hadestown studio album Mitchell released in 2010, but when I feel the drive to listen outside the context of the theater, it’s the 2010 album I turn to.
It’s the story of Orpheus who journeys into the underworld in his failed effort to rescue his beloved Eurydice, themes which are clearly reflected in my ongoing series, The Sibyliad. Such mythical else-worlds are metaphorical mindscapes with the gates flung open.
In the real world, we live on the surface, but in Hades, the exploration of the self goes deep.
That mythical connection must be one reason why it remains my favorite, and then, where Hamilton is born out of hip hop, Hadestown is a folk opera—Bob Dylan as Greek chorus—inspired by Les Miserable to be a tale of romance and politics.
Aren’t they all?
A wall surrounds the underworld—its only imagineable purpose being to keep the dead in their place. Yet, in Why We Build the Wall, Hades tells the dead:
We build the wall to keep us free… the wall keeps out the enemy… the enemy is poverty… that’s why we build the wall.
It’s striking how literally life imitates art.
Remember that the story is about a man who sneaks into this tyrannical land where the people are brainwashed into building the very wall that subjugates them, and he does so in an attempt to free his beloved. He’s not there to steal anything the dead possess. He’s come to give Eurydice the life and freedom Hades has stolen from her.
It’s telling that Joel Dimsdale titled his 2021 book on brainwashing, Dark Persuasion. One of the epigraphs for his first chapter is this quote:
[It] is through the material brain that emissaries of God or of the Devil—dictators, policemen, politicians, priests, physicians, and psychotherapists of various sorts—… try to work their will on man.
—William Sargant, 1957
We are controlled and manipulated through Pavlovian means to work against our own best interests and strike out against those who would rescue us. Our every word has been twisted and imbued with the opposite of its meaning. We submit to control, in part, because we want the deceit to be true. We might live in hell, but hell is the best of all possible worlds—everyone is dying to get in.
We’ve heard the term cognitive dissonance so often, we forget that dissonance is a musical term referring to the lack of harmony between notes. Mentally, we’ve fallen out of harmony. Our beliefs clash.
We think ourselves attacked and persecuted, when the conflict we seek to silence isn’t in the world but in our own heads. We threaten civil war, as if through violence we could eradicate our own thoughts.
How is that Hadestown could have a protest song that predates the very thing is protests? The answer is in the musical itself. It’s a time loop with the eternal hope that this time the ending will change.
What’s wrong now has been wrong before.
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:9 NIV
— Thaddeus Thomas
And now…
Discover classical-era, mythological, epic fantasy in a historical-fantasy, Renaissance wrapper!
The Sibyliad, Book One: The Hell Jar
The Sibyliad is an epic series of novellas, beginning with The Hell Jar, which you can pick up at no cost. The Greek underworld comes to Renaissance Italy!
Plethon:
My dear Daphnis, you think yourself ready to die. Most do, secure in the one belief that’s meant to ease their passage from this world to the next. I could teach them all to fear, if they were ready for anything but comfort and grace.
Stand in the grass outside the Basilica of the Holy Cross or idle curiously along the road; hear me teach; see the thinkers of Florence discover greater illumination outside the church than in. Too bold a claim? Before today, you’d have thought that idea a grave danger, but now, we present Florence the skeletons of freshly dead monks, stripped of skin and muscle, immaculate in their bloodless display.
My words are not the threat.