-
Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to Cambridge Opera
Journal.
http://www.jstor.org
The Doleful Airs of Euripides: The Origins of Opera and the
Spirit of Tragedy Reconsidered Author(s): Blair Hoxby Source:
Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Nov., 2005), pp.
253-269Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3878297Accessed: 09-03-2015 18:09
UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the
Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars,
researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information
technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new
forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please
contact [email protected].
This content downloaded from 130.104.144.135 on Mon, 09 Mar 2015
18:09:32 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
Cambridge Opera Journal, 17, 3, 253-269 () 2005 Cambridge
University Press doi:10.1017/S0954586706002035
The doleful airs of Euripides: The origins of opera and the
spirit of tragedy reconsidered
BLAIR HOXBY
Abstract: Scholarly consensus denies a real connection between
ancient tragedy and early opera because music historians have
measured early operas against an idealised conception of Attic
tragedy. However, the pioneers of opera were seeking to revive a
Euripidean style of musical tragedy as it was performed in the
'decadent' theatres of the Hellenistic era. Euripides's tragedies
established conventional relationships between musical expression
and the represen- tation of the passions. Baroque opera is seen as
a strongly complex reading of a set of Euripidean tragedies that
enjoyed favour in the Hellenistic era but fell from critical grace
in the nineteenth century. These plays hold the key to opera's
tragic pretensions; the esteem they long enjoyed should prompt us
to reconsider the spirit of tragedy and the nature of
catharsis.
In their prefaces to Euridice (1600), the first surviving opera,
the poet Ottavio Rinuccini and composer Jacopo Peri appealed to the
opinion 'of many' that the ancient Greeks and Romans 'sang their
tragedies throughout on the stage' and explained why they thought
the ancients must have sung their plays in a manner something like
Peri's stile recitativo.1 As if to announce the genre of their
work, they chose Tragedy herself to sing the Prologue.2 In a
counterbid to claim priority for the invention of the 'new music',
Giulio Caccini recalled in his preface to a rival setting of the
libretto that the 'noble virtuosi' who gathered years earlier at
Giovanni Bardi's house had even then declared his style of singing
'to be that used by the ancient Greeks when introducing songs into
the presentations of their tragedies'.3 Whether or not we accept
Caccini's claim at face value, there can be little doubt that
Bardi's prote6ges Vincenzo Galilei and Giulio Caccini - and after
them Jacopo Corsi's protegees Rinuccini and Peri - were inspired to
undertake their practical experiments with monodic songs and
recitative by two ideas that Girolamo Mei circulated among the
learned elite of Florence: that ancient tragedies had been sung
throughout and that ancient music had been so affecting because the
Greeks had not written polyphony but, relying on simple but
expressive melodies, had imitated the passions using modes whose
pitch and rhythm produced a powerful sympathetic response in the
souls of their auditors.4
1 Ottavio Rinuccini, Dedication to Euridice (Florence, 1600), in
Oliver Strunk, ed., Source Readings in Music Histo7y: From
ClassicalAntiqui~y through the Romantic Era (New York, 1950),
367-8. Jacopo Peri makes an almost identical statement in his
Preface to Le musiche sopra L'Euridice (Florence, 1600), in Oliver
Strunk, ed., Source Readings in Music History, rev. edn, gen. ed.
Leo Treitler, 'The Baroque Era', ed. Margaret Murata (New York,
1998), 659-60.
2 On the use of prologues as generic signals, see Barbara
Russano Hanning, 'Apologia pro Ottavio Rinuccini', Journal of the
American Musicological Society, 26 (1973), 240-62.
3 Giulio Caccini, Dedication to L'Euridice composta in musica in
stile rappresentativo (Florence, 1600), in Strunk/Murata, 'The
Baroque Era', 606.
4 See Claude V. Palisca, 'Girolamo Mei: Mentor to the Florentine
Camerata', Musical Quarterly, 40 (1954), 1-20; Nino Pirrotta,
'Temperaments and Tendencies in the Florentine Camerata',
footnote continued on next page
This content downloaded from 130.104.144.135 on Mon, 09 Mar 2015
18:09:32 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
254 Blair Hoxby
Yet subsequent critics have denied a meaningful connection
between the tragedy of the ancients and the stile rappresentativo.
Nietzsche found it incredible that 'this thoroughly externalized
operatic music ... could be received and cherished with
enthusiastic favour, as a rebirth, as it were, of all true music',
and even scholars who admire the music insist that because
composers like Caccini and Peri could study virtually no examples
of ancient music, their style actually found its 'origins in the
musical practice of the fifteenth century' and developed in
dialogue with contem- porary madrigals, solo songs and theatrical
music.5 Claudio Monteverdi added weight to this view when he told
Giovanni Battista Doni, the first historian of the new music, that
although he had valued seeing Galilei's transcriptions of ancient
musical examples twenty years before, he hadn't invested much time
trying to understand them because he knew that 'the ancient
practical manner' was 'completely lost'.6 The texts of the ancient
tragedies were not lost, of course, yet two of the most influential
historians of early opera, Claude Palisca and Nino Pirrotta, concur
in emphasising the contribution of contemporary theatrical forms,
such as masques, pastorals and comedies, to its dramatic form. What
contemporary tastes demanded, says Palisca, was 'not true tragedy
but a mixed genre', and Rinuccini and his circle, who were 'steeped
in the classics', knew perfectly well that the musico-dramatic form
they created was not 'a rebirth of ancient tragedy'.7
I believe that critics have underestimated and misconstrued
opera's relationship to ancient tragedy. Even Barbara Hanning, who
defends Peri and Rinuccini's interest in reviving the singing style
and affective power of the ancient stage, assumes too readily that
when the Tragedy of Euridice promises to sing 'not of blood spilled
from innocent veins, not of the lifeless brow of a tyrant', but 'of
mournful and tearful scenes', she is signalling a change of
allegiance from classical tragedy to contemporary tragicomedy.8
What lies behind such ready assumptions is an
footnote continued from prevous page Musical Quarterly, 40
(1954), 169-89; Girolamo Mei, Letters on Ancient and Modern Music
to Vincenzo Galilei and Giovanni Bardi, ed. Palisca
(Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1977); Palisca, Humanism in Italian
Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven, 1985), 408-33; Palisca,
ed., The Florentine Camerata (New Haven, 1989).
s Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of
Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1967), 114; Nino Pirrotta
and Elena Povoledo, Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi,
trans. Karen Eales (Cambridge, 1982), 201. For other accounts that
emphasise the inter-relationship of the stile recitativo with
contemporary musical forms, see, for example, Nigel Fortune,
'Italian Secular Monody from 1600 to 1635: An Introductory Survey',
Musical Quarterly, 39 (1953), 171-95; Claude V. Palisca, 'Vincenzo
Galilei and Some Links between "Pseudo-Monody" and Monody', Musical
Quarterly, 46 (1960), 344-60; and Gary Tomlinson, 'Madrigal,
Monody, and Monteverdi's "Via naturale alla Imitatione" ', Journal
of the American Musicological Society, 34 (1981), 60-108.
6 Claudio Monteverdi, Letter to Giovanni Battista Doni (February
1634), in The New Monteverdi Companion, ed. Denis Arnold and Nigel
Fortune (London, 1985), 86.
7 I quote Palisca, 'The Alterati of Florence, Pioneers in the
Theory of Dramatic Music', in New Looks at Italian Opera: Essays in
Honor of DonaldJ. Grout, ed. William W. Austin (Ithaca, 1968), 29,
36. Also see Pirrotta, 'Temperaments and Tendencies', 188;
Pirrotta, 'Tragidie et comedie dans la camerata fiorentina', in
Musique etpolsie au XVIe siicle (Paris, 1954), 295; Pirotta and
Povoledo, Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi, 268; and,
for a summary of similar views, see Hanning, 'Apologia', 241.
