The Doleful Airs of Euripides: The Origins of Opera and the Spirit of Tragedy Reconsidered

Author(s): Blair Hoxby

Source: Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Nov., 2005), pp. 253-269
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Cambridge
OperaJournal,17, 3, 253-269
doi:10.1017/S0954586706002035

() 2005 CambridgeUniversity Press

The doleful airs of Euripides:The origins of

opera and the spirit of tragedyreconsidered
BLAIR HOXBY
Abstract:

Scholarly consensus denies a real connection between ancient tragedy and early

opera because music historians have measured early operas against an idealised conception of

Attic tragedy. However, the pioneers of opera were seeking to revive a Euripidean style of
musical tragedy as it was performed in the 'decadent' theatres of the Hellenistic era. Euripides's
tragedies established conventional relationships between musical expression and the representation of the passions. Baroque opera is seen as a strongly complex reading of a set of

Euripideantragediesthat enjoyed favour in the Hellenistic era but fell from criticalgrace in the
nineteenth century. These plays hold the key to opera's tragic pretensions; the esteem they long
enjoyed should prompt us to reconsider the spirit of tragedy and the nature of catharsis.

In their prefaces to Euridice(1600), the first surviving opera, the poet Ottavio
Rinuccini and composer Jacopo Peri appealed to the opinion 'of many' that the
ancient Greeks and Romans 'sang their tragedies throughout on the stage' and
explained why they thought the ancients must have sung their plays in a manner
As if to announce the genre of their work, they
something like Peri's stilerecitativo.1
chose Tragedyherself to sing the Prologue.2In a counterbidto claimpriorityfor the
invention of the 'new music', Giulio Caccinirecalledin his preface to a rival setting
of the libretto that the 'noble virtuosi' who gathered years earlier at Giovanni
Bardi's house had even then declared his style of singing 'to be that used by the
ancient Greeks when introducing songs into the presentationsof their tragedies'.3
Whether or not we accept Caccini's claim at face value, there can be little doubt
that Bardi's prote6ges Vincenzo Galilei and Giulio Caccini - and after them
Jacopo Corsi's protegees Rinuccini and Peri - were inspired to undertake their
practicalexperimentswith monodic songs and recitativeby two ideas that Girolamo
Mei circulatedamong the learnedelite of Florence:that ancient tragedieshad been
sung throughout and that ancient music had been so affecting because the Greeks
had not written polyphony but, relying on simple but expressive melodies, had
imitated the passions using modes whose pitch and rhythm produced a powerful
sympatheticresponse in the souls of their auditors.4
1 Ottavio Rinuccini, Dedication to Euridice(Florence, 1600), in Oliver Strunk, ed., Source

Readingsin MusicHisto7y:From ClassicalAntiqui~y

throughtheRomanticEra (New York, 1950),
367-8. Jacopo Peri makes an almost identical statement in his Preface to Le musichesopra
L'Euridice(Florence, 1600), in Oliver Strunk, ed., SourceReadingsin MusicHistory,rev. edn,
gen. ed. Leo Treitler, 'The Baroque Era', ed. MargaretMurata (New York, 1998), 659-60.
2 On the use of prologues as generic signals, see BarbaraRussano Hanning, 'Apologia pro
Ottavio Rinuccini',Journalof theAmericanMusicological
Society,26 (1973), 240-62.
in musicain stilerappresentativo
3 Giulio Caccini, Dedication to L'Euridicecomposta
(Florence,
1600), in Strunk/Murata,'The Baroque Era', 606.
4 See Claude V. Palisca, 'Girolamo Mei: Mentor to the Florentine Camerata',MusicalQuarterly,
40 (1954), 1-20; Nino Pirrotta,'Temperaments and Tendencies in the Florentine Camerata',

continued
onnextpage
footnote

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254

Blair Hoxby

Yet subsequent critics have denied a meaningful connection between the tragedy
of the ancients and the stile rappresentativo.
Nietzsche found it incredible that 'this
thoroughly externalized operatic music ... could be received and cherished with
enthusiastic favour, as a rebirth, as it were, of all true music', and even scholars who
admire the music insist that because composers like Caccini and Peri could study
virtually no examples of ancient music, their style actually found its 'origins in the
musical practice of the fifteenth century' and developed in dialogue with contemporary madrigals, solo songs and theatrical music.5 Claudio Monteverdi added
weight to this view when he told Giovanni Battista Doni, the first historian of the
new music, that although he had valued seeing Galilei's transcriptions of ancient
musical examples twenty years before, he hadn't invested much time trying to
understand them because he knew that 'the ancient practical manner' was
'completely lost'.6 The texts of the ancient tragedies were not lost, of course, yet two
of the most influential historians of early opera, Claude Palisca and Nino Pirrotta,
concur in emphasising the contribution of contemporary theatrical forms, such as
masques, pastorals and comedies, to its dramatic form. What contemporary tastes
demanded, says Palisca, was 'not true tragedy but a mixed genre', and Rinuccini and
his circle, who were 'steeped in the classics', knew perfectly well that the
musico-dramatic form they created was not 'a rebirth of ancient tragedy'.7
I believe that critics have underestimated and misconstrued opera's relationship
to ancient tragedy. Even Barbara Hanning, who defends Peri and Rinuccini's
interest in reviving the singing style and affective power of the ancient stage,
assumes too readily that when the Tragedy of Euridicepromises to sing 'not of blood
spilled from innocent veins, not of the lifeless brow of a tyrant', but 'of mournful
and tearful scenes', she is signalling a change of allegiance from classical tragedy to
contemporary tragicomedy.8 What lies behind such ready assumptions is an
continued
footnote
fromprevous
page
Musicto
Musical
40 (1954), 169-89;GirolamoMei,LettersonAncientandModern
Quarterly,
GalileiandGiovanni
Bardi,ed. Palisca(Neuhausen-Stuttgart,
1977);Palisca,Humanism
Vincenzo
in ItalianRenaissance
MusicalThought
(New Haven,1985), 408-33;Palisca,ed., TheFlorentine
Camerata
(New Haven,1989).
trans.WalterKaufmann
andTheCaseof Wagner,
s FriedrichNietzsche,TheBirthof Tragedy
to
(New York,1967), 114;Nino Pirrottaand ElenaPovoledo,MusicandTheatre
fromPoliziano
trans.KarenEales (Cambridge,1982), 201. For otheraccountsthatemphasisethe
Monteverdi,
of the stilerecitativo
musicalforms,see, for example,
with contemporary
inter-relationship
Survey',Musical
Nigel Fortune,'ItalianSecularMonodyfrom 1600 to 1635:An Introductory
39 (1953), 171-95;ClaudeV. Palisca,'VincenzoGalileiandSomeLinksbetween
Quarterly,
andMonody',Musical
46 (1960), 344-60; and GaryTomlinson,
"Pseudo-Monody"
Quarterly,
"VianaturaleallaImitatione"
',Journalof theAmerican
'Madrigal,
Monody,andMonteverdi's
34 (1981), 60-108.
Society,
Musicological
Letterto GiovanniBattistaDoni (February1634),in TheNewMonteverdi
6 ClaudioMonteverdi,
ed. Denis ArnoldandNigel Fortune(London,1985), 86.
Companion,
7 I quotePalisca,'The Alteratiof Florence,Pioneersin the Theoryof DramaticMusic',in
NewLooksat ItalianOpera:
Essaysin HonorofDonaldJ.Grout,ed. WilliamW. Austin(Ithaca,
andTendencies',188;Pirrotta,'Tragidieet
1968), 29, 36. Also see Pirrotta,'Temperaments
comediedansla cameratafiorentina',
in Musique
etpolsieauXVIe siicle(Paris,1954), 295;
PirottaandPovoledo,MusicandTheatre
toMonteverdi,
268; and,for a summary
fromPoliziano
of similarviews,see Hanning,'Apologia',241.
8 Hanning,'Apologia',245-6, 252.

