The Music of Tragedy offers a new approach to the study of classical Greek theater by examining the use of musical language, imagery, and performance in the late work of Euripides. Drawing on the ancient conception of mousikē, in which words, song, dance, and instrumental accompaniment were closely linked, Naomi Weiss emphasizes the interplay of performance and imagination—the connection between the chorus’s own live singing and dancing in the theater and the images of music-making that frequently appear in their songs. Through detailed readings of four plays, she argues that the mousikē referred to and imagined in these plays is central to the progression of the dramatic action and to ancient audiences’ experiences of tragedy itself. She situates Euripides’s experimentation with the dramaturgical effects of mousikē within a broader cultural context, and in doing so, she shows how he both continues the practices of his tragic predecessors and also departs from them, reinventing traditional lyric styles and motifs for the tragic stage.