8 Hanning, 'Apologia', 245-6, 252.
This content downloaded from 130.104.144.135 on Mon, 09 Mar 2015
18:09:32 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
The origins of opera and the spirit of tragedy reconsidered
255
idealised conception of Attic tragedy that nineteenth-century
German philologists extracted from a few touch-stone plays by
Aeschylus and Sophocles. For Nietzsche, these two poets embodied
the true spirit of tragedy, a spirit with which Euripides fought 'a
death struggle'.9 Some of the scholars who have done the most to
shape accepted opinion about ancient drama in this century have
implicitly endorsed that view by reclassifying many of Euripides's
tragedies as romances, melodramas or tragicomedies - this despite
the fact that, as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers never
tired of repeating, Aristotle's Poetics declared Euripides, not
Aeschylus or Sophocles, to be the most tragic of poets.10 I would
agree that Peri, Rinuccini and their immediate successors were not
interested in staging the sort of bloody revenge tragedy popular
with Seneca's imitators. Nor did they desire to revive Nietzsche's
ideal of Attic tragedy. But these truths obscure a more important
one: that Baroque librettists, composers and scenographers did, to
an extent not hitherto recognised, seek to revive a Euripidean
style of musical tragedy - especially as it was performed in the
'decadent' theatres of Hellenistic Greece and Rome."1 Once we
understand the tragic ideal to which they aspired, we will be in a
better position to see Baroque opera (a new musico-dramatic form
that took many names in its first decades) for what it is: a
strongly complex reading of the Euripidean tradition.12
Euripides's musical dramaturgy Whereas Aeschylus and Sophocles
each left seven surviving plays, Euripides left nineteen. The
survival of Euripides's tragedies in such superior numbers is a
tribute
9 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 76. 10 See Aristotle, Poetics
1453a22-39; the Greek text, a translation and extensive
commentary
may be found in Gerard F. Else, Aristotle's Poetics: The
Argument (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 399-406. H. D. F. Kitto (Greek
Tragedy: A Literary Study [Garden City, NY, 1954]) devotes chapters
to Euripides's 'tragicomedies' and 'melodramas'. For a review of
the critical history of describing Euripides's tragedies as
melodramas, which appears to commence in 1905, see Ann Norris
Michelini, Euripides and the Tragic Tradition (Madison, 1987),
321-3.
11 Robert C. Ketterer argues that Latin literature was the most
important classical source for the operas of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. See his 'Why Early Opera is Roman and not
Greek', this journal, 15 (2003), 1-14. I would stress that some of
the central operatic features that Ketterer traces back to Roman
comedy can be traced back yet further, through New Comedy, to
Euripidean tragedy. But I have no wish to deny the importance of
Ovid, Virgil or the performance practices of the Roman theatre to
early opera.
12 Ottavio Rinuccini's first operas, Dafne and Euridice, bear no
generic subtitle, though Tragedy sings the prologue of the latter.
His Arianna is labelled a tragedia. Other early operas receive
subtitles such as Tragedia da recitarsi in musica, tragedia
musicale and Opera tragica musicale. The anonymous librettist of
Monteverdi's Le nozze d'Enea (1640) considered his work to be a
tragedia a lieto fine. But many operas were published with more
neutral generic descriptors. Alessandro Striggio simply called his
O1feo a favola in musica. Roman and Venetian librettos often used
terms such as dramma musicale, opera musicale, azione in musica,
opera di stile recitativo, opera rappresentativa in musica and
opera regia. The word 'melodramma' is first applied to a libretto
in 1647. For the sake of convenience, I will refer to early 'opera'
even though that term had not yet assumed its modern significance.
On the generic descriptions applied to early operas, see especially
Margaret Murata, Operas for the Papal Court, 1631-1668 (Ann Arbor,
1981), appendix 2; Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century
Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley, 1991), 34-45; Rosanna di
Giuseppe, 'Opera: Tradizione di una parola', Drammaturgia, 3
(1996), 131-50.
This content downloaded from 130.104.144.135 on Mon, 09 Mar 2015
18:09:32 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
256 Blair Hoxby
to the preference that Hellenistic and Roman audiences felt for
them. Seneca, in turn, placed his seal of approval on the popular
judgement by basing the majority of his surviving tragedies on
Euripidean originals. Any sixteenth-century reader who gave equal
weight to all the surviving Attic tragedies - whether he was
reading in the original Greek or in translation - would therefore
arrive at a conception of tragedy that was biased towards
Euripides's practice. But the scholarly interests of humanists and
the theatrical culture of Italy's princely courts in the sixteenth
century ensured that his dramaturgy would prove even more
influential than the sheer survival rate of his plays could
warrant.
Starting in 1550, the dissemination of a series of influential
commentaries on Aristotle's recently rediscovered Poetics
diminished the authority of Plato's theatrical and musical
strictures, which required that music be used to soothe and
moderate the emotions.13 Aristotle offered a viable defence of
extreme theatrical affect by defining tragedy as an imitation that,
'by means of pity and fear, accomplishes the catharsis of such
emotions'.14 Even though commentators could not agree just what he
meant by that definition, the Politics' discussion of the psychic
catharsis produced by listening to the enthusiastic music of the
aulos performed at sacred rites and tragic festivals left no doubt
that, in Aristotle's view, the state of passionate excitement that
such music induced was a 'harmless delight', not a danger to the
state. For participants were 'restored by the sacred tunes as
though they had received a cure and a catharsis'.15 Indeed, by
praising Euripides as the most tragic of poets, the Poetics seemed
to imply that the chief obligation of the tragic poet was to stir
audiences to extremes of pity and fear by representing those
passions on stage and thus
'leading' the psyches of the audience through an affective
script.16
13 See especially Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary
Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1961), chaps. 9-13;
and Baxter Hathaway, The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in
Italy (Ithaca, 1962), part 3.
14 Aristotle, Poetics 1449b27-28, in Else, Aristotle's Poetics,
221. Here I depart from Else's controversial translation ('carrying
to completion, through a course of events involving pity and fear,
the purification of those painful or fatal acts which have that
quality'), in favour of a more traditional translation, which is
certainly truer to the common seventeenth-century understanding of
the text. The meaning of Aristotle's notion of tragic catharsis
remains contested, and the literature on the subject is extensive.
Useful discussions include Franz Susemihl and R. D. Hicks, The
Politics ofAristotle, Books I- V (London, 1894), 641-56; Ingram
Bywater, Aristotle on the Art of Poetry (Oxford, 1909), 152-61,
361-5; Else, Aristotle's Poetics, 224-32, 423-47; Aristotle's
Poetics: A Translation and Commentary for Students of Literature,
trans. Leon Golden, comm. 0. B. Hardison, Jr. (Tallahassee, Fla.,
1981), 133ff.; Leon Golden, Aristotle on Tragic and Comic Mimesis
(Atlanta, 1992), 5-39; Elizabeth S. Belfiore, Tragic Pleasures:
Aristotle on Plot and Emotion (Princeton, 1992); Jonathan Lear,
'Katharsis', in Essays on Aristotle's 'Poetics', ed. Am6lie
Oksenberg Rorty (Princeton, 1992), 315-40; and Charles Segal,
'Catharsis, Audience, and Closure', in Tragedy and the Tragic:
Greek Theatre and Beyond, ed. M. S. Silk (Oxford, 1996),
148-72.