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The origins of opera and the spirit of tragedyreconsidered

255

idealised conception of Attic tragedy that nineteenth-century German philologists

extracted from a few touch-stone plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles. For Nietzsche,
these two poets embodied the true spirit of tragedy, a spirit with which Euripides
fought 'a death struggle'.9 Some of the scholars who have done the most to shape
accepted opinion about ancient drama in this century have implicitly endorsed that
view by reclassifying many of Euripides's tragedies as romances, melodramas or
tragicomedies - this despite the fact that, as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
readers never tired of repeating, Aristotle's Poeticsdeclared Euripides, not Aeschylus
or Sophocles, to be the most tragic of poets.10 I would agree that Peri, Rinuccini and
their immediate successors were not interested in staging the sort of bloody revenge
tragedy popular with Seneca's imitators. Nor did they desire to revive Nietzsche's
ideal of Attic tragedy. But these truths obscure a more important one: that Baroque
librettists, composers and scenographers did, to an extent not hitherto recognised,
seek to revive a Euripidean style of musical tragedy - especially as it was performed
in the 'decadent' theatres of Hellenistic Greece and Rome."1 Once we understand
the tragic ideal to which they aspired, we will be in a better position to see Baroque
opera (a new musico-dramatic form that took many names in its first decades) for
what it is: a strongly complex reading of the Euripidean tradition.12
Euripides's

musical dramaturgy

Whereas Aeschylus and Sophocles each left seven surviving plays, Euripides left
nineteen. The survival of Euripides's tragedies in such superior numbers is a tribute
76.
9 Nietzsche,Birthof Tragedy,
1453a22-39;the Greektext, a translationand extensivecommentary
10 See Aristotle,Poetics
TheArgument
Poetics:
Mass.,1967),
maybe foundin GerardF. Else,Aristotle's
(Cambridge,
399-406. H. D. F. Kitto (GreekTragedy:
A Literary
Study[GardenCity,NY, 1954])devotes
and 'melodramas'.
For a reviewof the criticalhistory
chaptersto Euripides's'tragicomedies'
of describingEuripides'stragediesas melodramas,
whichappearsto commencein 1905,see
Ann NorrisMichelini,Euripides
andtheTragic
Tradition
(Madison,1987), 321-3.
was the most importantclassicalsourcefor
11 RobertC. KettererarguesthatLatinliterature
the operasof the seventeenthand eighteenthcenturies.See his 'WhyEarlyOperais Roman
andnot Greek',thisjournal,15 (2003), 1-14. I wouldstressthat some of the central
operaticfeaturesthatKetterertracesbackto Romancomedycan be tracedbackyet
further,throughNew Comedy,to Euripideantragedy.But I haveno wish to denythe
importanceof Ovid,Virgilor the performancepracticesof the Romantheatreto early
opera.
bearno genericsubtitle,thoughTragedy
12 OttavioRinuccini'sfirstoperas,DafneandEuridice,
Otherearlyoperasreceive
singsthe prologueof the latter.His Ariannais labelleda tragedia.
subtitlessuch as Tragedia
The
musicale.
da recitarsi
in musica,
musicale
and Opera
tragedia
tragica
Le nozzed'Enea(1640) consideredhis workto be a
anonymouslibrettistof Monteverdi's
a lietofine.But manyoperaswerepublishedwith moreneutralgenericdescriptors.
tragedia
Alessandro
afavolain musica.
RomanandVenetianlibrettos
Striggiosimplycalledhis
O1feo
often used termssuch as dramma
musicale,
operadi stilerecitativo,
operamusicale,
azionein musica,
in musica
and operaregia.The word 'melodramma'
is firstappliedto a
operarappresentativa
librettoin 1647.For the sakeof convenience,I will referto early'opera'even thoughthat
termhad not yet assumedits modernsignificance.On the genericdescriptionsappliedto
Murata,Operas
earlyoperas,see especiallyMargaret
for thePapalCourt,1631-1668(Ann
Venice:
TheCreation
Arbor,1981), appendix2; EllenRosand,Operain Seventeenth-Century
ofa
Genre(Berkeley,1991), 34-45; Rosannadi Giuseppe,'Opera:Tradizionedi unaparola',
3 (1996), 131-50.
Drammaturgia,

