Highway to Hades: River of Cinderbricks

One of the most complex rock operas of the decade is Hadestown, conceptualized by musician Anaïs Mitchell and performed as a collaborative work with many artists and musicians. The rock opera has an apocalyptic, post-industrial Great Depression feel. In the words of Anaïs Mitchell, the work is meant to be a question about the limits of human compassion and cruelty:

Take global warming to its terrifying logical conclusion and imagine part of the world becomes uninhabitable and there are masses of hungry poor people looking for higher ground. [T]hen imagine you are lucky enough to live in relative wealth and security, though maybe you’ve sacrificed some freedoms to live that way. When the hordes are at the door, who among us would not be behind a big fence? These conditions exist already, but most of us don’t have to acknowledge them in a real way. (Themes of Hadestown, “History”)

The rock opera Hadestown uses the realm of Hades and its denizens in several ways. Firstly, it uses the landscape to highlight disparities of wealth and power among communities. Secondly, the connections it makes between characters — Hades and Persephone, Orpheus and Eurydice, and the restless dead — emphasize these connections and provide raw human emotions to fuel the changes that happen in the story. Finally, the mythological landscape utilizes the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in very unique ways, and we will explore all of these things here. Each of these points will be broken into a specific post for readability.

The Landscape of Hadestown

Before we discuss the landscape and its communicators, it’s important to know which songs I’m using as reference points and from where I am pulling supplemental information. While the overall themes of landscape and personality are communicated across the album, this analysis relies primarily on “Epic: Part One,” “Way Down Hadestown,” and “Wait For Me.” Any epithets used are sourced from Theoi.com.

The economic landscape of Hadestown has influenced the album’s musical choices. The music reminds me of the Swing Era and has a strong jazz and bluegrass feel. The album invokes a strong Great Depression feel and its presentation reminds me of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath because of the relentless search for work in a hostile environment. In any society with resource scarcity, from Africa’s water wars to Arizona’s xenophobia, the walls people build around their communities and the depths they sink to are reflective of their real fear of loss of property and resources.

In Hadestown, this division comes in the form of a wall. The River Styx symbolizes the sequestration of the Underworld from the world of the living. Unlike other mythological interpretations, in which the River Styx typically contains water, this river is a long wall reminiscent of the ones the Chinese and Romans built to keep themselves safe from the barbarians on the other side. Not only does this wall exist, but its creators continuously improve on it with a “million hands” and “a million minds that were just one mind” — a symbol of indoctrination, but also of work. Hades is the only place where people can get a steady job.

Working Forever

One of the most important ideas concerning the Greek Underworld is its permanence. People go down into death, but they can never come back up. In the Odyssey, even Herakles leaves a shade; the Dioskouroi use timesharing. In Hadestown, the Underworld is equally permanent. People who go down to Hadestown just don’t come back, and the only access comes in the form of a one-way train — so even when you get work, you can never stop.

To most people in a post-industrial Great Depression, working at all must sound like paradise. Eurydice provides an excellent example of this mentality. Instead of the idea of a heaven with gold-paved roads, she imagines the Underworld as a paradise where

Everybody dresses in clothes so fine
Everybody’s pockets are weighted down
Everybody sipping ambrosia wine
In a goldmine in Hadestown
Way down Hadestown
Way down under the ground

While this plays on our funeral preparations for the dead (their best clothes), it provides a very troublesome view of the economic turbulence of the living world. If people can only find work in Hadestown, and the presence of work has replaced traditional views of paradise, no wonder the Lord of the Undergloom has decided to barricade himself from the world above. Orpheus and Hermes’s section of “Way Down Hadestown” is the only section that presents a critical view:

ORPHEUS & HERMES
Mister Hades is a mean old boss
With a silver whistle and a golden scale
An eye for an eye!
And he weighs the cost
A lie for a lie!
And your soul for sale
Sold!
To the king on the chromium throne
Thrown!
To the bottom of a sing-sing cell
Where the little wheel squeal and the big wheel groan
And you better forget about your wishing well
Way down Hadestown
Way down under the ground

The phrase “sing-sing cell” probably refers to the Sing Sing Prison, an American prison known for its poor living conditions until a progressive director took control in the 20th century. According to an article by Mark Gado, the name was an Americanization of “stone on stone” in a Native American language. If correct, this indicates that Orpheus thinks quite poorly of Hadestown.

Conclusion: Setting the Stage

The landscape of Hadestown sets the stage for a drama about the limits of human cruelty and compassion. The landscape of poverty and the division between haves and have-nots is elaborated quite early in the rock opera, complete with musical styles and imagery that evokes images of the Great Depression. For my next post, I will discuss how the interpretation of the speaking characters builds on this physical landscape of Hades.

Lyrics for All of the Songs

Places to Buy

Amazon.com
eMusic (subscription download site)
iTunes

Image credit: A cell in Sing Sing prison. Date Unknown. Library of Congress online catalog collection.