Classical mythology in music and film: Part 1

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It is impossible in a brief compass to survey with any kind of justice the use of mythology in the field of music. The topic is too vast, rich, and important. We attempt here merely to suggest the significance and vitality of Greek and Roman inspiration in this area as well as to introduce (to those for whom an introduction may be necessary) a whole fascinating world to be explored with joy and profit. The genre of opera provides the most obvious and significant focal point for the most cursory discussion. Emphasis is placed upon works that may be seen or heard in contemporary performances; fortunately the ever expanding repertoires of the recording companies are making the more esoteric works available for entertainment and study. One should have by one's side the latest issue of the Schwann Long Playing Record Catalog. Music was an art inherent in the culture of ancient Greece and Rome. Drama, for example, was rooted in music and the dance and its origins were religious. Music is again linked with drama, and again the impetus is religious, in the liturgical mystery and miracle plays of the Middle Ages. During the Renaissance, with its veneration of antiquity, tragedy and comedy were often inspired by Greek and Roman originals and quite elaborate musical choruses and interludes were sometimes added. But the years ushering in the Baroque period (ca. 1600-1750) must provide the real beginning for our survey. In 1581 Vincenzo Galilei (father of the renowned astronomer) as the spokesman for the Camerata, a literary and artistic society of Florence, published his Dialogo della Musica Antica e della Moderna. The revolutionary goals of the Camerata were inspired by a reaction against the prevailing polyphonic style of music- intricate and multitextured in its counterpoint, with words sung by several voices to create a tapestry of sound.

The texts that were set to music in this way could not be understood; Galilei suggested a return to the simplicity of ancient Greek music and drama. Now Galilei and company knew very little about the actual musical setting of a Greek play by Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides- and for that matter we do not know much more. But they believed that ancient drama was sung in its entirety, not realizing fully the distinction between the episodes and choral interludes. We can agree, however, that Greek musical settings must have been simple in terms of instrumentation and melodic harmony. Choral music was generally accompanied by the aulos, or auloi (double pipe)-often translated as flute but actually more akin to a modem oboe. Thus the Camerata argued that words should be clearly heard and understood and the melodic line should reflect and underscore the meaning and emotion of the text.

Their new style was appropriately labeled monodic as opposed to polyphonic; it represents in large part the declamatory element that will survive in opera as recitativo, or recitative, the spoken dialogue accompanied by music of various kinds depending on period and composer, to be distinguished from the set melodic pieces-arias, duets, trios, and so on. Members of the Camerata produced in 1594 or 1597 what may be called the first opera; its title Dafne and its theme reflect the spell cast by the ancient world. Ottavio Rinuccini wrote the text (which is still extant); Jacopo Peri composed the music, with the help of Jacopo Corsi (some of his music alone survives), and Giulio Caccini may have contributed as well. A second opera, Euridice, followed, which has survived and on occasion receives scholarly revivals. Peri again wrote most of the score, but apparently Caccini added some music and then composed another Euridice of his own.

The first great genius in the history of this new form was Claudio Monteverdi; his first opera Orfeo (1607) lifts the musical and dramatic potential initiated by his predecessors to the level of great art that can be appreciated to this day. The subjects of some of his subsequent works reveal the power and impetus provided by Greece and Rome. Arianna (her "lament" is all that survives; it was a hit in its day); Tirse e Clori; I1 Matrirnonio dYAlceste con Admeto; Adone; Le Nozze d'Enea con Laoinia; I1 Aitorno d'Ulisse in Patria. His opera perhaps best known to modern audiences, L'lncoronazione di Poppea, is based upon Romanhistory. Monteverdi's pupil, Cavalli, wrote over forty operas. Among his best-known are Giasone (1649), concerning the legend of Jason, and Ercole Amante (1662). His contemporary, Marc Antonio Cesti, is said to have composed over one hundred operas; of the eleven surviving (all from the years 1649-1669), 11 Pomo d'Oro, which deals with the contest for the Apple of Discord, was the most famous- a superspectacle in five acts and sixty-six scenes, including several ballets in each act and requiring twenty-four separate stage sets. And thus opera developed in Italy.

The list of composers is long and the bibliography of their many works inspired by classical antiquity impressive; particularly startling is the number of repetitions of favorite subjects. Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725) in the years following emerges as one of the more vital and influential forces in music; his son, Domenico, who became famous for his composition of keyboard music, also wrote operas on Greek and Roman themes. Many of the operatic composers of the early period wrote cantatas as well. But as examples of this musical form, we shall mention two works by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) in the catalogue of his secular cantatas. Some of these he himself entitled dramma per musica, and modern critics have gone so far as to label them "operettas." In cantata 201 (Der Streit zwischen Phoebus und Pan) Bach presents the contest between Phoebus and Pan as a musical satire against a hostile critic of his works, Johann Adolph Scheibe. The text is derived from Ovid's version. Mt. Tmolus and Momus, god of mirth, award the victory to Pan, while Midas is punished with a pair of ass's ears. Cantata 213 (Hercules auf dem Scheidewege) depicts Hercules at the crossroads; he rejects the blandishments of Pleasure in favor of the hardship, virtue, and renown promised to him by Virtue.