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256

Blair Hoxby

to the preference that Hellenistic and Roman audiences felt for them. Seneca, in
turn, placed his seal of approval on the popular judgement by basing the majority
of his surviving tragedies on Euripidean originals. Any sixteenth-century reader who
gave equal weight to all the surviving Attic tragedies - whether he was reading in the
original Greek or in translation - would therefore arrive at a conception of tragedy
that was biased towards Euripides's practice. But the scholarly interests of
humanists and the theatrical culture of Italy's princely courts in the sixteenth century
ensured that his dramaturgy would prove even more influential than the sheer
survival rate of his plays could warrant.
Starting in 1550, the dissemination of a series of influential commentaries on
Aristotle's recently rediscovered Poeticsdiminished the authority of Plato's theatrical
and musical strictures, which required that music be used to soothe and moderate
the emotions.13 Aristotle offered a viable defence of extreme theatrical affect by
defining tragedy as an imitation that, 'by means of pity and fear, accomplishes the
catharsis of such emotions'.14 Even though commentators could not agree just what
he meant by that definition, the Politics'discussion of the psychic catharsis produced
by listening to the enthusiastic music of the aulos performed at sacred rites and
tragic festivals left no doubt that, in Aristotle's view, the state of passionate
excitement that such music induced was a 'harmless delight', not a danger to the
state. For participants were 'restored by the sacred tunes as though they had
received a cure and a catharsis'.15 Indeed, by praising Euripides as the most tragic
of poets, the Poeticsseemed to imply that the chief obligation of the tragic poet was
to stir audiences to extremes of pity and fear by representing those passions on stage
and thus 'leading' the psyches of the audience through an affective script.16
See especiallyBernardWeinberg,A HistoryofLiterary
in theItalianRenaissance
Criticism
TheLateRenaissance
(Chicago,1961), chaps.9-13; andBaxterHathaway,TheAgeof Criticism:
in Italy(Ithaca,1962),part3.
14 Aristotle,Poetics
221. HereI departfromElse's
1449b27-28,in Else,Aristotle's
Poetics,
controversial
translation('carryingto completion,througha courseof eventsinvolvingpity
and fear,the purification
of those painfulor fatalactswhichhave thatquality'),in favour
of a moretraditional
whichis certainlytruerto the common
translation,
of the text.The meaningof Aristotle'snotionof tragic
seventeenth-century
understanding
catharsisremainscontested,andthe literatureon the subjectis extensive.Usefuldiscussions
includeFranzSusemihland R. D. Hicks,ThePoliticsofAristotle,
BooksI- V (London,1894),
ontheArt ofPoetry
641-56; IngramBywater,Aristotle
(Oxford,1909), 152-61, 361-5; Else,
Aristotle's
andCommentary
A Translation
Poetics:
Poetics,
224-32, 423-47;Aristotle's
for Students
of
trans.
Leon
comm.
0.
B.
Fla.,
Golden,
Hardison,
Literature,
Jr. (Tallahassee, 1981), 133ff.;
andComic
Leon Golden,Aristotle
on Tragic
Mimesis
(Atlanta,1992), 5-39; ElizabethS.
Pleasures:
Aristotle
onPlotandEmotion(Princeton,1992);JonathanLear,
Belfiore,Tragic
in EssaysonAristotle's
ed. Am6lieOksenbergRorty(Princeton,1992),
'Poetics',
'Katharsis',
andtheTragic:
Greek
315-40; and CharlesSegal,'Catharsis,
Audience,and Closure',in Tragedy
Theatre
andBeyond,
ed. M. S. Silk(Oxford,1996), 148-72.
Aristoteles'
Politik,Studiaet
1342a.For the Greek,see Alois Dreizehnter,
15 Aristotle,Politics
see ThePolitics,
trans.
TestimoniaAntiquaVII (Munich,1970);for an Englishtranslation,
of this passage,
CarnesLord(Chicago,1984),240. I havedepartedfromLord'stranslation
whichreads,'but as a resultof the sacredtunes- when theyuse the tunesthatput the
soul in a frenzy- we see themcalmingdown as if obtaininga cureand a purification'.
16 On the use of the Greekwordpsuchagogia,
or leadingthe psyche,by ancientGreekcritics,
see W. B. Stanford,GreekTragedy
An Introductory
andtheEmotions:
Study(London,1983), 5.

13

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The origins of opera and the spirit of tragedyreconsidered

257

Theorising about the passions burgeoned, not least in the academies and informal
salons that were frequented by such key pioneers and sponsors of the stile
as Bardi, Galilei, Caccini, Peri and Rinuccini.
rappresentativo
Classical authors told many stories about the fabulous affective power of ancient
tragedy and music, but perhaps no tragedian attracted so many such stories as
Euripides. Plutarch recorded that an Athenian singing a chorus from Euripides's
Electra (a tragedy rediscovered by Mei) moved a conquering army to pity and thus
prevented Athens from being razed.17 Plutarch also recounted that the tyrant
Alexander of Pherae fled a performance of Euripides's TrojanWomenbecause he was
ashamed that his citizens should see him, a ruler who never pitied anyone he
murdered, weep at the sorrows of Hecuba and Andromache.18 Lucian said that a
performance of Euripides's Andromedaduring the reign of Alexander the Great's
successor Lysimachus put the whole town of Abdera into a fever for tragedy, so that
they sang the roles of Perseus and Andromeda in the streets and dreamed feverishly
of Perseus holding Medusa's head.19 It is no accident that these stories pay tribute
to Euripides's music, for his popularity in Hellenistic Greece depended in part on
his early adoption of the new dithyrambic music of Timotheus.
Although scholars like Mei and Francesco Patrizi believed that they found
evidence in Aristotle that ancient tragedies were sung through, Euripides's plays and
Aristophanes's parodies of them provided the clearest illustration that ancient
tragedians had not confined their musical expression to the chorus.20 The Aeschylus
of TheFrogscharges Euripides with having introduced Cretan monodies to the tragic
stage, and the evidence bears him out.21 The heroines of several of Euripides's
earliest surviving plays - Alcestis (438 BCE), Medea (431 BCE), and the Phaedra
of Hippo~ytus(428 BCE) - express their grief in sung monodies.22 In his subsequent
tragedies, Euripides drew on the new music of Timotheus, who abandoned restraint
in favour of an expanded tonal range, the flexible mixing of modes and structures,
tone painting, melismas and a determination to represent even the most extreme
experiences, like the birth pangs of Semele, in musical form.23 Not to be outdone,
Euripides represented the birth pangs of the incestuous Kanake in a monody. He
17

Plutarch,Lysander
15, in Plutarch's
Lives,trans.BernadottePerrin,Loeb ClassicalLibrary,
11 vols. (London,1917), IV, 273.
29, in Plutarch's
Lives,V, 415.
Pelopidas
18 Plutarch,
19
Lucian,Howto Write
History1, in Lucian,trans.K. Kilburn,Loeb ClassicalLibrary,8 vols.
Mass.,1959),VI, 3, 5.
(Cambridge,
20 On Mei'sand Patrizi'sinferencesfromAristotle,see Palisca,Humanismin ItalianRenaissance
412-26.
Thought,
21 Aristophanes,TheFrogs849-50, 944. Aristophanes's
playsarecitedby line number.All
translations
are fromAristophanes,
trans.BenjaminBickleyRogers,Loeb ClassicalLibrary,
3 vols. (Cambridge,
Mass.,1968).
22

For insightful discussions of music in Greek tragedyand close analyses of the metres used,

see T. B. L. Webster,TheTragedies
ofEuripides
(London,1967);andWebster,TheGreek
Chorus
(London,1970). See also MarioPintacuda,La musica
greca(Cefahi,
nellatragedia
1978).
23 Webster, Greek Chorus, 132, 153-4, 171; Lillian B. Lawler, The Dance of the Ancient Greek

Theater
(Iowa City,1964), 16-17.

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258

Blair Hoxby

even wrote the messenger's speech in the Orestesas an agitated monody in the new
style - sung by a Phrygian slave unmanned by fear.24
Even though the pioneers of drammaper musicacould not study Euripides's music,
they could learn a great deal from the texts of his tragedies. One of their chief goals
was to find a musical style that, by synthesising textual, musical and expressive
content, could speak a language of the passions.25 Euripides's restless metrical
experimentation showed that he was interested in the same problem, and nowhere
more so than in the laments of his characters. Starting with the lament of the dying
Hippolytus in the Hippolytus,he experimented with the use of an astrophic poetic
style whose metrical shifts and transitions from recitative to song could nimbly
follow the movement of his characters' thoughts and the agitation of their
passions.26 He left numerous examples of such astrophic laments, written with
varying degrees of structure, repetition and unexpected variation, including
Hermione's wish for death in Andromache,Cassandra's mad song in The Trojan
Women,Creusa's complaint to Apollo in the Ion, Antigone's lament for her dead kin
in ThePhoenicianWomen,Helen's long keen for her woes in the Helen, and Electra's
lament for the ruin of her house in Orestes.27
Perhaps there is no more revealing guide to the procedures of the Euripidean
lament than the pastiche that the Aeschylus of The Frogs sings.28 Like most great
parodies, it hews close to its subject. The distressed maiden begins with an
apostrophe to Night, sings of an ominous dream, finds that Glyce has abandoned
her in the night, thinks of what will never be, bewails Glyce's flight again, then
appeals to the gods for assistance. Frequent grammatical and metrical shifts signal
her agitation as she descends into incoherent grief. Yet amid all this freedom there
is structure. Text repetitions give scope to her sorrow and permit her to defer
acceptance of her plight. And all the while lines in dochmaic metre, which tragedy
reserves for statements of great grief, recur with the regularity of an ostinato bass,
serving as a reservoir of accumulating pathos - or so they would if the song were
meant seriously.
Laments like these assumed a special importance to Renaissance theorists of the
new monodic style of singing such as Mei, Galilei and Lorenzo Giacomini because
their emotional intensity was calculated to move an audience to pity - and therefore
24 Orestes
1369-1502.Euripides'splaysarecitedby line number.All translations
are from