15 Aristotle, Politics 1342a. For the Greek, see Alois
Dreizehnter, Aristoteles' Politik, Studia et Testimonia Antiqua VII
(Munich, 1970); for an English translation, see The Politics,
trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago, 1984), 240. I have departed from
Lord's translation of this passage, which reads, 'but as a result
of the sacred tunes - when they use the tunes that put the soul in
a frenzy - we see them calming down as if obtaining a cure and a
purification'. 16 On the use of the Greek word psuchagogia, or
leading the psyche, by ancient Greek critics, see W. B. Stanford,
Greek Tragedy and the Emotions: An Introductory Study (London,
1983), 5.
This content downloaded from 130.104.144.135 on Mon, 09 Mar 2015
18:09:32 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
The origins of opera and the spirit of tragedy reconsidered
257
Theorising about the passions burgeoned, not least in the
academies and informal salons that were frequented by such key
pioneers and sponsors of the stile rappresentativo as Bardi,
Galilei, Caccini, Peri and Rinuccini.
Classical authors told many stories about the fabulous affective
power of ancient tragedy and music, but perhaps no tragedian
attracted so many such stories as Euripides. Plutarch recorded that
an Athenian singing a chorus from Euripides's Electra (a tragedy
rediscovered by Mei) moved a conquering army to pity and thus
prevented Athens from being razed.17 Plutarch also recounted that
the tyrant Alexander of Pherae fled a performance of Euripides's
Trojan Women because he was ashamed that his citizens should see
him, a ruler who never pitied anyone he murdered, weep at the
sorrows of Hecuba and Andromache.18 Lucian said that a performance
of Euripides's Andromeda during the reign of Alexander the Great's
successor Lysimachus put the whole town of Abdera into a fever for
tragedy, so that they sang the roles of Perseus and Andromeda in
the streets and dreamed feverishly of Perseus holding Medusa's
head.19 It is no accident that these stories pay tribute to
Euripides's music, for his popularity in Hellenistic Greece
depended in part on his early adoption of the new dithyrambic music
of Timotheus.
Although scholars like Mei and Francesco Patrizi believed that
they found evidence in Aristotle that ancient tragedies were sung
through, Euripides's plays and Aristophanes's parodies of them
provided the clearest illustration that ancient tragedians had not
confined their musical expression to the chorus.20 The Aeschylus of
The Frogs charges Euripides with having introduced Cretan monodies
to the tragic stage, and the evidence bears him out.21 The heroines
of several of Euripides's earliest surviving plays - Alcestis (438
BCE), Medea (431 BCE), and the Phaedra of Hippo~ytus (428 BCE) -
express their grief in sung monodies.22 In his subsequent
tragedies, Euripides drew on the new music of Timotheus, who
abandoned restraint in favour of an expanded tonal range, the
flexible mixing of modes and structures, tone painting, melismas
and a determination to represent even the most extreme experiences,
like the birth pangs of Semele, in musical form.23 Not to be
outdone, Euripides represented the birth pangs of the incestuous
Kanake in a monody. He
17 Plutarch, Lysander 15, in Plutarch's Lives, trans. Bernadotte
Perrin, Loeb Classical Library, 11 vols. (London, 1917), IV,
273.
18 Plutarch, Pelopidas 29, in Plutarch's Lives, V, 415. 19
Lucian, How to Write History 1, in Lucian, trans. K. Kilburn, Loeb
Classical Library, 8 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), VI, 3, 5.
20 On Mei's and Patrizi's inferences from Aristotle, see
Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Thought, 412-26.
21 Aristophanes, The Frogs 849-50, 944. Aristophanes's plays are
cited by line number. All translations are from Aristophanes,
trans. Benjamin Bickley Rogers, Loeb Classical Library, 3 vols.
(Cambridge, Mass., 1968).
22 For insightful discussions of music in Greek tragedy and
close analyses of the metres used, see T. B. L. Webster, The
Tragedies of Euripides (London, 1967); and Webster, The Greek
Chorus (London, 1970). See also Mario Pintacuda, La musica nella
tragedia greca (Cefahi, 1978).
23 Webster, Greek Chorus, 132, 153-4, 171; Lillian B. Lawler,
The Dance of the Ancient Greek Theater (Iowa City, 1964),
16-17.
This content downloaded from 130.104.144.135 on Mon, 09 Mar 2015
18:09:32 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
258 Blair Hoxby
even wrote the messenger's speech in the Orestes as an agitated
monody in the new style - sung by a Phrygian slave unmanned by
fear.24
Even though the pioneers of dramma per musica could not study
Euripides's music, they could learn a great deal from the texts of
his tragedies. One of their chief goals was to find a musical style
that, by synthesising textual, musical and expressive content,
could speak a language of the passions.25 Euripides's restless
metrical experimentation showed that he was interested in the same
problem, and nowhere more so than in the laments of his characters.
Starting with the lament of the dying Hippolytus in the Hippolytus,
he experimented with the use of an astrophic poetic style whose
metrical shifts and transitions from recitative to song could
nimbly follow the movement of his characters' thoughts and the
agitation of their passions.26 He left numerous examples of such
astrophic laments, written with varying degrees of structure,
repetition and unexpected variation, including Hermione's wish for
death in Andromache, Cassandra's mad song in The Trojan Women,
Creusa's complaint to Apollo in the Ion, Antigone's lament for her
dead kin in The Phoenician Women, Helen's long keen for her woes in
the Helen, and Electra's lament for the ruin of her house in
Orestes.27
Perhaps there is no more revealing guide to the procedures of
the Euripidean lament than the pastiche that the Aeschylus of The
Frogs sings.28 Like most great parodies, it hews close to its
subject. The distressed maiden begins with an apostrophe to Night,
sings of an ominous dream, finds that Glyce has abandoned her in
the night, thinks of what will never be, bewails Glyce's flight
again, then appeals to the gods for assistance. Frequent
grammatical and metrical shifts signal her agitation as she
descends into incoherent grief. Yet amid all this freedom there is
structure. Text repetitions give scope to her sorrow and permit her
to defer acceptance of her plight. And all the while lines in
dochmaic metre, which tragedy reserves for statements of great
grief, recur with the regularity of an ostinato bass, serving as a
reservoir of accumulating pathos - or so they would if the song
were meant seriously.
Laments like these assumed a special importance to Renaissance
theorists of the new monodic style of singing such as Mei, Galilei
and Lorenzo Giacomini because their emotional intensity was
calculated to move an audience to pity - and therefore
24 Orestes 1369-1502. Euripides's plays are cited by line
number. All translations are from Euripides, trans. David Kovacs,
Loeb Classical Library, 5 vols. to date (Cambridge, Mass.,
1994-2002).
25 See Palisca, 'Girolamo Mei'; Palisca, 'The Artusi-Monteverdi
Controversy', in The New Monteverdi Companion, ed. Arnold and
Fortune, 147-8; and Palisca, Florentine Camerata, 57-61. Giovanni
Bardi particularly emphasised the importance of music serving text;
see 'On How Tragedy Should Be Performed', in Palisca, Florentine
Camerata, 145.
26 Hippolytus 1347ff.; Webster, Greek Chorus, 155. 27 Andromache
825ff.; The Trojan Women 308ff.; Ion 859ff., The Phoenician Women
1485ff.; Helen
164ff.; and Orestes 982ff. A list of Greek monodies may be found
in W. Jens, ed., Die Bauformen dergriechischen Tragodie (Munich,
1971), 279ff.
28 Aristophanes, The Frogs 1329-63. For a commentary on this
monody, which poses various textual and metrical difficulties, see
Aristophanes, Frogs, ed. Kenneth Dover (Oxford, 1993), 358-63.
