The Children of Orpheus: How Composers Receive Ancient Texts

Abstract

Since the Renaissance, classical subjects have exerted an ever-present impact on musical composition. Composers have responded in diverse, revealing ways to the challenge of setting classical texts. Some have harnessed their prestige as a platform for social or political commentary; others have regarded classical literary works as structural archetypes to be preserved by music; still others have re-interpreted or even negated those texts’ original meanings. Combining musical and classical scholarship, this outreach panel consists of four papers specifically chosen because they discuss the musical scores themselves as well as the texts they set. This dual study of music in collaboration with text is a potentially unique contribution to the offerings of the APA. The panel will consider the works of four composers who have set classical texts or subjects: Francesco Cavalli, Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, and Iannis Xenakis. Ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, the pieces represent different genres: opera, art song, incidental music, and concert/theatrical music. Progressing chronologically, the composers engage with their ancient sources in an increasingly direct manner. Cavalli’s seventeenth-century opera Il Giasone, the earliest work, sets an Italian libretto that draws on Apollonius’ and Ovid’s characterizations of Jason as an effeminate hero (Panelist 1). Many of Franz Schubert’s early nineteenth-century art songs set poems by such contemporaries as Goethe, Schiller, and Heine, which regard Greek antiquity from the perspective of German Romanticism (Panelist 2). In the 1840s, Felix Mendelssohn makes a studied attempt to forge a structural connection between music and text by aligning the rhythmic and metrical patterns of his incidental music for Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus as closely as possible with Sophocles’ Greek, albeit by way of a contemporary German translation (Panelist 3). Finally, Iannis Xenakis, alone among the four composers, directly sets ancient text, using original passages of Aeschylus’ Greek in his concert/theatrical Kassandra (Panelist 4).In spite of these varying degrees of distance from the ancient texts, each composer engages deeply with his literary sources, and follows distinct methodologies in setting the text to music. A series of interesting questions emerges, which will be explored by the respondent. For example, are ancient texts a viable platform for political and social advocacy, as the papers on Cavalli and Schubert discuss? In this case, composers may value a text’s classical origin – and its corresponding prestige and exemption from serious reproach (or even censorship) – more highly than any esthetic attributes the text itself may possess. Or, are ancient texts honored archetypes, literary molds into which music may be productively poured? Mendelssohn’s intellectualized experiment, a conscious re-creation of imagined ancient performance practice, could be considered in keeping with this view. Do ancient texts have value as collections of smaller “particles” of meaning and syntax that can be freely divorced from their original contexts, suffer the stretching or negation – both conceptually and performatively – of their significations, and still maintain a central relationship to the expressive totality of the work? Xenakis’ approach in his “Kassandra” seems to pose these questions.Each 20 minute paper will be accompanied by audio-visual and music notation examples to support its major points. The co-organizers are a classicist who has worked on the reception of classics in music, and a composer whose works reflect the classical tradition. The classicist will introduce and moderate. Following the presentations, the composer will offer a twenty-minute response that summarizes the most important points of the conversation, and adresses the questions above to raise issues for future exploration. Remaining time will be taken up with questions and discussion.