trans.DavidKovacs,Loeb ClassicalLibrary,5 vols. to date (Cambridge,

Mass.,
Euripides,
1994-2002).
25 See Palisca,'GirolamoMei';Palisca,'The Artusi-Monteverdi
in TheNew
Controversy',
Monteverdi
ed. Arnoldand Fortune,147-8; and Palisca,Florentine
57-61.
Camerata,
Companion,
GiovanniBardiparticularly
emphasisedthe importanceof musicservingtext;see 'On How
145.
Camerata,
TragedyShouldBe Performed',in Palisca,Florentine
26 Hippolytus
155.
1347ff.;Webster,GreekChorus,
27 Andromache
825ff.;TheTrojanWomen
308ff.;Ion859ff.,ThePhoenician
Women
1485ff.;Helen
982ff.A list of Greekmonodiesmaybe foundin W. Jens,ed., Die
164ff.;and Orestes
dergriechischen
(Munich,1971),279ff.
Tragodie
Bauformen
28

Aristophanes, The Frogs 1329-63. For a commentary on this monody,

which poses various

textual and metrical difficulties, see Aristophanes, Frogs,ed. Kenneth Dover (Oxford, 1993),

358-63.

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The origins of opera and the spirit of tragedyreconsidered

259

to accomplish tragedy's cathartic function.29 Euripides's laments, together with their

literary descendants in such works as Catullus 64 and the laments of Ovid's Heroides,
are the most important classical models for such highly expressive, irregular laments
as Rinuccini and Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna (1608) - with its naturalistic
declamatory style, its affective text repetitions, its choral responses, and its
appearance of freedom from superimposed formal structures.30 Perhaps no
musico-poetic form exercised a more formative influence on the early development
of opera than did the lament.31
Important though the formal example of Euripides's laments was, the heightened
and specific meanings with which he invested the singing voice may have
constituted a yet more crucial dramatic legacy. Euripides greatly expanded the set of
established relationships between particular speech acts and forms of musical
expression that were available to a dramatist. It was presumably no feat for him to
present sacred songs or dirges for the dead on stage: their meaning was already laid
down by custom and dramatic convention. But there is nothing inevitable about a
grief-stricken woman complaining in private song or about spouses singing in
recognition of each other. What is required, if such scenes are to be naturalised, is
a musico-dramatic rhetoric of the passions. That is precisely what Euripides created
for himself and his successors.
Rather than catalogue all the conventional relationships that Euripides established
between musical expression and particular speech acts, I will try to suggest how he
used dramatic context to establish such relationships. In Medea, the heroine's
anguish surfaces in a sung lament heard from behind the scene - 'Oh, what a wretch
am I, how miserable in my sorrows! Ah ah, how I wish I could die!' - while her
Nurse and Tutor, standing in front of her house, discuss her languishing condition.
Her suffering indecision, always expressed in song, punctuates the opening dialogue
like a refrain - 'Oh, what sufferings are mine, sufferings that call for loud
29

EllenRosand,'Lamento',Grove
MusicOnline,
ed. L. Macy(AccessedJuly 14, 2004)
<http://www.grovemusic.com>
30 Catullus64, whichis sometimesdescribedas an epyllion,or diminutiveepic,is the longest
of Catullus'spoems.Its narrationof the marriageof PeleusandThetisis interrupted
by a
long ekphrasticdescriptionof a coverletdepictingTheseus'sdesertionof Ariadne;for her
trans.FrancisWarreCornish,2nd edn rev. G. P. Goold,Loeb
lengthylament,see Catullus,
ClassicalLibrary(Cambridge,
Ovid assumesthe
Mass.,1988), 64.132-201.In the Heroides,
voices of such Euripideanheroinesas PhaedraandMedeaand of otherheroineswho
featureprominentlyin seventeenth-century
monodiesand operas,such as Penelope,Dido,
andAriadne;see Heroides
andAmores,
trans.GrantShowerman,2nd edn rev. G. P. Goold,
Loeb ClassicalLibrary(Cambridge,
Mass.,1986).The musicfor the choralresponsesof the
does not survive,but the librettoclearlyindicatestheirexistence;see
Lamento
d'Arianna
3 vols. (Milan,1903-4), II, 175-9. For an essay
AngeloSolerti,Glialboridelmelodramma,
thatbrieflyremarkson the importantrole of monodiesin Euripideantragedy,then focuses
' "Her eyes
on the Latinsourcesof Ariadne'slament,see LeofrancHolford-Strevens,
becametwo spouts":ClassicalAntecedentsof RenaissanceLaments',Ear!yMusic,27 (1999),
379-405.
31 See EllenRosand,'The DescendingTetrachord:
An Emblemof Lament',Musical
Quarterly,
65 (1979), 346-59;Tomlinson,'Madrigal,
"Via"';Nigel
Monody,andMonteverdi's
ed. Arnoldand
in NewMonteverdi
Fortune,'Monteverdiand the seconda
prattica',
Companion,
Fortune,192-7; and the specialissue on lamentsthat appearedin Ear~yMusic,27 (1999).

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BlairHoxby

lamentation!'- until she emerges to present a calm exteriorand to speak,ratherthan