This content downloaded from 130.104.144.135 on Mon, 09 Mar 2015
18:09:32 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
The origins of opera and the spirit of tragedy reconsidered
259
to accomplish tragedy's cathartic function.29 Euripides's
laments, together with their literary descendants in such works as
Catullus 64 and the laments of Ovid's Heroides, are the most
important classical models for such highly expressive, irregular
laments as Rinuccini and Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna (1608) -
with its naturalistic declamatory style, its affective text
repetitions, its choral responses, and its appearance of freedom
from superimposed formal structures.30 Perhaps no musico-poetic
form exercised a more formative influence on the early development
of opera than did the lament.31
Important though the formal example of Euripides's laments was,
the heightened and specific meanings with which he invested the
singing voice may have constituted a yet more crucial dramatic
legacy. Euripides greatly expanded the set of established
relationships between particular speech acts and forms of musical
expression that were available to a dramatist. It was presumably no
feat for him to present sacred songs or dirges for the dead on
stage: their meaning was already laid down by custom and dramatic
convention. But there is nothing inevitable about a grief-stricken
woman complaining in private song or about spouses singing in
recognition of each other. What is required, if such scenes are to
be naturalised, is a musico-dramatic rhetoric of the passions. That
is precisely what Euripides created for himself and his
successors.
Rather than catalogue all the conventional relationships that
Euripides established between musical expression and particular
speech acts, I will try to suggest how he used dramatic context to
establish such relationships. In Medea, the heroine's anguish
surfaces in a sung lament heard from behind the scene - 'Oh, what a
wretch am I, how miserable in my sorrows! Ah ah, how I wish I could
die!' - while her Nurse and Tutor, standing in front of her house,
discuss her languishing condition. Her suffering indecision, always
expressed in song, punctuates the opening dialogue like a refrain -
'Oh, what sufferings are mine, sufferings that call for loud
29 Ellen Rosand, 'Lamento', Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy
(Accessed July 14, 2004)
30 Catullus 64, which is sometimes described as an epyllion, or
diminutive epic, is the longest of Catullus's poems. Its narration
of the marriage of Peleus and Thetis is interrupted by a long
ekphrastic description of a coverlet depicting Theseus's desertion
of Ariadne; for her lengthy lament, see Catullus, trans. Francis
Warre Cornish, 2nd edn rev. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library
(Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 64.132-201. In the Heroides, Ovid assumes
the voices of such Euripidean heroines as Phaedra and Medea and of
other heroines who feature prominently in seventeenth-century
monodies and operas, such as Penelope, Dido, and Ariadne; see
Heroides and Amores, trans. Grant Showerman, 2nd edn rev. G. P.
Goold, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., 1986). The music
for the choral responses of the Lamento d'Arianna does not survive,
but the libretto clearly indicates their existence; see Angelo
Solerti, Gli albori del melodramma, 3 vols. (Milan, 1903-4), II,
175-9. For an essay that briefly remarks on the important role of
monodies in Euripidean tragedy, then focuses on the Latin sources
of Ariadne's lament, see Leofranc Holford-Strevens, ' "Her eyes
became two spouts": Classical Antecedents of Renaissance Laments',
Ear!y Music, 27 (1999), 379-405.
31 See Ellen Rosand, 'The Descending Tetrachord: An Emblem of
Lament', Musical Quarterly, 65 (1979), 346-59; Tomlinson,
'Madrigal, Monody, and Monteverdi's "Via"'; Nigel Fortune,
'Monteverdi and the seconda prattica', in New Monteverdi Companion,
ed. Arnold and Fortune, 192-7; and the special issue on laments
that appeared in Ear~y Music, 27 (1999).
This content downloaded from 130.104.144.135 on Mon, 09 Mar 2015
18:09:32 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
260 Blair Hoxby
lamentation!' - until she emerges to present a calm exterior and
to speak, rather than sing, to the Chorus.32 In Hippolytus, on the
other hand, Phaedra's stepson and his chorus of servants enter
singing to a dance rhythm, then pay homage to Artemis. Their
strength and chastity stand in marked contrast to Phaedra's wasted
appear- ance as she lies on a couch and sings languidly and
feverishly of her desire to be in the woods where Hippolytus hunts.
In their different ways, both scenes contrast the public and the
private, the visible and the hidden. As they reveal the wavering of
the women's aims, they dilate time in order to give scope to the
emotions and thus to exploit fully the dramatic potential of
internal, as opposed to physical, pathos. And they turn the singing
voice into a privileged means of expressing hidden passions.
Scenes like these consolidated a conventional association
between laments and the feminine voice. Plato invoked that
association by describing tragic laments as womanly.33 When Lucian
was attending tragedies in Rome, he found it tolerable to hear
Andromache and Hecuba 'melodising' their 'calamities' on stage,
even though he found it risible to hear Heracles burst into song.34
Not coincidentally, the vast majority of monodic laments published
in the first decades of the seventeenth century were written for
female characters portrayed by the soprano voice.35 But the
association of abandoned women with song is just one of many that
Euripides naturalised through sheer repetition. Although he may not
have been the first to think of setting a recognition scene as a
sung duet (the uncertain date of Sophocles's Electra leaves the
question open), there is no doubt that he left the most numerous
examples of such duets in his late tragedies. In the Ion, Iphigenia
in Tauris and Helen, he showed how lyric dialogue could be turned
into a theatrical expression of intellectual discovery, spontaneous
joy and mutual feeling as parent and child, brother and sister, or
husband and wife are reunited.36 His example paved the way for the
sudden, expansive lyricism of Penelope when she at last recognises
her husband in Giacomo Badoaro and Monteverdi's II ritorno d'Ulisse
(1637).
The very priority that Euripides set on such musical set-pieces
pushed him towards a form of dramatic construction that differs,
say, from Sophocles's. Euripides often slows the dramatic action in
order to give scope to his characters' passions in song, then uses
those songs, in turn, to structure his tragedies. The climactic
scene of Iphigenia in Aulis shows him doing this on a small scale:
the hapless girl sings a long lament prompted by the prospect of
death, Clytemnestra and Achilles consider how to save her life,
then Iphigenia, whose mind has been working silently to bring about
the reversal of the play's action, sings a triumphal song in which
she expresses her determination to die gloriously as a willing
victim.37 Hippolytus shows him working on a larger scale and using
song to shift the pathetic and dramatic focus from Phaedra, who at
first complains of her love-pains, to
32 Euripides, Medea 96-7, 111-13. 3 Plato, Republic 605d-e, in
The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and
Huntington
Cairns (Princeton, 1961), 831. 34 Lucian, On Dance 27-8, in
Lucian, V, 40. 35 Rosand, 'Lamento'. 36 Ion 1437-1509, Iphigenia in
Tauris 827-99, and Helen 625-97. 7 Iphigenia in Aulis 1278-1336,
1338ff., 1371ff.
This content downloaded from 130.104.144.135 on Mon, 09 Mar 2015
18:09:32 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
The origins of opera and the spirit of tragedy reconsidered
261
Theseus, who mourns her death in dialogue with the chorus, to
the wounded Hippolytus, who dies singing an agonised lament near
the end of the tragedy. In both plays, these songs stand out from
the surrounding action like monuments to particular passions. This
method of construction appealed even to the authors of spoken
tragedies in a century when the abbe d'Aubignac could maintain that
it was the proper business of a tragedian to present a 'gallery' of
passions, each developed 'to the point of fulness'.38 For
librettists, it provided a viable model for the dramatic
arrangement of action and reflection, speech and song, recitative
and set-piece laments and arias.
