Reinventing the Past: Mendelssohn's Antigone and the Creation of an Ancient Greek Musical Language

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
JASON GEARY
Keyword(s):  
Original Poetry ◽  
Wind Band ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Ludwig Tieck ◽  
Male Chorus ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ancient Music ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn

ABSTRACT In 1841, Sophocles's Antigone was performed at the Prussian court theater with staging by Ludwig Tieck and music by Felix Mendelssohn. Commissioned by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, this production aimed to re-create aspects of Greek tragedy by, among other things, using J. J. Donner's 1839 metrical translation and having an all-male chorus sing the odes. Mendelssohn initially experimented with imitating the purported sound of ancient music by composing primarily unison choral recitative and limiting the accompaniment to flutes, tubas, and harps; but he quickly abandoned this approach in favor of a more traditional one. Yet despite his overall adherence to modern convention, he did employ several strategies to evoke ancient Greek practice and thus to meet the unique demands of the Prussian court production. Highlighting important distinctions between verse-types in the original poetry, Mendelssohn retained a vestige of his initial approach by composing unison choral recitative to indicate the presence of anapestic verse while turning to melodrama for the lyric verse of the play's two main characters. In addition, he reproduced the poetic meter by shaping the rhythm of the vocal line to reflect both the accentual pattern of Donner's translation and, in some cases, the long and short syllables of Sophocles's Greek verse. Owing largely to the irregular line lengths characteristic of Donner's text, the music is marked by conspicuously asymmetrical phrases, which serve to defamiliarize the otherwise straightforward choral styles being employed to convey the various moods of Sophocles's choruses. In the opening chorus, Mendelssohn alludes to the familiar sound of a Mäännerchor accompanied by a wind band, thereby suggesting the ode's celebratory and martial associations while recalling his own Festgesang written for the 1840 Leipzig festival commemorating the 400th anniversary of Gutenberg's printing press. The listener is thus presented with a thoroughly recognizable musical idiom and yet simultaneously distanced from it in a way that underscores the historical remoteness of ancient Greek tragedy.

scholarly journals Theatre as Sacrament

Ramus ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 42 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 5-22
Author(s):  
Paul Woodruff
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Framing Effect ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ethical Concept ◽  
Measured Time ◽  
The One ◽  
A Minor

All theatre is sacramental. A theatrical event establishes itself as theatre by setting aside a measured space as inviolable for a measured time. This framing effect of theatre is sacramental. Within the frame of theatre, other sacraments can be represented or performed. Part I of this paper develops conceptual distinctions necessary to understanding the sacramental in theatre, using an ethics-based theory of sacrament. Part II sets out to use the theory, applying it to open up new questions for the interpretation of ancient Greek tragedy, and using the theory to explain certain plot elements in Sophocles' Philoctetes and other plays.Any act of theatre has a sacramental effect. The art of theatre makes ceremonies possible, and by ceremonies we are able to make things sacred. In saying that theatre is sacramental, I am not saying that it is religious. Religious ceremonies employ the art of theatre and depend on that art, but theatre does not depend on religion. I understand sacrament as an ethical concept. A sacrament sets up an ethical hedge around something—makes it wrong to touch, to tread on, or to alter the thing in question.By ‘theatre’ I mean the art that makes action worth watching for a measured time in a measured space. This art must of necessity draw a line between watching and being watched. Drawing that line is a minor, though fundamental, sacrament. Other sacraments may take place within the frame of theatre. My theory of the sacramental in theatre stands on its usefulness for understanding and interpreting the elements of theatre—the experiences of both the watchers and the watched in actual productions, on the one hand, and, on the other, the texts that survive to represent productions of the past. If the theory is coherent and useful, then we should use it. Otherwise, not.

Touched by the Past

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
Richard Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Physical Contact ◽  
Analytic Model ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Holocaust Studies ◽  
The Past

Recent work on trauma, especially in the field of Holocaust studies, has tackled the question of how the “generation after” relates, and relates to, the trauma of its immediate ancestors as it navigates between the poles of remembrance and appropriation. Other studies have shifted focus towards the effects of trauma upon narration, in part through critiquing the prevailing psycho-analytic model of trauma as an unrepresentable event that evades/forecloses language. Aeschylus’ Suppliants, with its chorus of fifty female Danaids who react to their traumatic present by recourse to tales of the traumatic past of their ancestor Io and her son Epaphos (“Touch”), offers a productive stage for testing the applicability of these theoretical frames to the genre of ancient Greek tragedy. The Danaids’ turn to the past explores the agency of an ancestral trauma that reaches into their present, and in doing so highlights the unsteady inheritance of trauma both for those who relate and for those who witness these acts of testimony. The act of supplication itself is defined in part by physical contact between the suppliant and the supplicandus, yet this ritual emphasis on touch is amplified by the play’s consistent focus upon a series of real and hypothesized touches, from the traumatic to the salvific. Through this engagement with the haptic context of trauma and traumatic recall, Aeschylus’ play proposes an enlarged aetiology of touch—across cognitive, affective, and physical registers—for the ritual of supplication itself.