sing, to the Chorus.32In Hippolytus,on the other hand, Phaedra'sstepson and his
chorus of servants enter singing to a dance rhythm, then pay homage to Artemis.
Their strength and chastity stand in marked contrast to Phaedra'swasted appearance as she lies on a couch and sings languidlyand feverishlyof her desire to be in
the woods where Hippolytushunts. In their differentways, both scenes contrastthe
public and the private,the visible and the hidden.As they revealthe waveringof the
women's aims, they dilate time in order to give scope to the emotions and thus to
exploit fully the dramaticpotential of internal,as opposed to physical,pathos. And
they turn the singing voice into a privilegedmeans of expressing hidden passions.
Scenes like these consolidated a conventional association between laments and
the feminine voice. Plato invoked that association by describing tragic laments as
womanly.33When Lucianwas attendingtragediesin Rome, he found it tolerableto
hear Andromache and Hecuba 'melodising'their 'calamities'on stage, even though
he found it risible to hear Heracles burst into song.34Not coincidentally,the vast
majority of monodic laments published in the first decades of the seventeenth
centurywere written for female charactersportrayedby the sopranovoice.35But the
association of abandoned women with song is just one of many that Euripides
naturalisedthrough sheer repetition. Although he may not have been the first to
think of setting a recognitionscene as a sung duet (the uncertaindate of Sophocles's
Electraleaves the question open), there is no doubt that he left the most numerous
in Taurisand Helen,
examples of such duets in his late tragedies.In the Ion,Iphigenia
he showed how lyric dialogue could be turned into a theatrical expression of
intellectual discovery, spontaneous joy and mutual feeling as parent and child,
brother and sister, or husband and wife are reunited.36His example paved the way
for the sudden, expansive lyricism of Penelope when she at last recognises her
husband in Giacomo Badoaro and Monteverdi'sII ritornod'Ulisse(1637).
The very priority that Euripides set on such musical set-pieces pushed him
towards a form of dramatic construction that differs, say, from Sophocles's.
Euripides often slows the dramaticaction in order to give scope to his characters'
passions in song, then uses those songs, in turn, to structurehis tragedies.The
climacticscene of Iphigenia
inAulis shows him doing this on a smallscale:the hapless
girl sings a long lament prompted by the prospect of death, Clytemnestraand
Achilles consider how to save her life, then Iphigenia, whose mind has been
working silently to bring about the reversalof the play's action, sings a triumphal
song in which she expressesher determinationto die gloriouslyas a willingvictim.37
Hippolytusshows him working on a largerscale and using song to shift the pathetic
and dramatic focus from Phaedra, who at first complains of her love-pains, to
32 Euripides,Medea96-7, 111-13.
3 Plato, Republic605d-e, in TheCollected
Dialoguesof Plato,ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington

Cairns(Princeton,1961), 831.

34 Lucian, On Dance27-8, in Lucian,V, 40.

35 Rosand, 'Lamento'.
36 Ion 1437-1509, Iphigeniain Tauris827-99, and Helen 625-97.
7 IphigeniainAulis 1278-1336,1338ff.,1371ff.

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The originsof operaand the spiritof tragedyreconsidered

261

Theseus, who mourns her death in dialogue with the chorus, to the wounded
Hippolytus, who dies singing an agonised lament near the end of the tragedy.In
both plays, these songs stand out from the surroundingaction like monuments to
particularpassions. This method of construction appealed even to the authors of
spoken tragediesin a centurywhen the abbe d'Aubignaccould maintainthat it was
the proper business of a tragedianto present a 'gallery'of passions, each developed
'to the point of fulness'.38For librettists,it provided a viable model for the dramatic
arrangementof action and reflection, speech and song, recitative and set-piece
laments and arias.
Euripides and the operatic repertory
The whole tenor of my argumentsuggests that Euripides'scontributionto Baroque
opera should not be measuredby the number of operas that are based directly on
his tragedies.An Ariadne or a Dido may lament like a Euripideanheroine, while,
conversely, an opera that is purportedlybased on one of his tragediesmay bear no
deep resemblanceto it. But it is nevertheless instructive to consider which of his
tragedies entered directly into the repertory before the end of the eighteenth
century.
I would like to defer considerationof his extant tragedies,however, and begin
with one of his lost plays,Andromeda,
because I think its popularityreveals much
about what Baroque librettists found attractivein Euripides.This was the tragedy
that filled the Dionysus of TheFrogswith 'a sudden pang of longing', a 'fierce desire'
that threatenedto consume him unless he could rescue Euripides from Hades.39
This was the play that Alexanderthe Great was said to have recited spontaneously
at his last banquet.40Just enough was known about the contents of the play to be
suggestive.It contained the strikingspectacle of the forlornAndromeda chained to
the rocks, her flesh as white as a statue's. She lamented to the Night but, until a
chorus of Ethiopian maidens arrivedto lament in lyric dialoguewith her, she was
answered only by the echo of her voice sung from off stage. She was eventually
rescued by Perseus, who made a memorable entrance.That was enough to inspire
numerous librettiststo write versions of the tale based on what was known of the
It was staged in Bologna as a
tragedy and on its retelling in the Metamorphoses.
da
in
recitarsi
Musica'
in
a lost score by Monteverdi
with
Mantua,
'Tragedia
(1610);
in
where
it
was
the
first
work
to
be
(1620); Venice,
staged in a public opera house
in
where
it
Giutti
an occasion to employ his
Francesco
Ferrara,
(1637);
gave
impressivestage machinery(1638); in Paris,where it provided the vehicle for Pierre
Corneille and Giacomo Torelli's first attempt to adapt Italian opera and Venetian
stage-craftto French tastes (1650); in Madrid,when the fourteen-year-oldInfanta
Maria Teresa, future wife of Louis XIV, commissioned Calder6n de la Barca to
38 Abb6 d'Aubignac,La Pratiquedu theitre,trans. anon. as The Whole
Art of theStage(1684), III,

46.
39 Aristophanes, TheFrogs52-4, 58-9.
40 Athenaeus 537d-e; see Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae,
trans. CharlesBurton Gulick, Loeb
ClassicalLibrary,7 vols. (Cambridge,Mass., 1927-41), V, 429.

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262

Blair Hoxby

produce the first fully sung Spanish opera (1653); and in Paris, where Louis XIV
himself commended the subject to Philippe Quinault and Jean-Baptiste Lully
(1682).41 The fact that the original was lost may not have been the least of its
recommendations since that forestalled all direct comparisons. After the controversy that erupted over their revision of an extant text, Alceste (1674), Quinault,
Lully, and Lully's occasional librettist Thomas Corneille discreetly opted to
reconstruct only lost Euripidean tragedies in Thisee(1675), Bellirophon(1678), Persie
(1682) and Pha'ton (1683).
Of Euripides's surviving tragedies, seven entered the operatic repertory before
the close of the eighteenth century: Alcestis,Andromache,Electra, Hippolytus,Iphigenia
in Aulis, Iphigeniain Tauris and Medea.42They tended to make their entrance, or
receive their most famous treatment, at times when composers wanted to set their
mark on opera or to reform it. When Quinault and Lully wished to demonstrate that
their tragidiesen musiquehad 'no other models but the tragedies of Ancient Greece',
they did so with the controversial Alceste (1674).43 When Thomas Corneille and
Marc-Antoine Charpentier wished to show that a tragddieen musiquecould succeed
without a lietofine, they produced Mde'e (1693). When Jean-Philippe Rameau wished
to make an impressive debut in the form, he wrote HippolyteetAricie (1733), a work
so ambitious that his contemporary Andre Campra famously remarked that it
contained enough music for ten operas.44 It was again to Euripides that the
mid-eighteenth-century reformers of operaseria looked for inspiration. Thinking of
Niccolo Machiavelli's claim that republics must periodically reduce themselves to
first principles if they are to remain vigorous, the Venetian reformer Francesco
Algarotti urged that opera must do the same in order to 'keep alive' - and he
attached a prose libretto of Iphigeniain Aulis to emphasise what he meant.45 Denis
Diderot argued for the musical potential of Racine's version of the play at the same
time.46 Working in Vienna with the likes of the poet Ranieri Calzabigi and the
41