Euripides and the operatic repertory
The whole tenor of my argument suggests that Euripides's
contribution to Baroque opera should not be measured by the number
of operas that are based directly on his tragedies. An Ariadne or a
Dido may lament like a Euripidean heroine, while, conversely, an
opera that is purportedly based on one of his tragedies may bear no
deep resemblance to it. But it is nevertheless instructive to
consider which of his tragedies entered directly into the repertory
before the end of the eighteenth century.
I would like to defer consideration of his extant tragedies,
however, and begin with one of his lost plays, Andromeda, because I
think its popularity reveals much about what Baroque librettists
found attractive in Euripides. This was the tragedy that filled the
Dionysus of The Frogs with 'a sudden pang of longing', a 'fierce
desire' that threatened to consume him unless he could rescue
Euripides from Hades.39 This was the play that Alexander the Great
was said to have recited spontaneously at his last banquet.40 Just
enough was known about the contents of the play to be suggestive.
It contained the striking spectacle of the forlorn Andromeda
chained to the rocks, her flesh as white as a statue's. She
lamented to the Night but, until a chorus of Ethiopian maidens
arrived to lament in lyric dialogue with her, she was answered only
by the echo of her voice sung from off stage. She was eventually
rescued by Perseus, who made a memorable entrance. That was enough
to inspire numerous librettists to write versions of the tale based
on what was known of the tragedy and on its retelling in the
Metamorphoses. It was staged in Bologna as a 'Tragedia da recitarsi
in Musica' (1610); in Mantua, with a lost score by Monteverdi
(1620); in Venice, where it was the first work to be staged in a
public opera house (1637); in Ferrara, where it gave Francesco
Giutti an occasion to employ his impressive stage machinery (1638);
in Paris, where it provided the vehicle for Pierre Corneille and
Giacomo Torelli's first attempt to adapt Italian opera and Venetian
stage-craft to French tastes (1650); in Madrid, when the
fourteen-year-old Infanta Maria Teresa, future wife of Louis XIV,
commissioned Calder6n de la Barca to
38 Abb6 d'Aubignac, La Pratique du theitre, trans. anon. as The
Whole Art of the Stage (1684), III, 46.
39 Aristophanes, The Frogs 52-4, 58-9. 40 Athenaeus 537d-e; see
Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, trans. Charles Burton Gulick, Loeb
Classical Library, 7 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1927-41), V,
429.
This content downloaded from 130.104.144.135 on Mon, 09 Mar 2015
18:09:32 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
262 Blair Hoxby
produce the first fully sung Spanish opera (1653); and in Paris,
where Louis XIV himself commended the subject to Philippe Quinault
and Jean-Baptiste Lully (1682).41 The fact that the original was
lost may not have been the least of its recommendations since that
forestalled all direct comparisons. After the contro- versy that
erupted over their revision of an extant text, Alceste (1674),
Quinault, Lully, and Lully's occasional librettist Thomas Corneille
discreetly opted to reconstruct only lost Euripidean tragedies in
Thisee (1675), Bellirophon (1678), Persie (1682) and Pha'ton
(1683).
Of Euripides's surviving tragedies, seven entered the operatic
repertory before the close of the eighteenth century: Alcestis,
Andromache, Electra, Hippolytus, Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphigenia in
Tauris and Medea.42 They tended to make their entrance, or receive
their most famous treatment, at times when composers wanted to set
their mark on opera or to reform it. When Quinault and Lully wished
to demonstrate that their tragidies en musique had 'no other models
but the tragedies of Ancient Greece', they did so with the
controversial Alceste (1674).43 When Thomas Corneille and
Marc-Antoine Charpentier wished to show that a tragddie en musique
could succeed without a lietof ine, they produced Mde'e (1693).
When Jean-Philippe Rameau wished to make an impressive debut in the
form, he wrote Hippolyte etAricie (1733), a work so ambitious that
his contemporary Andre Campra famously remarked that it contained
enough music for ten operas.44 It was again to Euripides that the
mid-eighteenth-century reformers of opera seria looked for
inspiration. Thinking of Niccolo Machiavelli's claim that republics
must periodically reduce themselves to first principles if they are
to remain vigorous, the Venetian reformer Francesco Algarotti urged
that opera must do the same in order to 'keep alive' - and he
attached a prose libretto of Iphigenia in Aulis to emphasise what
he meant.45 Denis Diderot argued for the musical potential of
Racine's version of the play at the same time.46 Working in Vienna
with the likes of the poet Ranieri Calzabigi and the
41 On these operas, see Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Centuy7
Venice, 67-75; Margaret Rich Greer, The Plaj of Power: Mythological
Court Dramas of Calderon de la Barca (Princeton, 1991), 31-76;
Louise K. Stein, Songs of Mortals, Dialogues of the Gods: Music and
Theatre in Seventeenth-Century Spain (Oxford, 1993); and Buford
Norman, Touched by the Graces: The Libretti of Philppe Quinault in
the Context of French Classicism (Birmingham, Ala., 2001),
237-58.
42 Ruth Zinar, 'The Use of Greek Tragedy in the History of
Opera', Current Musicology, 12 (1971), 80-94.
43 Anonymous letter, February 1675. Jean Duron attributes it to
one of Lully's secretaries or performers; see the CD booklet for
Lully's Ays, Les Arts Florissants, dir. William Christie (Harmonia
Mundi 401257.59, 1987), 18-19. On the controversy over Alceste, see
Buford Norman, 'Ancients and Moderns, Tragedy and Opera: The
Quarrel over Alceste' in French Musical Thought 1600-1800, ed.
Georgia Cowart (Ann Arbor, 1989), 177-96.
44 Charles Dill, Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic
Tradition (Princeton, 1998), 53. 45 Niccol6 Machiavelli, Discordsi
sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, ed. Francesco Bausi, 2 vols.
(Rome, 2001), bk. 3, chap. 1; Francesco Algarotti, Saggio sopra
l'opera in musica (1763), ed. Annalisa Bini (n.p., 1989), 21-2.
46 Denis Diderot, 'Troisiame entretien sur le Fils naturel'
(1757), in (Liuvres completes, ed. Jacques Chouillet and Anne Marie
Chouillet (Paris, 1980), X, 139-62. See Julien Tiersot, 'Gluck and
the Encyclopedistes', trans. Theodore Baker, Musical Quartery , 16
(1930), 336-57; Daniel Heartz, 'From Garrick to Gluck: The Reform
of Theatre and Opera in the Mid-Eighteenth Century', Proceedings of
the Royal Musical Association, 94 (1967-8), 111-27.
This content downloaded from 130.104.144.135 on Mon, 09 Mar 2015
18:09:32 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
The origins of opera and the spirit of tragedy reconsidered
263
choreographers Gasparo Angiolini and George Noverre - all of
whom professed to be striving to revive the true spirit of ancient
theatre - Gluck produced an Italian Alceste (1767) before making
his debut in Paris with Iphignie en Aulide (1774), a work that he
followed with the French Alceste (1776) and Iphignie en Tauride
(1779 and 1781).47 Even Luigi Cherubini chose Ifigenia in Aulide
(1788) as the subject of his most distinguished opera seria and
MIde as the subject of one of his most successful and innovative
operas (1797).
