APRIL 2004

Aristophanes in Music
Peter Brown, University of Oxford

There has been little study of the music composed in modern times to accompany performances of Aristophanes' plays. Yet the musical element is an integral part of almost any modern production, and in one case (Karolos Koun's production of Birds at the Athens Festival in 1959, with music by Manos Hadzidakis) the nature of the music was used by the Greek Minister of the Interior as a pretext for banning all further performances after the first night, on the grounds that 'certain scenes were presented in such a way as to insult the religious sensibilities of the people'. One reason for the relative neglect of this topic must be the difficulty of acquiring recordings of the music in most cases; even if you manage to do so, it is then difficult to assess the contribution of the music to the overall dramatic effect. For instance, a CD of Stephen Sondheim's music for The Frogs (1974) was issued in 2001 but included very little of the spoken dialogue. The CD booklet makes clear that Aeschylus and Euripides in the second half of the play were replaced by William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw, but the recording includes only the setting of 'Fear no more the heat o' the sun' with which Shakespeare finally won. Furthermore, the work was originally performed in the swimming pool at Yale (with Meryl Streep and Sigourny Weaver taking part as students at the Yale School of Drama), an element which must have contributed a great deal to the overall effect but is (of course) not captured at all on the CD. A video or DVD of the complete performance would clearly be preferable, if only such things were available.

This difficulty applies to all study of the modern performance reception of ancient drama, and indeed to all study of drama altogether: if you were not there on the night, how can you know what it felt like? Even if you were there, how can you convey that to a reader? In fact, as we know, it is possible to make considerable progress by analysis of the text and by tracking down newspaper reviews and interviews with the director. The banning of Koun's Birds became notorious, and we know which scene it was that offended the Minister: at the point where a priest performs a sacrifice to the gods at the inauguration of the new city, he began the ceremony by chanting in the style of Byzantine ecclesiastical music; this was taken by some in the audience to be mockery of the Orthodox Church, and they were not slow to voice their disapproval on the spot. Even if you have not heard a recording of the music, you do not need to be a musicologist to imagine roughly what it was like. In fact the musical style of the entire production was strikingly contemporary, since Hadzidakis based his score on modern Greek folk music; this went hand in hand with the updating of many of the political references in the spoken text to give it an anti-American slant which no doubt also influenced the Minister's decision to ban the play. Gonda van Steen ( Venom in Verse: Aristophanes in Modern Greece, Princeton 2000) has done well to remind us that the audience at the Athens Festival in the 1950s was essentially a Greek audience, not packed with tourists, which made the political and religious implications of the production all the more sensitive an issue. It does not require much imagination for non-Greeks 45 years later to appreciate all of this, nor does it require sophisticated analysis of the music.

Hadzidakis himself appears briefly as a character in Mikis Theodorakis' operatic version of Lysistrata, first performed in Athens in 2002, with a libretto by Theodorakis: at one point the Poet (an added linking character) starts to sing one of Hadzidakis' most famous tunes, whereupon Hadzidakis appears in person and accuses him of stealing it. Earlier the Proboulos had started singing (in Spanish) from Theodorakis' own work Canto General, only to be told off for doing so. In these cases the musical intertextuality is so explicit in the libretto that you do not even need to know the tunes to get the point. Towards the end of the opera Theodorakis quotes from what he himself has described in an interview as 'one of the most beautiful melodies I ever wrote', but this time there is no indication in the words of what is going on. As with all intertextuality, some people will spot instantly (whether reading the score or hearing a performance) what others will never notice unaided. It is possible to point such things out by writing about them, but undoubtedly there is a wider public for discussion of verbal than of musical intertextuality.

One task yet to be performed is the compilation of a complete list of musical settings of Aristophanes. A good starting point is the entry on Aristophanes in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (2nd ed., London 2001), and one can uncover a certain amount more by searching for Lysistrata (and Lysistrate) in the online version at http://www.grovemusic.com/, and also by searching Google if one can find a way to limit one's searches. Grove lists eleven operas, operettas or musicals based on this play, three ballets, an 'opera-ballet' by Johnny Dankworth, a 'play in music', an orchestral suite, a vocal suite, a concert overture, a piece of electronic music, and an unfinished opera by Hans Krása, who died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz in 1944. (Plays other than Lysistrata yield meagre results, but there is surely more to be unearthed.) In addition Grove lists several composers of incidental music for more straightforward productions; one of the most famous examples of this type of composition is the music composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams for the Cambridge production of Wasps in 1909. If you have access to Lexis-Nexis and search under 'News' for the combination of 'Aristophanes' and 'musical', you will find such delights as The Second Greatest Sex (a film musical, 1955), The Happiest Girl in the World (1961) and Wild Wild Women (1989), all based on Lysistrata. Settings of ancient drama are also listed in Joachim Draheim, Vertonungen antiker Texte vom Barock bis zur Gegenwart (Amsterdam 1981); the list in Marianne McDonald, Sing Sorrow: Classics, History, and Heroines in Opera (Westport, Connecticut and London 2001, in general much the fullest available list of operas based on ancient drama and ancient history) is less complete for Aristophanes but includes some settings.