On these operas,see Rosand,Operain Seventeenth-Centuy7

67-75; MargaretRichGreer,
Venice,
ThePlaj ofPower:
dela Barca(Princeton,1991), 31-76;
CourtDramasof Calderon
Mythological
LouiseK. Stein,SongsofMortals,
in Seventeenth-Century
oftheGods:MusicandTheatre
Dialogues
TheLibretti
ofPhilppe
Spain(Oxford,1993);and BufordNorman,Touched
bytheGraces:
Ala.,2001), 237-58.
Quinaultin theContext
ofFrenchClassicism
(Birmingham,
12
42 RuthZinar,'The Use of GreekTragedyin the Historyof Opera',Current
Musicology,
80-94.
(1971),
43 Anonymousletter,February1675.JeanDuronattributesit to one of Lully'ssecretariesor
see the CD bookletfor Lully'sAys, Les Arts Florissants,dir.WilliamChristie
performers;
(HarmoniaMundi401257.59,1987), 18-19. On the controversyoverAlceste,see Buford
Norman,'Ancientsand Moderns,Tragedyand Opera:The QuarreloverAlceste'in French
MusicalThought
1600-1800,ed. GeorgiaCowart(Ann Arbor,1989), 177-96.
Tradition
Rameau
andtheTragic
(Princeton,1998), 53.
44 CharlesDill, Monstrous
Opera:
45 Niccol6 Machiavelli,Discordsi
soprala primadecadi TitoLivio,ed. Francesco Bausi, 2 vols.

in musica
(Rome,2001), bk. 3, chap.1; FrancescoAlgarotti,Saggio
(1763), ed.
sopral'opera
AnnalisaBini (n.p., 1989), 21-2.

46 Denis Diderot, 'Troisiame entretien sur le Fils naturel'(1757), in (Liuvrescompletes,

ed.

JacquesChouilletandAnne MarieChouillet(Paris,1980),X, 139-62. SeeJulienTiersot,

'Gluckand the Encyclopedistes',
trans.TheodoreBaker,Musical
, 16 (1930),
Quartery
336-57;DanielHeartz,'FromGarrickto Gluck:The Reformof Theatreand Operain the
94 (1967-8), 111-27.
Association,
Mid-Eighteenth
Century',Proceedings
oftheRoyalMusical

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The originsof operaand the spiritof tragedyreconsidered

263

choreographersGasparoAngiolini and George Noverre - all of whom professed to

be strivingto revive the true spirit of ancient theatre- Gluck produced an Italian
Alceste(1767) before makinghis debut in Pariswith IphignieenAulide(1774), a work
that he followed with the French Alceste(1776) and Iphignieen Tauride(1779 and
1781).47 Even Luigi Cherubinichose Ifigeniain Aulide (1788) as the subject of his
most distinguishedoperaseriaand MIde as the subject of one of his most successful
and innovative operas (1797).
Euripides and the tragic experience
The tragediesthat entered the operatic repertorybefore 1800 reveal that librettists
and composers were attractedto a subset of plays that could be said to constitute
a strong reading not only of the Euripidean tradition but of tragic catharsis. In
Medea,the Nurse regretsthat 'no one has discoveredhow to put an end to mortals'
bitter griefs with music and song sung to the lyre. It is because of these griefs that
deaths and terrible disasters overthrow houses. It would have been a gain for
mortalsto cure these ills by song'.48 We are surelymeant to think that the Athenians
have met this need with theirtragedies.But in what sense can tragedybe said to cure
ills by song? Rene Girardand WalterBurkert,whose views on the subjecthave been
particularlyinfluentialin recent decades, argue that tragic representationsfunction
like blood sacrifices.49The action of several of Euripides's plays, including the
in Taurisand Iphigeniain Aulis, threatensto result in, or is actually
Hecuba,Iphigenia
consummatedby, a human sacrifice,and TheBacchae,a tragedythat is conspicuous
by its absence from the operatic repertorybefore the twentieth century,can easily
be read as an admission of the deep-seated connection between tragicjoy and the
sense of emotional liberationafforded by communal violence against a victim.
But I would suggest that if we return to the deliberations of the Florentine
Alterati,we will get a better sense of what seventeenth-centurydramatistsvalued in
Euripides.Founded in 1569, the Alteratimet once or twice a week at the palace of
Giovanni Battista Strozzi the Younger to discuss subjects like Aristotle's Poetics,
Francesco Patrizi'snew commentaryon the Poetics,the verse-forms appropriateto
tragedy, how rhetoric and poetry moved the passions, and what tragic catharsis
meant. Its members included Giovanni Bardi; Ottavio Rinuccini, the librettist of
Dafne, Euridiceand Arianna;Jacopo Corsi, who contributed music to Peri and
Rinuccini's Dafne and sponsored their Euridice;Prince Giovanni de' Medici, who
de Cefaloin 1600; Girolomo Mei; and Giovanni Batttista
staged Caccini'sRapimento
Doni, author of the Trattatodellamusicascenica(1638).50
For some of their theoretical statements, which are filled with appeals to the example of
ancient tragedyand pantomime, see [RanieriCalzabigi],Lettresur le micanisme
de l'opiraitalien
(1756), George Noverre, Lettressuzrla danseet les ballets(1760), Gasparo Angiolini,
Dissertation
sur les balletspantomimlsdesanciens(1765), Christoph Gluck, 'Dedication' for
Alceste(1769), in Strunk/Murata,SourceReadings,'The Baroque Era', 933-4.
48 Euripides,Medea195-201.
49 Walter Burkert,HomoNecans,trans. P. Bing (Berkeley, 1983); Renb Girard, Violenceand the
Sacred(Baltimore, 1977).
50 Palisca, 'The Alterati'.
47

