“To Give Greece Back to the Greeks”

Eva Palmer Sikelianos, along with her husband, the poet Angehlos Sikelianos, founded the first modern Delphic Festival in 1927 in an effort to revive the ancient Greek rites that had taken place on that spot more than twenty-five hundred years before. This chapter explores Palmer Sikelianos’s choreography, rituals, music, and dramaturgy for her reconstructed Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus in light of her research on ancient Greek culture, conducted in both Paris and modern Greece. Based on silent film records of Palmer Sikelianos’s 1930 festival, her autobiography, her collaborations with Natalie Clifford Barney on Greek-themed theatricals in the early 1900s, and comparisons to the movement vocabulary and other contemporary stagings of ancient Greek festivals and sport, the chapter demonstrates how Palmer Sikelianos navigated between the needs and methods of the archaeologist and those of the performer. She blended the oldest sources on ancient Greek ritual music and dance that she could find with what she saw as an authentic “spirit” of Greek culture that she observed in modern Greek society. Her performances drew from archival/archaeological courses (ancient treatises, dance iconography) and lived practices (folk song, modern dance, Byzantine chant traditions). Like the Ballets Russes’s re-enactment of ancient Greece in Daphnis et Cholé and L’Après-midi d’un Fauné and pagan Rus’s in Le Sacre du printemps [The Rite of Spring], Palmer Sikelianos’s project to re-enact “authentic” Greek theater and choreography illustrates that theories of theatrical historical reconstruction in the early twentieth century were heavily influence by contemporary theatrical, political, and social events.

Gabriel Fauré and Théodore Reinach

This chapter focuses on archaeologist and music scholar Théodore Reinach’s collaboration with composer Gabriel Fauré. In 1894 Reinach asked the composer to create an instrumental accompaniment to a recently discovered second-century BCE hymn dedicated to Apollo in Delphi. Reinach, along with other scholars from the French school of Athens, deciphered the Greek notation from the marble tablets, and Fauré wrote a modern accompaniment to the original melody. For Reinach, the need to re-enact antiquity transcended scholarly interest in his personal life. Reinach not only reconstructed ancient Greek music, but also built a replica ancient Greek villa in the south of France (with a modern piano hidden behind an ancient cabinet) in order to live out his ancient Greek fantasies. This chapter uses the metaphor of the modern piano hidden behind the ancient veneer of the cabinet to explore the ways modern aesthetics lurk underneath the scientific reconstructions of ancient music carried out by Reinach in the 1890s and 1910s.

Scholars and Their Objects of Study; or, Loving Your Subject

This concluding chapter directly addresses the relationship between scholars and their objects of study. In two parts, it looks at the relationship between the Parisian archaeologist and art historian Salomon Reinach and Natalie Clifford Barney before turning to analysis of contemporary collaborations between musicologists/dance historians and performers. To better understand ancient Greek artistic and social life, Reinach (the scholar) attached himself to Barney (the living embodiment of the past) and the queer women who performed pseudo-ancient Greek music and dance at her Parisian home (namely, the dancers Régina Badet and Liane de Pougy). Their correspondence reveals a complex system of reciprocity in the relationship among the scholar, his object of study, and the individuals with the power to embody the past through performance. The Barney-Reinach relationship reminds us to continually interrogate the ways musicologists perform scholarship today. As musicologists engage more in the creative realizations of their scholarly projects, and as musicological arguments find their way into performances, the negotiations between the performer and the scholar in the days when the discipline of musicology was forming will prove insightful. Recent calls for a reparative instead of a paranoid musicology emphasize the role of love in the work of music studies. The conclusion echoes calls for a reparative mode of scholarship, but one that doesn’t ignore the blinding power of that love.

Performing Sappho’s Fractured Archive, or Listening for the Queer Sounds in the Life and Works of Natalie Clifford Barney

This chapter excavates the remaining traces of pseudo-ancient Greek musical and dance performance that took place in Natalie Clifford Barney’s Parisian home in the first decades of the twentieth century. Barney’s discovery of Greek antiquity came about at the same time that she became aware of her own sexual identity. She perceived a freedom in the culture of ancient Lesbos and Athens that she felt was lacking in early twentieth-century American and French culture, and she used her passion for studying ancient Greek poetry under the tutelage of the best Greek scholars in Paris to channel both her creative and erotic interests in a very public way. This chapter focuses on the alterity of queer performance and reception within Barney’s Parisian circle by exploring how queer performance and identity were mapped in her cultural salon. The evidence of these performances remains in fragments, scattered across public and private collections, preserved in photographs, memoirs, letters, and anecdotes told third-hand. The chapter draws on theories of performance and queerness to make sense of the archival materials relating to re-enactment of ancient Greek dance and music hosted at the heiress’s home. This illustrates the role of ancient Greek–inspired music and dance in defining queer subjectivity in early twentieth-century Parisian salons. In piecing together fragments, this chapter offers new ways for musicologists to think about performance and the archive.

Musicology, Archaeology, Performance

This introduction provides historical and theoretical context and sets up the key questions explored in the book, including issues of authenticity and historically informed performance in musicology and methods of performance studies that can be employed by musicology. It introduces two new ways of thinking about the performance of the musical past: re-enactment and reperformance. The introduction also highlights the theoretical methodologies by examining in parallel the historiography of musicology, archaeology, and photography in Paris in the 1890s and the first decades of the 1900s. It examines the tools and methods used throughout the book as well as those of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars.

Performing Scholarship for the Paris Opéra

This chapter examines an opera based on an ancient Greek subject created by two scholars of ancient Greek music, dance, and history: Maurice Emmanuel, a composer, musicologist, and dance historian specializing in ancient Greek music and dance, and Théodore Reinach, a librettist, archaeologist, musicologist, classicist, and numismatician. It begins by outlining and critiquing Emmanuel’s relevant scholarly contributions to the reconstruction of ancient Greek dance and contributions to musicology. It then demonstrates how tensions between conflicting trends manifested in the 1929 production of Emmanuel’s opera Salamine, with choreography by Nicola Guerra and a libretto by Théodore Reinach based on Aeschylus’s The Persians. During this time the Opéra had a eurhythmic dance section, a style that Emmanuel and critics such as André Levinson viewed with skepticism. In contrast to the Greek inspirations of Duncanism, Delsartism, and eurhythmics, Levinson used Emmanuel’s research to argue that classical ballet was the true inheritor of the ancient Greek tradition. Exploring Emmanuel’s aesthetics of dance (ancient and modern) affords a unique opportunity to see how these creative media were theorized and practiced during the eurhythmic years, while illustrating some of the conflicts between abstract and embodied knowledge.