Classics and Contemporary Theatre

2006 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-244
Author(s):  
Helene Foley
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Contemporary Theatre ◽  
Greek Drama ◽  
Performance Space ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Status ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Status Of Women

Any discussion of ancient Greek and Roman drama on the contemporary stage must begin with a brief acknowledgment of both the radically increased worldwide interest in translating, (often radically) revising, and performing these plays in the past thirty-five years and the growing scholarly response to that development. Electronic resources are developing to record not only recent but many more past performances, from the Renaissance to the present.1 A group of scholars at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford—Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, Oliver Taplin, and their associates Pantelis Michelakis and Amanda Wrigley—are at the forefront, along with Lorna Hardwick and her associates at the U.K.'s Open University, in organizing conferences and lecture series; these have already resulted in several volumes that aim to understand the recent explosion of performances as well as to develop a more extensive picture of earlier reception of Greek and Roman drama (above all, Greek tragedy, to which this essay will be largely confined).2 These scholars, along with others, have also tried to confront conceptual issues involved in the theatrical reception of classical texts.3 Most earlier work has confined itself to studies of individual performances and adaptations or to significant directors and playwrights; an important and exemplary exception is Hall and Macintosh's recent Greek Tragedy and British Theatre 1660–1914.4 This massive study profits from an unusually advantageous set of archival materials preserved in part due to official efforts to censor works presented on the British stage. Oedipus Rex, for example, was not licensed for a professional production until 1910 due to its scandalous incest theme. This study makes a particular effort to locate performances in their social and historical contexts, a goal shared by other recent studies of postcolonial reception discussed below.5 For example, British Medeas, which repeatedly responded to controversies over the legal and political status of women, always represented the heroine's choice to kill her children as forced on her from the outside rather than as an autonomous choice. Such connections between the performance of Greek tragedy and historical feminism have proved significant in many later contexts worldwide. Work on the aesthetic side of performances of Greek drama, including translation, is at an earlier stage, but has begun to take advantage of important recent work on ancient staging, acting, and performance space.6

scholarly journals Bodies Out of Time: Sculpting Queer Poetics and Queering Classical Sculpture in the Poetry of C. P. Cavafy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. L. Watson
Keyword(s):  
Raw Material ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Poetry ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
The Past ◽  
Greek World

AbstractTwo major themes dominate the poetry of the Alexandrian poet, C. P. Cavafy: homosexual desire and Greekness, broadly defined. This paper explores the interconnectivity of these motifs, showing how Cavafy’s poetic queerness is expressed through his relationship with the ancient Greek world, especially Hellenistic Alexandria. I focus on Cavafy’s incorporation of ancient sculpture into his poetry and the ways that sculpture, for Cavafy, is a vehicle for expressing forbidden desires in an acceptable way. In this, I draw on the works of Liana Giannakopoulou on statuary in modern Greek poetry and Dimitris Papanikolaou on Cavafy’s homosexuality and its presentation in the poetry. Sculpture features in around a third of Cavafy’s poems and pervades it in various ways: the inclusion of physical statues as focuses of ecphrastic description, the use of sculptural language and metaphor, and the likening of Cavafy’s beloveds to Greek marbles of the past, to name but three. This article argues that Cavafy utilizes the statuary of the ancient Greek world as raw material, from which he sculpts his modern Greek queerness, variously desiring the statuesque bodies of contemporary Alexandrian youths and constructing eroticized depictions of ancient Greek marbles. The very ontology of queerness is, for Cavafy, ‘created’ using explicitly sculptural metaphors (e.g. the repeated uses of the verb κάνω [‘to make’] in descriptions of ‘those made like me’) and he employs Hellenistic statues as a productive link between his desires and so-called ‘Greek desire’, placing himself within a continuum of queer, Greek men.

The Living Art of Greek Tragedy. By Marianne McDonald. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003; pp. 224. $15.95 paper.

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-168
Author(s):  
Edmund P. Cueva
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Indiana University

Marianne McDonald's book provides a solid introduction to ancient tragedy and theatre. The author examines the works by the three major ancient Greek tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and supplies for each playwright biographies, synopses of their works, and modern and ancient translations and adaptations of their plays. The listing of the translations and adaptations is selective and spans from the classical period up to the twentieth century.

scholarly journals And did those hooves: Pan and the Edwardians

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Eleanor Toland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Sexual Revolution ◽  
World War ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
World War One ◽  
Peter Pan ◽  
Major Work ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

