The Music of Tragedy


Book Description

The Music of Tragedy offers a new approach to the study of classical Greek theater by examining the use of musical language, imagery, and performance in the late work of Euripides. Naomi Weiss demonstrates that Euripides’ allusions to music-making are not just metatheatrical flourishes or gestures towards musical and religious practices external to the drama but closely interwoven with the dramatic plot. Situating Euripides’ experimentation with the dramaturgical effects of mousike within a broader cultural context, she shows how much of his novelty lies in his reinvention of traditional lyric styles and motifs for the tragic stage. If we wish to understand better the trajectories of this most important ancient art form, The Music of Tragedy argues, we must pay closer attention to the role played by both music and text.




Brill's Companion to Sophocles


Book Description

Brill's Companion to Sophocles offers 32 specially commissioned essays from leading international scholars which give critical examinations of the progress and direction of numerous wide-ranging debates about various aspects of Sophoclean drama. Each chapter offers an authoritative and state-of-the-art survey of current thinking and research in a particular subject area, as well as covering a wide variety of thematic angles. Recent advances in scholarship have raised new questions about Sophocles and Greek tragedy, and have overturned some long-standing assumptions. Besides presenting a comprehensive and authoritative guide to understanding Sophocles, this companion provides scholars and students with compelling fresh perspectives upon a broad range of issues in the field of Sophoclean studies.




Music to the Electra of Sophocles


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“Music’s Obedient Daughter”


Book Description

A libretto is an indispensable part of an opera as a musical genre: with few exceptions, operas have been the subject of musicological studies, and instrumental versions of sung or unsung opera numbers may be heard, but we never listen to libretto texts being performed without the music. Thus as a literary form the libretto is a highly specific genre with its own particular attributes. This volume offers an approach to the libretto through the discussion of these attributes in many different examples. It explores what may be expected of a librettist in response to the demands of the genre’s characteristics, his trials and tribulations, his exchanges with the composer while adapting or converting a source, almost always a literary source, into the eventual libretto, and about the different musical ways of dealing with the text. In this way the volume clarifies the fundamental differences between the libretto and other literary genres.







Antigone and other Tragedies


Book Description

Sophocles stands as one of the greatest dramatists of all time, and one of the most influential on artists and thinkers over the centuries. His plays are deeply disturbing and unpredictable, unrelenting and open-ended, refusing to present firm answers to the questions of human existence, or to provide a redemptive justification of the ways of gods to men or women. These three tragedies portray the extremes of human suffering and emotion, turning the heroic myths into supreme works of poetry and dramatic action. Antigone's obsession with the dead, Creon's crushing inflexibility, Deianeira's jealous desperation, the injustice of the gods witnessed by Hyllus, Electra's obsessive vindictiveness, the threatening of insoluble dynastic contamination... Such are the pains and distortions and instabilities of Sophoclean tragedy. And yet they do not deteriorate into cacophony or disgust or incoherence or silence: they face the music, and through that the suffering is itself turned into the coherence of music and poetry. These original and distinctive verse translations convey the vitality of Sophocles' poetry and the vigour of the plays in performance, doing justice to both the sound of the poetry and the theatricality of the tragedies. Each play is accompanied by an introduction and substantial notes on topographical and mythical references and interpretation.




Sophocles' "Electra" in Performance


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Late Sophocles


Book Description

An accessible examination of the evolution of key Sophoclean characters




Greek Mythology


Book Description

Allegorists in ancient Greece attempted to find philosophical and physical truths in myth. Plato, who resolutely excluded myths from the sphere of truth, thought that they could express ideas in a realm he could not reach with dialectical reasoning. Freud built a science around the myth of Oedipus, saying that myths were "distorted wish dreams of entire nations, the dreams of early mankind." No body of myth has served more purposes - or been subject to more analysis - than Greek mythology. This is a revised translation of Fritz Graf's highly acclaimed introduction to Greek mythology, Griechische Mythologie: Eine Einfuhrung, originally published in 1985 by Artemis Verlag. Graf offers a chronological account of the principal Greek myths that appear in the surviving literary and artistic sources, and concurrently documents the history of interpretation of Greek mythology from the seventeenth century to the present. First surveying the various definitions of myth that have been advanced, Graf proceeds to look at the relationship between Greek myths and epic poetry; the absence of an "origin of man" myth in Creek mythology; and connection between particular myths and shrines or holy festivals; the harmony in Greek literature between myth and history; the use of myth in Greek song and tragedy; and the uses and interpretations of myth by philosophers and allegorists.




Paths of Song


Book Description

Paths of Song: The Lyric Dimension of Greek Tragedy analyzes the multiple and varied evocations of choral lyric in fifth-century Greek tragedy using a variety of methodological approaches that illustrate the myriad forms through which lyric is present and can be presented in tragedy. This collection focuses on different types of interaction of Greek tragedy with lyric poetry in fifth-century Athens: generic, mythological, cultural, musical, and performative. The collected essays demonstrate the dynamic and nuanced relationship between lyric poetry and tragedy within the larger frame of Athenian song- and performance-culture, and reveal a vibrant and symbiotic co-existence between tragedy and lyric. Paths of Song illustrates the effects that this dynamic engagement with lyric possibly had on tragic performances, including performances of satyr drama, as well as on processes of survival and reputation, selection and refiguration, tradition and innovation. The volume is of particular interest to scholars in the field of classics, cultural studies, and the performing arts, as well as to readers interested in poetic transmission and in cultural evolution in antiquity.




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