Music for the Aeneid

Abstract

In modern times the rendering of treasured legend through the sung, as well as the spoken, word moved from biblical to classical sources during the fifteenth century. In 1472 a lyric drama on the Orpheus fable was so produced at Mantua, to a text by the poet Poliziano. The music is lost; it must have been in the madrigal style. But, rather more than a hundred years later, scholars and musicians gathered at the house of the Count of Vernio in Florence in an attempt to recover the supposed methods of Athenian tragedy (the musical details of which remain too imprecise to be cogent) in a new kind of declamatory stage-song. The subsequent, comprehensive, and altogether creative achievement of Monteverdi's Orfeo, produced at Mantua in 1608, established the first point in a fresh trickle of operas on classical subjects, which in the eighteenth century became a downpour. Operas that still hold a place on the public stage are mainly of Greek provenance. They range from Iphigénie en Tauride, the culmination of Gluck's late abandonment of light opera for ‘nature’ and classical librettos, and Mozart's exceptional, not at all comic, Idomeneo, to Strauss's equally exceptional Elektra, with Tippett's opera on the death of Priam on the way. (Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito (1791) appears to have been a reluctant struggle with a fresh version of Metastasio's text of 1734, which will become pertinent later. Mozart was preoccupied with Die Zauberflöte.)