<p>A surprisingly high number of the novels, short stories and plays produced in Britain during the Edwardian era (defined in the terms of this thesis as the period of time between 1900 and the beginning of World War One) use the Grecian deity Pan, god of shepherds, as a literary motif. Writers as diverse as Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster, Frances Hodgson Burnett and G.K. Chesterton made Pan a fictional character or alluded to the god of shepherds in more subtle ways. The mystery of why the Edwardians used an ancient Greek god as a symbol requires a profound interrogation of the early twentieth century British soul. The Edwardian era was a narrow corridor of time between the Victorian age and the birth of modernism with the First World War, a period characterised by vast social and political transition, as a generation began to comprehend change they equally feared and desired. Pan was an equivocal figure: easily portrayed as satanic due to his horns and goatish nature, but as the kindly god of shepherds, also a Christ-like figure. Such ambiguity made Pan an ideal symbol for an age unsure of itself and its future. Writers like Maugham and Machen, afraid of social and sexual revolution, portrayed Pan as diabolical, a tempter and a rapist. E.M. Forster, a homosexual man hopeful about the possibility of change, made Pan a terrifying but ultimately liberating figure for those ready to accept the freedom he represented. Kenneth Grahame, desiring the return of a Luddite, Arcadian past that had never truly existed, wrote of Pan as Jesus on the riverbank, sheltering the lost and giving mystic visions to the worthy. Pan represented a simultaneous craving in the Edwardians to flee to the past and to embrace the future, an idealism of the primitive coupled with hope for the future. What he also symbolized was anxiety about the future and the desire to not return to the horrors of the past, fears of the primitive suggested in the nightmarish atavism of Saki’s “The Music on the Hill” and the fears of what society might become expressed in Forster’s “The Machine Stops”. The Edwardian Pan eventually reached its culmination in J.M. Barrie’s twentieth-century fairy tale Peter Pan, in which the eponymous character, seeming at first so different from the ancient Greek mythological figure, became an embodiment of everything the Edwardian Pan phenomenon represented. With the nightmarish yet fascinating figure of Peter Pan, the Edwardians had created a new Pan, reborn for their age. With the beginning of World War One, the Pan figure would begin to fade into insignificance, with only one major work later published which could justifiably be called part of the phenomenon; Lord Dunsany’s The Blessing of Pan, a fitting elegy for the Edwardian Age.</p>

Introduction

Ladies' Greek ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yopie Prins
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Collective Identification ◽  
Victorian Women ◽  
Greek Alphabet ◽  
Women Of Letters

This book examines why Victorian women of letters such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sara Coleridge, and Virginia Woolf self-consciously performed collective identification with Greek letters and showed literary interest in their translations of with Greek tragedy. It considers how these women engaged with ideas about classical antiquity, and how much they contributed to the idealization of all things Greek. It discusses the ways in which women learned to read the Greek alphabet, to discover all the letters between alpha and omega, and how they turned ancient Greek into a language of and for desire. The book argues that nineteenth-century women writers turned to tragedy in particular as a literary genre for the performance of female classical literacy, and that their passionate reading of Greek led them into various forms of translation. Five tragedies are analyzed to elucidate the legacy of Ladies' Greek: Agamemnon and Prometheus Bound, Electra, Hippolytus, and Bacchae.

The Narrative Imperative in the Films of Theo Angelopoulos

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Eades
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Artistic Heritage

This chapter examines the development of what it calls the ‘narrative imperative’ in Theo Angelopoulos' films such as Eternity and a Day, Megalexandros and Ulysses' Gaze. Throughout Angelopoulos' career as a filmmaker, the place and nature of literary references progressively superseded references to other forms of the ancient Greek artistic heritage and contributed to establishing a progressive drive towards a narrative imperative in his creative process. This imperative in Angelopoulos' most recent films consists in subjecting the function and signification of images, mise en scène, even music, to the advancement of the plot, the characterisation of its protagonists and the construction of a diegetic world. The chapter argues that the narrative imperative in Angelopoulos' modernist cinema is a driving force behind the numerous explicit references to Greek tragedy and Homeric epic.

Gilding American History through Song Culture in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)

2018 ◽  
pp. 65-82
Author(s):  
Ryan Platte
Keyword(s):  
Technological Change ◽  
American History ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
American South ◽  
Folk Song ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The Past ◽  
Epochal Change ◽  
Depression Era

In the first of two chapters investigating the role of Homeric epic in fabricating golden ages, Platte reveals how Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which proclaims its debt to Homer’s Odyssey in the opening credits, also re-enacts Homeric epic’s creation of a golden age. Platte focuses on the role of song in generating ancient and modern societies’ gilded memories of the past, including the nostalgia-laden misremembering of the Depression-era American South in which the film is set. Platte emphasizes how technological change affected the American folk-song tradition through recording – a phenomenon similar to that which changed Greek song culture into “Homeric” epic. By focusing on a moment of epochal change, the filmmakers undercut the notion that folk music is a simple and genuine artefact of the past. Instead, invoking nostalgia through song exposes the artificiality of the traffic in nostalgia, which has shaped attitudes toward the ancient Greek and modern American pasts. Through the protagonist’s encounter with two Homer avatars, the Coens dramatize both the process of nostalgia-creation for such a golden age and the rejection of attempts to politically weaponize it: in this case, by obscuring racism in romantic depictions of the “Old South.”

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document