The musician who descended to the underworld to rescue his wife was Orpheus.
Orpheus was a legendary Greek poet and musician whose singing and lyre-playing were said to charm animals, trees, stones, and even the rulers of the dead. After his wife Eurydice died, he entered the underworld and performed music so moving that Hades and Persephone agreed to let her return with him.
The condition was that Orpheus must walk ahead and not look back until both had reached the upper world. Near the exit, overcome by doubt or longing, he turned around while Eurydice was still below. She vanished a second time, and the chance to restore her was lost forever.
The familiar version is especially associated with Virgil and Ovid, but earlier traditions about Orpheus’s underworld journey differ. Plato presents the episode more skeptically, suggesting that the gods showed him only an apparition. Orpheus is also linked with Jason and the Argonauts, and his story inspired operas, poems, films, and the modern musical Hadestown.