blair hoxby the doleful airs of euripides, the origins of opera and the sprit of tragedy

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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

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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 representation 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


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 contemporary 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.


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.


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.



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.


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.



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).


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 appearance 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.



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.


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 controversy 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.



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'.


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.



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.


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).



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).


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.



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.


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

blair hoxby the doleful airs of euripides, the origins of opera and the sprit of tragedy

Documents

origins of opera

surviving opera

ancient tragedy

pioneers of opera

baroque opera

jstor terms

jstor archive

utcyour use