Relistening to the Hadestown soundtrack a lot recently and you know what. I think one of the biggest things that ultimately doomed Orpheus is he changed the shape of his song and his resistance to please Hades. He's "working on a song" that "isn't finished yet", but when he DOES finish it, who is the audience for that song? Not the people he's trying to free, but the God he's trying to take his lover back from.
Epic I is mostly about setting the scene if like, any audience members happened to NOT know the story of Orpheus/Euridyce, but it's still directly critical of Hades. Hades saw her, he wanted her, he fell in love with her because of how she moved in the sun, and the shape of his wanting necessities someone else's deprivation. So he took her where "the sun never shone on anyone", and the world was worse off until she won her 6 months of freedom.
Epic II is the most directly critical of Hades. He is "king of silver, king of gold", king of "everything glithering under the earth", and his capitalist hunger means that will never be enough. Epic II emphasizes Hades' jealousy that someone he wants could ever want to be somewhere else, even temporarily, his exploitation of workers, how the riches that he violently guards only exist because of "a million hands that are not his own".
But Epic III? Epic III is the story defanged. Hades fell in love. It takes away his agency and his responsibility in his own cruelty. It pays deference to him as king put quickly pivots to framing him as just "a poor boy", "afraid", versus a God. but he was always a God! Orpheus tries to reach him by appealing to Hades' view of himself -- a hard worker, laboring thanklessly for the woman he adores, the woman he fights for. He tries to reach him by helping Hades remember love. And it... doesn't work. It can't work.
Hades will never let him go. He will "let them try", but he rigs the game and lays the stakes, and more importantly by capitulating to Hades' rules and agreeing to play the game on Hades' terms and reshaping his song to please the very God he is trying to outsmart, Orpheus loses himself, and he loses the strength and resiliance needed to take Euridyce (and the other Workers!) home.
Something something about how art can be people power and resistance and revolution, but it is also so easy for that resistance to be taken and twisted away from us. It's so easy for that power to be freely given, by us, in some hopeful-hopeless attempt to win over people who will never, ever simply allow us to leave. And how that process systematically removes any real power our art and voices once had because when you play by their rules, you lose. "It's an old tale, it's a tragedy".
And I say all of this knowing that Hadestown itself is has now become a comercial product. Sure we sing it again and again and again, but can we take it back? Once we give it away. Can we take it back?