Euripides and the tragic experience The tragedies that entered
the operatic repertory before 1800 reveal that librettists and
composers were attracted to a subset of plays that could be said to
constitute a strong reading not only of the Euripidean tradition
but of tragic catharsis. In Medea, the Nurse regrets that 'no one
has discovered how to put an end to mortals' bitter griefs with
music and song sung to the lyre. It is because of these griefs that
deaths and terrible disasters overthrow houses. It would have been
a gain for mortals to cure these ills by song'.48 We are surely
meant to think that the Athenians have met this need with their
tragedies. But in what sense can tragedy be said to cure ills by
song? Rene Girard and Walter Burkert, whose views on the subject
have been particularly influential in recent decades, argue that
tragic representations function like blood sacrifices.49 The action
of several of Euripides's plays, including the Hecuba, Iphigenia in
Tauris and Iphigenia in Aulis, threatens to result in, or is
actually consummated by, a human sacrifice, and The Bacchae, a
tragedy that is conspicuous by its absence from the operatic
repertory before the twentieth century, can easily be read as an
admission of the deep-seated connection between tragic joy and the
sense of emotional liberation afforded by communal violence against
a victim.
But I would suggest that if we return to the deliberations of
the Florentine Alterati, we will get a better sense of what
seventeenth-century dramatists valued in Euripides. Founded in
1569, the Alterati met once or twice a week at the palace of
Giovanni Battista Strozzi the Younger to discuss subjects like
Aristotle's Poetics, Francesco Patrizi's new commentary on the
Poetics, the verse-forms appropriate to tragedy, how rhetoric and
poetry moved the passions, and what tragic catharsis meant. Its
members included Giovanni Bardi; Ottavio Rinuccini, the librettist
of Dafne, Euridice and Arianna; Jacopo Corsi, who contributed music
to Peri and Rinuccini's Dafne and sponsored their Euridice; Prince
Giovanni de' Medici, who staged Caccini's Rapimento de Cefalo in
1600; Girolomo Mei; and Giovanni Batttista Doni, author of the
Trattato della musica scenica (1638).50 47 For some of their
theoretical statements, which are filled with appeals to the
example of
ancient tragedy and pantomime, see [Ranieri Calzabigi], Lettre
sur le micanisme de l'opira italien (1756), George Noverre, Lettres
suzr la danse et les ballets (1760), Gasparo Angiolini,
Dissertation sur les ballets pantomimls des anciens (1765),
Christoph Gluck, 'Dedication' for Alceste (1769), in Strunk/Murata,
Source Readings, 'The Baroque Era', 933-4.
48 Euripides, Medea 195-201. 49 Walter Burkert, Homo Necans,
trans. P. Bing (Berkeley, 1983); Renb Girard, Violence and the
Sacred (Baltimore, 1977). 50 Palisca, 'The Alterati'.
This content downloaded from 130.104.144.135 on Mon, 09 Mar 2015
18:09:32 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
264 Blair Hoxby
In 1586, Lorenzo Giacomini delivered a discourse on tragic
purgation to the academy.51 According to Giacomini, we take four
types of pleasure in tragedy. We enjoy learning about the events of
the tragedy and marvel to see incredible things actually happening.
We appreciate the play as an imitation, with its beautiful
language, sweet music, festive dance, magnificent machinery,
sumptuous costumes and artfully arranged plot, full of digressions,
recognitions and reversals of fortune. We enjoy reflecting on both
the compassion that we feel for the characters on stage and our own
freedom from their 'fearful adventures'. And we experience 'the
pleasures accessory to the cathartic process' itself.52 Giacomini
pursues the physiological implications of Aristotle's claim that
those who listen to enthusiastic music during sacred rites and
tragic festivals are 'restored ... as though they had received a
cure and catharsis'.53 He argues that the passion of a hero
represented on stage acts like a sympathetic medicine, agitating
our own passions and drawing them away from us. When the soul is
sad, our vital spirits evaporate and rise to the head. As they
enter the anterior part of the head, they stimulate the fancy, and
as they condense, they cause our face to contract until we relieve
ourselves by lamenting or weeping. Although Giacomini may seem to
reduce catharsis from an abstract concept of purification (or
intellectual clarification) to having a good cry, the numerous
classical sources that speak of the pleasure of feeling pity and
weeping at tragic spectacles lend some support to his
interpretation. 'This insatiable delight of lamenting, full of
grief, sings the chorus of The Suppliant Women, 'carries me away,
just as spring-water runs down the high-cliff, unceasing
ever'.54
At the end of his discourse, Giacomini singles out Iphigenia in
Tauris for discussion - a telling choice that to my knowledge has
escaped critical comment. Tragedies that proceed from misery to
felicity can be purgative, he says, because the prospect of an
impending evil can move us as powerfully as a present one. Thus
when Iphigenia prepares to sacrifice her unrecognised brother
Orestes in her role as a priestess in Tauris, she elicits almost as
much pity as she would if she actually killed him. For 'the laying
out of the instruments of a miserable death that is impending' can
move our compassion as much as the sight of an actual death, which
might 'appear so terrible and so sorrowful, with such a withdrawal
of the vital spirits to their origin of being' that it would make
pity and tears impossible, inducing a 'stupor and that numbness of
which Dante spoke: "I did not weep, I so turned to stone inside"
'.ss
For Giacomini Iphigenia in Tauris is an example of what
Aristotle meant by the best manner of tragic fable. He can
presumably justify his choice because the Poetics says that
Euripides is not to be faulted for focusing on heroes like Orestes
who 'have happened either to undergo or to do fearful things'. In
fact, 'the artistically finest
s1 Lorenzo Giacomini, Tebalducci Malespini, Orationi e discorsi
(Florence, 1597), 29-52. Hathaway (The Age of Criticism) discusses
the discourse in the context of rival explanations of catharsis
(251-60), while Palisca, 'The Alterati', discusses its musical
significance (24-9). Where possible, I follow Palisca's
translations.
52 Giacomini, Orationi e discorsi, 46-7. 53 Aristotle, Politics
1342a. 54 Euripides, The Suppliant Women 79ff. ss Giacomini,
Orationi e discorsi 51-2.
This content downloaded from 130.104.144.135 on Mon, 09 Mar 2015
18:09:32 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
The origins of opera and the spirit of tragedy reconsidered
265
kind of tragedy ... is based upon this structure' and 'in our
theatres and competitions such plays appeal to the audience as most
tragic, if they follow the right principle, and Euripides, even
though in other respects his construction is faulty, nevertheless
appeals to the audience as the most tragic, at least, of the
poets'.56 To be sure, some Renaissance commentators thought that
Aristotle meant only to defend Euripides's unhappy endings.57 But
Giacomini seems to conclude that the tragedian's essential duty is
to move audiences to extremes of pity and fear without letting them
fall into a petrifaction of horror. If that purpose can be
accomplished by a plot that moves from misery to felicity, then the
success justifies the endeavour. Although Giacomini quotes Dante to
describe the stupefaction that might result if Orestes were
actually killed in Iphigenia in Tauris, the words also suggest the
potency of a drama based on imagined evils. For what turns Ugolino
to stone is not the sight of a death but a premonition based on a
dream: as he beholds his innocent sons in the tower, he foresees
their deaths by starvation and his own feast on their flesh.58 From
the standpoint of this essay what must be stressed is a simpler
point: with all Attic tragedy available to him, Giacomini selects
Iphigenia in Tauris, a play that many critics now prefer to
characterise as a 'romantic melodrama', to show what Aristotle
meant by the 'best' (ottima) manner of tragic fable.59 In defence
of himself, Giacomini could point to a passage, which frankly
puzzles most modern commentators, in which Aristotle says that
tragedies like Iphigenia in Tauris, in which recognition averts a
violent deed, are the 'best' kind (kratiston).60
Palisca describes Giacomini's discourse as 'a document of the
prevailing taste'. He suggests that this taste supported the
strange compound of dramatic ingredients that found their way into
'the Roman and Venetian operas of the seventeenth century'. It was
a taste, he says, that 'demanded of the stage not true tragedy but
a mixed genre that adds to the emotionally purgative experience a
feast of the senses and the mind'.61 But this formulation obscures
the importance of Euripides as the
56 Poetics 1453a21-31, in Else, Aristotle's Poetics, 376, 399.
57 Ludovico Castelvetro, Poetica d'Aristotele
vulgarizzata e sposta, ed. Werther Romani, 2 vols.