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BlairHoxby

In 1586, Lorenzo Giacomini delivered a discourse on tragic purgation to the

academy.51According to Giacomini, we take four types of pleasurein tragedy.We
enjoy learningabout the events of the tragedyand marvel to see incredible things
actually happening. We appreciate the play as an imitation, with its beautiful
language,sweet music, festive dance, magnificentmachinery,sumptuous costumes
and artfullyarrangedplot, full of digressions,recognitions and reversalsof fortune.
We enjoy reflectingon both the compassion that we feel for the characterson stage
and our own freedom from their 'fearful adventures'.And we experience 'the
pleasures accessory to the cathartic process' itself.52 Giacomini pursues the
physiologicalimplicationsof Aristotle's claim that those who listen to enthusiastic
music during sacred rites and tragic festivals are 'restored ... as though they had
received a cure and catharsis'.53
He arguesthat the passion of a hero representedon
stage acts like a sympatheticmedicine, agitatingour own passions and drawingthem
away from us. When the soul is sad, our vital spiritsevaporateand rise to the head.
As they enter the anteriorpart of the head, they stimulatethe fancy, and as they
condense, they cause our face to contractuntil we relieve ourselves by lamentingor
weeping. Although Giacomini may seem to reduce catharsis from an abstract
concept of purification (or intellectual clarification) to having a good cry, the
numerous classicalsources that speak of the pleasureof feeling pity and weeping at
tragic spectacles lend some support to his interpretation.'This insatiabledelight of
lamenting, full of grief, sings the chorus of TheSuppliantWomen,'carriesme away,
just as spring-waterruns down the high-cliff, unceasing ever'.54
in Taurisfor discussion
At the end of his discourse,Giacomini singles out Iphigenia
- a tellingchoice that to my knowledgehas escaped criticalcomment. Tragediesthat
proceed from misery to felicity can be purgative,he says, because the prospect of
an impendingevil can move us as powerfullyas a present one. Thus when Iphigenia
preparesto sacrificeher unrecognisedbrother Orestes in her role as a priestess in
Tauris, she elicits almost as much pity as she would if she actuallykilled him. For
'the layingout of the instrumentsof a miserabledeath that is impending'can move
our compassion as much as the sight of an actual death, which might 'appear so
terribleand so sorrowful,with such a withdrawalof the vital spirits to their origin
of being' that it would make pity and tears impossible, inducing a 'stupor and that
numbness of which Dante spoke: "I did not weep, I so turned to stone inside" '.ss
For GiacominiIphigenia
in Taurisis an exampleof what Aristotlemeant by the best
manner of tragicfable. He can presumablyjustifyhis choice because the Poeticssays
that Euripides is not to be faulted for focusing on heroes like Orestes who 'have
happened either to undergo or to do fearful things'. In fact, 'the artisticallyfinest
s1 Lorenzo Giacomini, Tebalducci Malespini, Orationie discorsi(Florence, 1597), 29-52.
Hathaway (TheAge of Criticism)discusses the discourse in the context of rival explanations
of catharsis (251-60), while Palisca, 'The Alterati',discusses its musical significance (24-9).
Where possible, I follow Palisca's translations.
52 Giacomini, Orationie discorsi,
46-7.
53
Aristotle, Politics1342a.
54 Euripides, The Suppliant Women79ff.

ss Giacomini,Orationi
e discorsi
51-2.

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The origins of opera and the spirit of tragedyreconsidered

265

kind of tragedy ... is based upon this structure' and 'in our theatres and
competitions such plays appeal to the audience as most tragic, if they follow the
right principle, and Euripides, even though in other respects his construction is
faulty, nevertheless appeals to the audience as the most tragic, at least, of the
poets'.56 To be sure, some Renaissance commentators thought that Aristotle meant
only to defend Euripides's unhappy endings.57 But Giacomini seems to conclude
that the tragedian's essential duty is to move audiences to extremes of pity and fear
without letting them fall into a petrifaction of horror. If that purpose can be
accomplished by a plot that moves from misery to felicity, then the success justifies
the endeavour. Although Giacomini quotes Dante to describe the stupefaction that
might result if Orestes were actually killed in Iphigeniain Tauris, the words also
suggest the potency of a drama based on imagined evils. For what turns Ugolino to
stone is not the sight of a death but a premonition based on a dream: as he beholds
his innocent sons in the tower, he foreseestheir deaths by starvation and his own feast
on their flesh.58 From the standpoint of this essay what must be stressed is a simpler
point: with all Attic tragedy available to him, Giacomini selects Iphigeniain Tauris,a
play that many critics now prefer to characterise as a 'romantic melodrama', to show
what Aristotle meant by the 'best' (ottima) manner of tragic fable.59 In defence of
himself, Giacomini could point to a passage, which frankly puzzles most modern
commentators, in which Aristotle says that tragedies like Iphigeniain Tauris,in which
recognition averts a violent deed, are the 'best' kind (kratiston).60
Palisca describes Giacomini's discourse as 'a document of the prevailing taste'.
He suggests that this taste supported the strange compound of dramatic ingredients
that found their way into 'the Roman and Venetian operas of the seventeenth
century'. It was a taste, he says, that 'demanded of the stage not true tragedy but a
mixed genre that adds to the emotionally purgative experience a feast of the senses
and the mind'.61 But this formulation obscures the importance of Euripides as the
Poetics
1453a21-31,in Else,Aristotle's
Poetics,
376, 399.
e sposta,ed. WertherRomani,2 vols.
Poetica
d'Aristotele
57 LudovicoCastelvetro,
vulgarizzata
classicistshaverejectedthe notionthat
(RomeandBari,1979), I, 376. Severalmodern
Aristotlemeansonly to praiseEuripides'sunhappyendings;see, for example,Aristotle,On
andSole,trans.G. M. A. Grube(Indianapolis,
Poetry
1958), 25-6n.4;and Else,Aristotle's
400-6.
Poetics,
canto33.
5s
Inferno,
59 Dante,
callsIphigenia
In his influentialsurveyof Greektragedy,for example,Kitto (GreekTragedy)
in Tauris
and a 'romanticmelodrama'(327). Commentingon
by turnsa 'tragi-comedy'
Else
in Tauris,
Aristotle'spraiseof Sophocles'sOedipus
RexandEuripides'sIphigenia
remarks,'it so happenedthatthe knife-edgeof his judgmenthit square
(Aristotle's
Poetics)
cannot
on one masterpiece,
the Oedpus;
but the otherplayit hit upon,the Iphigenia,
(446). Else goes so faras to say
honestlybe calledmuchmorethana good melodrama'
thatAristotle'sselectionof these two playsas examplesof the best kindof tragedyis
'damagingto Aristotle'screditas a critic,no matterhow one looks at it' (446), thoughhe
is disturbedas muchby the exclusionof playslike theAgamemnnon
as he is
andthe Bacchae
by inclusionof the Iphigenia.
421. For an attemptto reconcileThe
1454a2-9,in Else,Aristotle's
Poetics,
60 Aristotle,Poetics
Poetics'
in Tauris,
see Stephen
andIphigenia
seeminglycontradictory
praisefor OedpusTyrannus
A. White,'Aristotle'sFavoriteTragedies',in EssaysonAristotle's
221-40.
'Poetics',
61 Palisca,'Alterati',
28-9.

56

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266

Blair Hoxby

classical model for the very genre that Palisca identifies. H. D. F. Kitto puts it in
these terms: by 'reducing the tragic to the pathetic' in plays like Alcestis,Electra,

in Aulis, Euripides'madeit possible to combine

in Taurisand Iphigenia
Iphigenia

harmoniouslyinto one theatricalwhole a wide range of emotional effects'.62The

appeal of that 'theatricalwhole' to opera composers need not be stressed: they
in Taurisand seventeen versions of Iphigenia
produced eighteen versions of Iphigenia
in Aulis before 1800.
In the eyes of most seventeenth-centuryreaders, such a range of emotional
effects did not disqualify these plays as tragedies. A revolution of feelings was
considered essential to the tragic experience by such an influential critic as Rene
Rapin.The soul, he said, could be pleasurablyagitatedonly by a constant varietyof
objects set before it, such was the 'Immensity of its desires'.When Rapin praised
Rex in his commentaryon ThePoetics,it was not for its beautiful simplicity
Oedjpus
but for its 'flux and reflux of indignation,and of pity', its 'revolutionof horror and
of tenderness', its capacity to generate such 'a universalemotion of the soul' by
'surprises,astonishments,admirations'.63
Tragediansas diverse as John Milton,Jean
Racine andJohn Dryden defined tragedynot in terms of the shape of its action but
in terms of the passions it representedand aroused.64
No wonder, then, that an arbiterof taste like the abbe d'Aubignacappealed to
'the nineteen plays of Euripides's
as evidence that the catastrophesof tragediescould
be either 'calamitous and bloody' or, as in the case of Alcestis,Electraand many
which begins with fury and rage, and runs upon such
others, felicitous:'the Orestes,
strong Passions and Incidents, that they seem to promise nothing but a fatalbloody
Event, [is] nevertheless terminatedby the entire content and satisfactionof all the
Actors, Helenabeing plac'd among the Gods, and Apolloobliging Orestesand Pylades
62

Kitto, GreekTragedy,
336-7.

onAristotle'sTreatiseof 'Poesie',trans. Thomas Rhymer,in The Whole

63 Rene Rapin, Reflections

CriticalWorksofMonsieurRapin,2 vols. (London, 1716), II, 141, 208.