No one (I hope!) will try to lay down rules for the appropriate type of music for composers to use. The Happiest Girl in the World uses music by Offenbach (the original cast recording is available on CD), and Hadzidakis has not been the only Greek composer to use the idioms of Greek folk music. Such practices inevitably bring anachronistic associations with them, but anyone who is going to be worried by that will not choose to go to the musicals and had probably better avoid staged productions of Aristophanes altogether. A musical based on Offenbach is not going to feel much like Aristophanes to most of us, but (as with operatic versions of Greek tragedy) the vigour of the classical tradition shows itself most strikingly in its adaptability to ever-changing modern styles.

One issue of which one quickly becomes aware is the problem of definition, since there is no clear dividing line between such terms as incidental music, Singspiel, melodrama, semi-opera, opera, operetta and musical. There is an excellent article in Grove on Incidental Music which starts with a discussion of this problem, but of course it is in practice a problem only for those who need to classify the material for some purpose.

Few of the operas or musicals have made much of a mark: Sondheim's Frogs has never achieved the popularity of his Plautine show A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, though it is to be revived in New York this summer. But it is worth mentioning that the 'Glow-worm Idyll' from Paul Lincke's operetta Lysistrata (1902) became extremely popular as a free-standing extract. One opera which was a considerable success when it was first performed in 1920 was Walter Braunfels' version of Birds ( Die Vögel ), with a libretto by the composer. This was given more than fifty performances in two years in Munich and was soon performed in other German cities as well. Braunfels' music was banned by the Nazis in 1933, but he withdrew from Cologne to Lake Constance and survived the war there. His opera has been revived several times in recent years, most recently in Geneva in January and February of this year and in Vienna in March and April. It is a free adaptation of the plot and for the most part Aristophanes without the comedy: at the end, the city of the birds is destroyed by Zeus, after Prometheus has warned that it is futile to stand against him. A recording was issued by Decca in 1996: the highlight is a duet between the Nightingale and Hoffegut (Euelpides) which corresponds to nothing in Aristophanes but is very beautiful.

One of Franz Schubert's less well-known operatic compositions is The Conspirators ( Die Verschworenen ), a setting of a libretto based on Lysistrata in which the sex-strike theme is transferred to a castle at the time of the Crusades; it includes a scene where the page Udolin attends the women's plotting disguised as a woman, thus incorporating a motif from Thesmophoriazusae for good measure. Schubert composed this one-act Singspiel in 1823, but it was not performed until 1861, and it cannot be said to be one of his greatest works. But recordings were issued in 1977 by EMI (reissued 1996 by Classic Produktion Osnabrück) and in 1996 on the Opus label, and in 1997 it was performed on the second night of the Proms in London.

Finally, Mark Adamo's opera Lysistrata, or The Nude Goddess, originally scheduled to appear in 2002, is now announced for 2005. Adamo's earlier opera Little Women (1998) has had considerable success in the USA, so we await his Lysistrata with keen interest.

RESPONSE

Lorna Hardwick, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Peter, your fascinating account certainly prompted questions in my mind about the levels of possible response among spectators (as well as academic interpreters and critics). In his 1989 essay 'Performance as an extreme occasion' Edward Said suggested that after the cultural centrality of the musical experience in modernism it subsequently became fragmented - reflected even in music departments in the divisions between different aspects such as musicology, theory, ethnomusicology and composition. I was wondering about the extent to which you think that this kind of post-modern slant on fragmentation is helpful in analysing the part played by music in more recent productions. If modern stagings involve a reinterpretation and reimagining of comedy does the communication of humour (as oppposed to more referential or programme music) make special demands on the spectators and on those who select or commission the music? I'm struck by the renewed interest in music in respect of tragedy (for example in the recent productions of Agamemnon by Dorinda Hulton, of Trojan Women by Avery Willis in Oxford and by Femi Osofisan/Chuck Mike in The Women of Owu, in which an element of comedy was, for cultural and performance reasons, quite prominent). Do you see this focus on music as a continuing development in stagings of comedy too (not just in adaptations)? And if so, how can academics, critics and students learn to respond to this aspect of the construction of meaning?

Final Response from the Topic Leader Peter Brown

I just don't know enough to say whether those putting Greek comedy on now take more trouble over the music than was done (say) thirty years ago. Given the long-standing Greek tradition of employing leading composers to write the music for productions of both tragedy and comedy, I suspect that in that country at least the importance of the music has been acknowledged for several decades. And the Cambridge Greek Play had music by Parry for its production of Birds in 1883 (and again in 1903), as well as Vaughan Williams' music for Wasps in 1909.

The most helpful thing for academics, critics and students would probably be interviews with directors and composers that directly address the issue of how they see the music's contribution to the overall effect of the production and what sort of discussions they had about the nature of the music. This should help to sharpen our receptivity as first-time audiences, but it's probably even more important for historical study, since fashions come and go, and tunes that are familiar to a wide audience in one generation may mean nothing to most listeners in the next.

In general, we are all inevitably victims of our own limitations: if part of the point of the music is that it evokes some famous songs by Bob Dylan, you're going to miss that if you don't happen to know the songs. Music chosen to enhance the comic effect is likely to do so by means of parody, or by setting incongruous words to familiar tunes: to be sure the audience gets the point; composers probably have to use crashingly obvious tunes. But the only remedy for post-modern fragmentation and compartmentalisation is for us all to recreate ourselves as Renaissance men and women. I don't rate my chances very highly, but some of the people on this seminar list set a pretty impressive example.