The more familiar Christmas Oratorio presents a reworking of the musical themes of this cantata. In England during the Baroque period, plays with incidental music and ballet became very much the fashion; such productions, inevitably influenced by foreign developments, led eventually to the evolution of opera in a more traditional sense. John Blow wrote (ca. 1684) a musical-dramatic composition, Venus and Adonis. Although the work bears the subtitle "A masque for the entertainment of the king," it is in reality a pastoral opera constructed along the most simple lines. But it was Blow's pupil, Henry Purcell, who created a masterpiece that has become one of the landmarks in the history of opera, Dido and Aeneas (ca. 1689). The work was composed for Josias Priest's Boarding School for Girls in Chelsea; the libretto by Nahum Tate comes from Book 4 of Vergil's Aeneid. The artful economy and tasteful blending of the various elements have often been admired in Purcell's score. Dido's lament as she breathes her last surely must be one of the most noble and touching arias ever written: When I am laid in earth, may my wrongs create No trouble in thy breast. Remember me, but ah! forget my fate. In France operatic development was very much influenced by spectacle and ballet as well as by the works of dramatists like Corneille and Racine. Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), a giant in the

development of opera in general and of French opera in particular, worked with MoliGre in the composition of opera-ballets. In 1673 'Lully produced Cadmus et Hermione in collaboration with the poet Phillippe Quinault; this was the first of a series of fifteen such tragic operas (twelve of them to texts by Quinault). Some of the other titles confirm the extent of the debt to Greece and Rome: Alceste, Thbsbe, Atys, Proserpine, Persbe, Phabton, Acis et Galatbe. Jean- Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) was the most significant heir to the mantle of Lully. He too created many operas and opera-ballets on Greek and Roman themes, for example, Hippolyte et Aricie, Castor et Pollux, Dardanus, Les Fgtes d'Hbbb. George Frederic Handel (1685-1759) was one of the greatest composers of the first half of the eighteenth century with a musical idiom that was international and universal. He was a prolific musician and although the general public knows him primarily for his oratorios, he was very much concerned during much of his career with the composition of operas. In fact many of his oratorios are operatic in nature, and his operas often strike the modern listener as oratorio-like in their structure and movement.

Certainly several of his oratorios are on secular themes, intended for the concert hall and in spirit much closer to the theater than to the church, and some deal with mythology, for example, Sernele and Hercules. Handel wrote forty operas, but many are little known today because they are not in fashion. Standard criticism complains'about the stylization, the lack of drama, and the complexity and absurdity of the plots. Fortunately, they are more frequently revived to reveal the abundant beauties and subtleties that they contain. Many of Handel's operas are historically orientated, for example, Attone, Agrippina, Giulio Cesare, Serse; some are more strictly mythological-Acis and Galatea (a pastorale), Admeto, and Deidarnia. Christoph Willibald Gluck is the composer of the earliest opera to maintain any kind of regularity in the standard repertoire, Orfeo ed Euridice (first version 1762). This beautiful work, restrained in its passion and exquisite in its melody, remains one of the most artistically rewarding settings of this eternal myth. The libretto, by Raniero Calzabigi, proved a great help to Gluck, whose avowed purpose was to compose music that would best serve the poetry and the plot. Musical extravaganzas with artificial and even absurd plots and the immoderate intrusion of ballet and spectacle had become only too fashionable; and lesser composers complacently succumbed to the whims and demands of vain artists and vulgar audiences. As a result Gluck, along with the poet Calzabigi, desperately felt a need for reform.

It was appropriate that Gluck should resort to the same theme as that of his idealistic predecessors. Orpheus' arias expressing his anguish at the loss of his wife, Che puro ciel and Che far8 senza Euridice, well illustrate the highest embodiment of these ideals. In the first performance of Gluck's opera, Orfeo was sung by a castrate-a male who had been castrated and therefore could sing soprano and who undertook both male and female roles. But Gluck wrote a second, French version of his opera for production in Paris in 1774 and reworked the role for a tenor. He is now usually sung by a mezzo-soprano or contralto. Gluck again worked with Calzabigi for Alceste, derived from Euripides' 'play (first version 1767), another impressive achievement more monumental in character than Orfeo, but nevertheless equally touching in its nobility and sentiment. Their third collaboration, Paride ed Elena(1770), was a failure. -Subsequent operas by Gluck were Zphigbnie en Aulide, Iphigbnie en Tauride, and Echo et Narcisse. Niccolb (or Nicola) Piccinni, a rival of Gluck (they were both commissioned by the French Opera to write an Orfeo), composed over a hundred operas, many of them on classical subjects. Gluck's new style greatly influenced Maria Luigi Cherubini, who also turned to ancient mythology.

