scholarly journals E’ lecito ai poeti alterar le favole: The story of Dido according to Giovan Battista Busenello

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (11) ◽  
pp. 103-111
Author(s):  
Alessia Maria Scalera
Keyword(s):  
Happy Ending ◽  
Henry Purcell ◽  
Death Wish ◽  
Fourth Book

The aim of this paper is to analyze the rewriting of Dido’s myth by Giovan Battista Busenello, the librettist of the first opera named after the queen of Carthage. The imposing regality of Dido and the highly dramatic tension of the Aeneid are absent in Busenello’s libretto. Interestingly, if in the fourth book of the Virgilian poem Dido kills herself with Aeneas’ sword, in the final act of the opera she marries Iarbas, king of Gaetulians. Poignantly, in her only aria Dido sings her rejection of Iarbas’ advances, instead of her death wish or her sorrow for Aeneas’ departure. The tragic éthos we expect of Dido surfaces in two other characters in the opera, Hecuba and Cassandra, specifically through their laments. The basso lines of their laments call to mind the formal archetype at the heart of the famous Dido’s lament, Dido’s aria in Dido and Eneas, composed by Henry Purcell forty-eight years after the Didone. In that way, Hecuba and Cassandra constitute the actual tragic characters in the Didone, while, conversely, Dido is granted a happy ending, a deviation from the source just as peculiar as its author.

Memento Mori: Gary Lease and the Study of Religion

2009 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-156
Author(s):  
Nancy Levene
Keyword(s):  
Social Support ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Support Structures ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Happy Ending ◽  
Memento Mori ◽  
Death Wish ◽  
Object Of Study

AbstractGary Lease wrote vividly about the entanglement of religion and power, pursuing critical histories of religious claims and their social support structures. He sought to replace a standard story of religion's ubiquity (often coupled with an attitude of approval) with a much darker version of the human desires and conflicts embedded in, and masking as, religious discourse. But Lease seems to have been fundamentally ambivalent about the object in question. Is it "religion," namely the ideological dynamics deployed by human beings to dominate one another (and themselves), or is it religion, a void or death wish at the heart of human existence, a now-refashioned ubiquity but without the happy ending? I claim that there are profound, and ultimately productive, ambivalences in Lease's attempt cleanly to circumscribe the object of study—ambivalences which makes him a vital interlocutor in the effort to move beyond conventional histories of religion and consciousness.

Sources bibliques dans l’oeuvre vocale religieuse de Henry Purcell

XVII-XVIII ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-176
Author(s):  
Laurent Simon
Keyword(s):  
Henry Purcell

The Ethics of Revenge and the Meanings of the Odyssey

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander C. Loney
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Careful Analysis ◽  
Happy Ending ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
Multiple Meanings

This book is the first in-depth examination of revenge in the Odyssey. The principal revenge plot of the Odyssey—Odysseus’ surprise return to Ithaca after twenty years away and his vengeance on Penelope’s suitors—is the act for which he is most celebrated. This story forms the backbone of the Odyssey. But is Odysseus’ triumph over the suitors as univocally celebratory as is often assumed? Does the poem contain and even suggest other, darker interpretations of Odysseus’ greatest achievement? This book offers a careful analysis of several other revenge plots in the Odyssey—those of Orestes, Poseidon, Zeus, and the suitors’ relatives. It shows how these revenge stories color one another with allusions (explicit and implicit) that connect them and invite audiences to interpret them in light of one another. These stories—especially Odysseus’ revenge upon the suitors—inevitably turn out to have multiple meanings. One plot of revenge slips into another as the offender in one story becomes a victim to be avenged in the next. As a result, Odysseus turns out to be a much more ambivalent hero than has been commonly accepted. And in the Odyssey’s portrayal, revenge is an unstable foundation for a community. Revenge also ends up being a tenuous narrative structure for an epic poem, as a natural end to cycles of vengeance proves elusive. This book offers a radical new reading of the seemingly happy ending of the poem.

Propertius, Greek Myth, and Virgil

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Heslin
Keyword(s):  
Near Neighbour ◽  
Greek Myth ◽  
Relative Dating ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
The Military ◽  
Working Out ◽  
Fourth Book

This book develops a new interpretation of Propertius’ use of Greek myth and of his relationship to Virgil, working out the implications of a revised relative dating of the two poets’ early works. It begins by examining from an intertextual perspective all of the mythological references in the first book of Propertius. Mythological allegory emerges as the vehicle for a polemic against Virgil over the question of which of them would be the standard-bearer for Alexandrian poetry at Rome. Virgil began the debate with elegy by creating a quasi-mythological figure out of Cornelius Gallus, and Propertius responded in kind: his Milanion, Hylas and several of his own Galluses respond primarily to Virgil’s Gallus. In the Georgics, Virgil’s Aristaeus and Orpheus are, in part, a response to Propertius; Propertius then responds in his second book via his own conception of Orpheus and Adonis. The polemic then took a different direction, in the light of Virgil’s announcement of his intention to write an epic for Octavian. Virgilian pastoral was no longer the antithesis of elegy, but its near neighbour. Propertius critiqued Virgil’s turn to epic in mythological terms throughout his second book, while also developing a new line of attack. Beginning in his second book and intensifying in his third, Propertius insinuated that Virgil’s epic in progress would turn out to be a tedious neo-Ennian annalistic epic on the military exploits of Augustus. In his fourth book, Propertius finally acknowledged the published Aeneid as a masterpiece; but by then Virgil’s death had brought an end to the fierce rivalry that had shaped Propertius’ career as a poet.

“Careful the Spell You Cast”

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Francis
Keyword(s):  
Sudden Death ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Moral Maturity ◽  
Happy Ending ◽  
The World ◽  
Children's Stories

WithInto the Woodswe enter an enchanted landscape that is beset, however, by lengthening shadows. The show, which starts as an ingenious retelling of some familiar children’s stories, darkens in tone as the characters face up to difficult decisions and sudden death. In this show Sondheim and Lapine do not just retell fairy tales; instead they examine why we tell stories and how they can be used to bring the listener to moral maturity, which means—and this is a recurring theme in Sondheim’s work—accepting the necessity of choice and learning not to rely on the world to provide you with a happy ending.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document