- Title
- Aeschylus and opera
- Creator
- Ewans, Michael
- Relation
- Brill's Companion to the Reception of Aeschylus p. 205-223
- Relation
- Brills' Companions to Classical Reception 2
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004348820
- Publisher
- Koninklijke Brill
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- Only two operas drawn from a tragedy by Aeschylus were composed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, despite this being a peak period for the use of Greek and Roman material. Stories from Greek myth were popular from the start, but no actual Greek tragedies were adapted for the stage for sixty years after the first opera (Peri's Dafoe of 1597-8). Adaptations began with Pietro Andrea Zanni's Antigona delusa di Alceste (1660), and Euripides was the favoured author; Alcestis, the two Iphigenia plays and Medea were the Greek tragedies most frequently chosen to furnish source material for opera librettos. The adaptations were very free, with romantic plots and sub-plots, spectacle, ballets and sometimes even comic interludes. The much more complex work of Aeschylus was difficult to adapt, and his subject matter was distant from the popular taste of the period. The ancient Greek chorus, which is very difficult to reshape into opera, plays a much greater part in Aeschylus than in Euripides; his language is high-flown and sometimes obscure, and his tragedies contain no elements of adventure or potential for romance, which were essential for popularity with Baroque audiences. In addition to that, three tragedies (Seven against Thebes, Suppliants and Prometheus Bound) survive from trilogies of which the other two dramas are lost, leaving the grim Persians and the formidable Oresteia as Aeschylus' only complete surviving works. Even at the start of the nineteenth century Goethe, though he admired the trilogy, described it as "a primaevally gigantic form, of monstrous shape" to which it was hard to make an adequate response. Perhaps because of the problems involved, no opera was based on any of Aeschylus' actual tragedies-apart from an unsuccessful Cassandre in 1706 and an unperformed Clytemnestre written in 17873-until Taneyev's Oresteia (1895); the two most important works before that with a relationship to Aeschylus are Salieri's Les Danaides, which is a sequel to Suppliants, and Wagner's The Nibelung's Ring, a trilogy of "stage festival plays" based on Norse and German mythology, which was inspired by Wagner's engagement with the Oresteia. I shall study these works and Taneyev's Oresteia in some detail, then examine two twentieth-century adaptations of Prometheus Bound, and conclude with a brief survey of some twentieth-century operas based on the Oresteia.
- Subject
- Greek myth; Greek tragedies; ancient Greek chorus; adaptations; Taneyev; Oresteia
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1411176
- Identifier
- uon:36307
- Identifier
- ISBN:9789004348820
- Language
- eng
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