(Rome and Bari, 1979), I, 376. Several modern classicists have
rejected the notion that Aristotle means only to praise Euripides's
unhappy endings; see, for example, Aristotle, On Poetry and Sole,
trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, 1958), 25-6n.4; and Else,
Aristotle's Poetics, 400-6.
5s Dante, Inferno, canto 33. 59 In his influential survey of
Greek tragedy, for example, Kitto (Greek Tragedy) calls Iphigenia
in Tauris by turns a 'tragi-comedy' and a 'romantic melodrama'
(327). Commenting on Aristotle's praise of Sophocles's Oedipus Rex
and Euripides's Iphigenia in Tauris, Else (Aristotle's Poetics)
remarks, 'it so happened that the knife-edge of his judgment hit
square on one masterpiece, the Oedpus; but the other play it hit
upon, the Iphigenia, cannot honestly be called much more than a
good melodrama' (446). Else goes so far as to say that Aristotle's
selection of these two plays as examples of the best kind of
tragedy is 'damaging to Aristotle's credit as a critic, no matter
how one looks at it' (446), though he is disturbed as much by the
exclusion of plays like the Agamemnnon and the Bacchae as he is by
inclusion of the Iphigenia.
60 Aristotle, Poetics 1454a2-9, in Else, Aristotle's Poetics,
421. For an attempt to reconcile The Poetics' seemingly
contradictory praise for Oedpus Tyrannus and Iphigenia in Tauris,
see Stephen A. White, 'Aristotle's Favorite Tragedies', in Essays
on Aristotle's 'Poetics', 221-40.
61 Palisca, 'Alterati', 28-9.
This content downloaded from 130.104.144.135 on Mon, 09 Mar 2015
18:09:32 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
266 Blair Hoxby
classical model for the very genre that Palisca identifies. H.
D. F. Kitto puts it in these terms: by 'reducing the tragic to the
pathetic' in plays like Alcestis, Electra, Iphigenia in Tauris and
Iphigenia in Aulis, Euripides 'made it possible to combine
harmoniously into one theatrical whole a wide range of emotional
effects'.62 The appeal of that 'theatrical whole' to opera
composers need not be stressed: they produced eighteen versions of
Iphigenia in Tauris and seventeen versions of Iphigenia in Aulis
before 1800.
In the eyes of most seventeenth-century readers, such a range of
emotional effects did not disqualify these plays as tragedies. A
revolution of feelings was considered essential to the tragic
experience by such an influential critic as Rene Rapin. The soul,
he said, could be pleasurably agitated only by a constant variety
of objects set before it, such was the 'Immensity of its desires'.
When Rapin praised Oedjpus Rex in his commentary on The Poetics, it
was not for its beautiful simplicity but for its 'flux and reflux
of indignation, and of pity', its 'revolution of horror and of
tenderness', its capacity to generate such 'a universal emotion of
the soul' by 'surprises, astonishments, admirations'.63 Tragedians
as diverse as John Milton, Jean Racine and John Dryden defined
tragedy not in terms of the shape of its action but in terms of the
passions it represented and aroused.64
No wonder, then, that an arbiter of taste like the abbe
d'Aubignac appealed to 'the nineteen plays of Euripides's as
evidence that the catastrophes of tragedies could be either
'calamitous and bloody' or, as in the case of Alcestis, Electra and
many others, felicitous: 'the Orestes, which begins with fury and
rage, and runs upon such strong Passions and Incidents, that they
seem to promise nothing but a fatal bloody Event, [is] nevertheless
terminated by the entire content and satisfaction of all the
Actors, Helena being plac'd among the Gods, and Apollo obliging
Orestes and Pylades 62 Kitto, Greek Tragedy, 336-7. 63 Rene Rapin,
Reflections on Aristotle's Treatise of 'Poesie', trans. Thomas
Rhymer, in The Whole
Critical Works of Monsieur Rapin, 2 vols. (London, 1716), II,
141, 208. 64 In the preface to Samson Agonistes entitled 'Of That
Sort of Dramatic Poem Which Is Called
Tragedy', Milton entirely omits Aristotle's key contention that
tragedy is a representation of an action and focuses instead on its
imitation and manipulation of the passions: 'Tragedy, as it was
ancient composed, hath been ever held the gravest, moralest, and
most profitable of all other poems: therefore said by Aristotle to
be of power by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind
of those and such-like passions, that is to temper and reduce them
to just measure with a kind of delight, stirred up by reading or
seeing those passions well imitated'. Racine also stresses the
representation and stirring of the passions in his critical
writings. In the preface to Berenice, for instance, he insists that
it is enough for a tragedy that 'its action should be great and its
actors heroic, that passions should be aroused, and that everything
in it should breathe that majestic sadness in which all the
pleasure of tragedy resides' ((Euvres completes, ed. Raymond Picard
[Paris, 1950], I, 465). In his preface to Iphigenie, he points to
the tears of his own audience to confirm Aristotle's judgement that
Euripides was the most tragic of poets, 'that is, he was
wonderfully adept at arousing compassion and fear, which are the
true effects of tragedy' (CEuvres, I, 465). The representation of
an action scarcely figures at all in the definition that Lisideius
contributes to Dryden's Essay ofDramatick Poesie - a definition
widely quoted and accepted by subsequent authors: 'A just and
lively Image of Humane Nature, Representing its Passions and
Humours, and the Changes of Fortune to which it is subject; for the
Delight and Instruction of Mankind' (The Works ofJohn Dryden, ed.
Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 20 vols. [Berkeley,
1956-89], XVII, 15).
This content downloaded from 130.104.144.135 on Mon, 09 Mar 2015
18:09:32 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
The origins of opera and the spirit of tragedy reconsidered
267
to marry Hermione and Electra'.45 This ending may have been one
of the inspirations for the apotheosis that concludes Striggio and
Monteverdi's revised Orfeo (1609). For the Orestes introduces
Apollo from a machine to elevate Helen to the stars, thus saving
her from assassins compared to bacchants; while the Orfeo
introduces Apollo from a machine to sing his son up to the stars,
thus saving Orpheus from the impending threat of real bacchants.66
Whether or not we wish to make such a connection, I would maintain,
more generally, that Pirrotta has committed a grave oversight in
claiming that opera's 'propensity for the depiction of tender
passions' and its 'almost unbroken rule of the happy ending' betray
its pastoral parentage, just as Robert Ketterer has in saying that
'romantic love' and 'the dramatic structure it begets' is almost
nowhere present in Athenian tragedy and must be attributed to Roman
comedy.67 These formal characteristics of opera might just as well
be traced to Euripides's tragedies, which devote tremendous energy
to the representation of passionate love, frequently end happily,
and more often than not introduce a deux ex machina to engineer the
felicitous catastrophe. It seems particularly inappropriate to
attribute the 'love interest and the lieto fine' of Calzabigi and
Gluck's Alceste to an operatic convention derived from Roman comedy
(as Ketterer does) when they are present in the Euripidean original
and when even the ancients recognised Euripides as the ultimate
source of such 'comic', 'romantic' or 'melodramatic' conventions.68
As Satyrus remarks, 'peripeteiai, violations of maidens,
substitution of children, recognition by means of rings and
necklaces, these are the elements of New Comedy, and it was
Euripides who developed them'.69
For many nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics, plays like
Alcestis, Electra, Orestes and Iphigenia in Tauris are by
definition untragic. These critics say that in lieu of the
'metaphysical comfort' that tragedy should provide, these plays
offer an 'earthly resolution of the tragic dissonance' and that in
lieu of 'tragic catharsis', they offer a 'happy ending'.70 Yet we
know from Euripides's texts that he was interested in developing an
'art against grief, and at least one classicist has gone so far as
to anoint him the originator of catharsis as a tragic ideal, the
practising dramatist who showed Aristotle the way.71 For our
purposes, I think it is most useful to think of his tragedies more
simply as a series of provisional but coherent answers to the
question, What sorts of song cure ills?
