Eumenides

Album: Violet Cries (2011)
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Songfacts®:

  • The Eumenides is a Greek tragedy in which Orestes goes before an Athens court to decide whether his murder of his mother makes him worthy of the torment the Eumenides [the three Furies of ancient Greece] have inflicted upon him. In 1944 the Irish-born artist Francis Bacon painted Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, a triptych based on The Eumenides. Esben & The Witch's Daniel Copeman explained to Spin magazine that it was Bacon's three-sectioned painting that inspired the song: "I first saw the Eumenides in a Bacon triptych, so we had the idea of a song in three different movements. We're invariably trying to write music to tie to an idea or an image."
  • The American Rock supergroup A Perfect Circle's song "Orestes" is another take on this Greek myth.

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