His Mbdbe (1797) is sometimes revived for a prima donna of the caliber of Maria Callas or Magda Olivero, who can meet the technical and histrionic demands of the title role. Another of Gluck's many and far-reaching influences was on Antonio Sacchini, who wrote Dardanus (1784) and a popular masterwork, Oedipe a Colone (1786). The two musical giants of the second half of the eighteenth century, Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, were not generally drawn to Greek and Roman subjects. But Haydn's Olfeo ed Euridice (1791) is considered by many to be the finest of his many operas, and Mozart's Idomeneo, RB di Creta (1781) is a fascinating, although imperfect, masterpiece, well worth investigation, as is his "theatre serenade," Ascanio in Alba (1771). Other youthful works by Mozart deal with Roman history as legend: Mitridate, RB di Ponto (1770), based upon Racine's play about King Mithridates, and I1 Sogno di Scipione (1772). The latter, a serenata, has a text by Metastasio, derived from Cicero's Somnium Scipionis (Dream of Scipio), wherein Scipio Aemelianus has a vision of an Elysium that is Platonic to be sure but also, in its chauvinism and substance, very much like the Elysium of Vergil.

Also by Mozart (when only eleven years old) is a short opera, Apollo et Hyacinthus (1767). The Latin text by Father Rufinus Wid1 transforms this famous tale of homosexual passion into a romantic, heterosexual triangle: Zephyrus (West Wind) falls in love with Hyacinthus' sister, who also happens to be the beloved of Apollo. Mozart's much loved and admired opera, The Magic Flute (1791), is significant for the mythographer because of its Masonic symbolism and motifs. The matriarchal Queen of the Night, the ritual worship of Isis and Osiris, and the ordeals that the hero Tamino must endure for the revelation of the Mysteries all represent universal, thematic patterns. Ludwig von Beethoven, another of the very great composers, found some direct influence from Greece and Rome. His Coriolanus overture (1807), inspired by the legendary Roman hero, might be mentioned; more to the point is his ballet music The Creatures of Prometheus (1801). The thematic material of this work seems in a special way to epitomize the indomitable spirit of the composer. He arranged it as a set of variations for piano and it appears again in the final movement of his great third symphony (the Eroica). The whole aura of defiance conjured up by the romantic image of the life and music of Beethoven is strikingly parallel to that evoked by the Titan Prometheus. At any rate, Beethoven's career (1770-1827) provides the chronological and spiritual link between eighteenth-century Classicism and nineteenth-century Romanticism. The German lied of the nineteenth century embodies much of the passion and longing that are the exquisite torture and delight of the Romantic soul. The musical mood runs parallel to that of the Stum und Drang movement in literature as typified by the works of Goethe. Several of the songs of Franz Schubert (1797-1828), for example, are set to poems on ancient themes: Der Atlas, Fahrt zum Hades, Orest auf Tauris, Der zurnenden Diana, Fragment aus dem Aeschylus (a chorus from the Eumenides), Memnon, Philoktet, and Orpheus. Also by Schubert are two lovely duets Hektors Abschied and Antigone und Oedip.

Two songs by a later Romantic composer, Hugo Wolf (1860-1903), Prometheus and Ganymed, are staples of the lieder repertoire. On the other hand, his one symphonic work, a tone poem entitled Penthesilea, is an interesting piece of program music that is not so well known. Other interesting examples of the genre of the symphonic poem are offered by Franz Liszt (1811- 1886), Orpheus and Prometheus, and by C6sar Franck (1822-1890), Psych& The operatic achievements of the nineteenth century are among its most conspicuous glories, but Greek and Roman themes no longer generally held the vogue that they once had. Many of the illustrious composers of the period (the list is impressive) remained virtually untouched by traditional classical motifs, for example, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Giaochino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, Vincenzo Bellini, Giuseppe Verdi, Carl-Maria von Weber, Richard Wagner. Yet Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen offers exciting parallels for the study of classical mythology, particularly since he was so profoundly influenced by the Oresteia of Aeschylus. Operas like Bellini's Norma (the tragic story of a Druid priestess) are, it is true, built upon Roman legendaj themes, but such an exception only brings home to us more forcefully the changes being wrought in subject matter and style. But as always it is rash to generalize too broadly.