Although Euripides shows a consistent taste for scenes of
extreme pathos and is inclined to elicit pity by staging or
describing the suffering or death of helpless victims like young
virgins and children, he does not adhere to a particular tragic
pattern, and he seems to have been willing to entertain the
possibility that, as
65 D'Aubignac, La Pratique du thedatre, IV, 140. 66 Euripides,
Orestes 1492-3. 6 Pirrotta and Povoledo, Music and Theatre from
Poliziano to Monteverdi, 268; Ketterer, 'Why Early Opera is Roman
and not Greek', 5, 12. 6 Ketterer, 'Why Early Opera is Roman and
not Greek', 12. 69 Satyrus, Vita di Euripide 39, col. 7; for the
Greek text and an Italian translation, see Vita di
Euripide, ed. Graziano Arrighetti (Pisa, 1964). 70 Nietzsche,
Birth of Tragedy, 10; Kitto, Greek Tragedy, 331. 'n See C. Diano,
'Euripide auteur de la catharsis tragique', Numen, 8 (1961),
117-41; Pietro
Pucci, The Violence of Pity in Euripides' 'Medea' (Ithaca,
1980).
This content downloaded from 130.104.144.135 on Mon, 09 Mar 2015
18:09:32 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
268 Blair Hoxby
Giacomini said, an action that moves from misery to felicity
might still be purgative because the soul contemplates an impending
evil as if it were a present reality.72 In most of the plays that
Kitto labels 'melodramas', Euripides 'leads the psyches' of his
audience by harrowing them with prospects of evil and exposing them
to passions developed to the point of fullness before stupefying
them with the marvellous entrance of a god. His di ex machina are
not just a way to tie up his plots, or to pander to a taste for
spectacle. They are a means, or so seventeenth-century readers
could reasonably interpret them, of completing the affective script
of his tragedies by stirring the audience to intense wonder - a
passion that, according to many commentators, had its own purgative
qualities. They are, in other words, an integral part of his 'art
against grief.
This, at any rate, is the way many Italian Baroque operas and
French tragidies en musique interpret Euripidean tragedy. Their
moments of deepest fear and pity usually fall well before the
catastrophe. Think of Le Cerf de la Vieville's account of the
audience's reaction to the end of Act II of Quinault and Lully's
Armide (1686), when they are ravished by the mere spectre of an
impending evil: 'When Armide nerves herself to stab Renaud ... I
have twenty times seen the entire audience in the grip of fear,
neither breathing nor moving, their whole attention in their ears
and eyes, until the instrumental air which concludes the scene
allowed them to draw breath again, after which they exhaled with a
murmur of pleasure and admiration'.73 If the purpose of tragedy is
simply to stir up and purge the passions, there is no reason why it
should not stage scenes like this, and there is every reason for it
to introduce a deus ex machina at the end to arouse a final sense
of wonder. Such endings became so conventional that
Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret could explain that, because 'a
machine nearly always ends serious operas in France, in imitation
of Greek plays', it 'can be said to fall within the rules' of
dramatic propriety.74
I do not believe, any more than Palisca or Pirrotta do, that
seventeenth-century tragedians or librettists were under the
impression that their productions were historically accurate
reconstructions of ancient Greek tragedies. Nor do I wish to deny
that Latin literature or pastoral drama - which Giraldi Cinthio
traced back to Euripides's late play Cyclops - contributed to the
development of opera.75 The pioneers of opera read widely in
classical sources from a variety of genres and periods, consciously
rejecting the use of masks when they would interfere with the
expression of the passions, drawing freely on accounts of
Alexandrian and Roman actors, dancers and machinists, and always
bearing in mind that the first duty of the poet was to please his
contemporary audience. A mournful sense of the gulf dividing modern
Europe from the ancient world, the contemporary stage from the
72 Giacomini, Orationi e discorsi, 51-2. 73 Jean-Laurent Le Cerf
de la Vieville, Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la
musiquefranfoise,
trans. in French Baroque Opera: A Reader, ed. Caroline Wood and
Graham Sadler (Aldershot, 2000), 39.
74 Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougeret, De l'Art du thaitre, 2 vols.
(Paris, 1769), II, 211. 7 See Cinthio's Discorso sopra il comporre
le satire atte alle scene (1554). Cinthio cites Cyclops, the
only complete surviving example of an ancient satyr play, as the
model of his Egl6, which has been variously described as a satyric
drama, a pastoral drama and a tragicomedy.
This content downloaded from 130.104.144.135 on Mon, 09 Mar 2015
18:09:32 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
The origins of opera and the spirit of tragedy reconsidered
269
ancient theatre, runs through some of the very writings in which
they piece together the fragmentary evidence of the past. Indeed,
it could be argued that it was their very consciousness of
belatedness that reinforced their taste for Euripides and for the
'decadent' performers of Alexandria and Rome - who were themselves
confronted with the task of renewing a revered, yet increasingly
alien, literary and dramatic tradition. But when scholars dismiss
the claims of early opera or tragidie en musique to being 'true
tragedy', they obscure both how open and contested were the generic
boundaries of tragedy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
and how avidly Baroque opera fed on a particular style of tragic
dramaturgy. It is time we recognised that in imaginatively
responding to Euripides's musical dramaturgy, early opera helped to
disentangle his tragic style from Seneca's sententious revision of
it, and, by so doing, to secure his position as the premier model
of classical tragedy, spoken or sung, by the time the abbe
d'Aubignac announced 'our Poets have recovered the Way to
Parnassus, upon the Footsteps of Euripides'.76 With its musical
representation of the passions, its episodic plotting, its choral
interludes and its felicitous catastrophes, Baroque opera is a
strong and coherent reading of a set of Euripidean tragedies that
were highly prized in Hellenistic Greece but that fell from grace
in the nineteenth century. Although the prevailing theories about
the meaning of tragic catharsis and the sources of tragic pleasure
changed several times between 1550 and 1800, only the rise of
German idealism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
displaced the passions from their central place in the critical
analysis of tragedy, thus depriving Euripides of his distinction as
the most tragic of the poets and transforming a revival of ancient
tragedy into the birth of melodrama.
76 D'Aubignac, La Pratique du th'itre, I, 12.
This content downloaded from 130.104.144.135 on Mon, 09 Mar 2015
18:09:32 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Article Contentsp. [253]p. 254p. 255p. 256p. 257p. 258p. 259p.
260p. 261p. 262p. 263p. 264p. 265p. 266p. 267p. 268p. 269
Issue Table of ContentsCambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 17, No. 3,
Nov., 2005Front MatterThe Witches and the Witch: Verdi's Macbeth
[pp. 225 - 252]The Doleful Airs of Euripides: The Origins of Opera
and the Spirit of Tragedy Reconsidered [pp. 253 - 269]'Veluti in
Speculum': The Twilight of the Castrato [pp. 271 -
301]Reviewuntitled [pp. 303 - 308]
Back Matter