64 In the preface to SamsonAgonistesentitled 'Of That Sort of Dramatic Poem Which Is Called
Tragedy',Milton entirely omits Aristotle's key contention that tragedyis a representationof
an action and focuses instead on its imitation and manipulationof the passions: 'Tragedy,
as it was ancient composed, hath been ever held the gravest, moralest, and most profitable
of all other poems: therefore said by Aristotle to be of power by raising pity and fear, or
terror, to purge the mind of those and such-like passions, that is to temper and reduce
them to just measure with a kind of delight, stirred up by reading or seeing those passions
well imitated'. Racine also stresses the representationand stirringof the passions in his
criticalwritings. In the preface to Berenice,
for instance, he insists that it is enough for a
tragedy that 'its action should be great and its actors heroic, that passions should be
aroused, and that everythingin it should breathe that majestic sadness in which all the
ed. Raymond Picard [Paris,1950], I, 465). In
pleasure of tragedyresides' ((Euvrescompletes,
his preface to Iphigenie,
he points to the tears of his own audience to confirm Aristotle's
judgement that Euripides was the most tragic of poets, 'that is, he was wonderfully adept at
arousing compassion and fear, which are the true effects of tragedy'(CEuvres,
I, 465). The
representationof an action scarcely figures at all in the definition that Lisideius contributes
to Dryden's Essay ofDramatickPoesie- a definition widely quoted and accepted by
subsequent authors:'A just and lively Image of Humane Nature, Representingits Passions
and Humours, and the Changes of Fortune to which it is subject; for the Delight and
Instruction of Mankind' (The WorksofJohnDryden,ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T.
Swedenberg,Jr., 20 vols. [Berkeley,1956-89], XVII, 15).

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The originsof operaand the spiritof tragedyreconsidered

267

to marryHermione
and Electra'.45
This ending may have been one of the inspirations
for the apotheosis that concludes Striggio and Monteverdi'srevised Orfeo(1609).
For the Orestes
introducesApollo from a machine to elevate Helen to the stars,thus
her
from
assassinscomparedto bacchants;while the OrfeointroducesApollo
saving
from a machine to sing his son up to the stars, thus saving Orpheus from the
impending threat of real bacchants.66Whether or not we wish to make such a
connection, I would maintain,more generally,that Pirrottahas committed a grave
oversight in claimingthat opera's 'propensity for the depiction of tender passions'
and its 'almost unbrokenrule of the happy ending'betrayits pastoralparentage,just
as Robert Kettererhas in saying that 'romanticlove' and 'the dramaticstructureit
begets' is almost nowhere present in Athenian tragedy and must be attributedto
Roman comedy.67These formal characteristicsof opera might just as well be traced
to Euripides'stragedies,which devote tremendous energy to the representationof
passionate love, frequentlyend happily, and more often than not introduce a deux
ex machinato engineer the felicitous catastrophe.It seems particularlyinappropriate
to attributethe 'love interest and the lietofine'of Calzabigiand Gluck'sAlcesteto an
operaticconvention derived from Roman comedy (as Kettererdoes) when they are
present in the Euripideanoriginaland when even the ancientsrecognisedEuripides
as the ultimatesource of such 'comic', 'romantic'or 'melodramatic'conventions.68
As Satyrus remarks, 'peripeteiai,
violations of maidens, substitution of children,
recognition by means of rings and necklaces, these are the elements of New
Comedy, and it was Euripideswho developed them'.69
For many nineteenth- and twentieth-centurycritics, plays like Alcestis,Electra,
Orestesand Iphigenia
in Taurisare by definition untragic.These critics say that in lieu
of the 'metaphysicalcomfort' that tragedy should provide, these plays offer an
'earthlyresolution of the tragicdissonance'and that in lieu of 'tragiccatharsis',they
offer a 'happy ending'.70Yet we know from Euripides'stexts that he was interested
in developing an 'art againstgrief, and at least one classicist has gone so far as to
anoint him the originatorof catharsisas a tragicideal, the practisingdramatistwho
showed Aristotle the way.71For our purposes, I think it is most useful to think of
his tragedies more simply as a series of provisional but coherent answers to the
question, What sorts of song cure ills?
Although Euripidesshows a consistent taste for scenes of extreme pathos and is
inclined to elicit pity by staging or describing the suffering or death of helpless
victims like young virgins and children, he does not adhere to a particulartragic
pattern, and he seems to have been willing to entertain the possibility that, as
D'Aubignac, La Pratiquedu thedatre,
IV, 140.
66 Euripides, Orestes
1492-3.

65

6 Pirrottaand Povoledo, Musicand Theatre

from

to Monteverdi,
268; Ketterer, 'Why
Early Opera is Roman and not Greek', 5, 12.Poliziano
6 Ketterer, 'Why Early Opera is Roman and not Greek', 12.
69 Satyrus, Vita di Euripide39, col. 7; for the Greek text and an Italian translation,see Vita di

ed. GrazianoArrighetti(Pisa,1964).
Euripide,
70
'n

Nietzsche, Birthof Tragedy,

10; Kitto, GreekTragedy,
331.
See C. Diano, 'Euripide auteur de la catharsistragique',Numen,8 (1961), 117-41; Pietro
Pucci, The Violenceof Pity in Euripides''Medea'(Ithaca, 1980).

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268

BlairHoxby

Giacomini said, an action that moves from miseryto felicitymight still be purgative
because the soul contemplatesan impending evil as if it were a present reality.72In
most of the plays that Kitto labels 'melodramas',Euripides'leads the psyches' of his
audience by harrowingthem with prospects of evil and exposing them to passions
developed to the point of fullness before stupefying them with the marvellous
entranceof a god. His di ex machina
are not just a way to tie up his plots, or to pander
to a taste for spectacle.They are a means, or so seventeenth-centuryreaderscould
reasonablyinterpret them, of completing the affective script of his tragedies by
stirring the audience to intense wonder - a passion that, according to many
commentators,had its own purgativequalities.They are, in other words, an integral
part of his 'art againstgrief.
This, at any rate, is the way many ItalianBaroque operas and French tragidiesen
musique
interpretEuripideantragedy.Their moments of deepest fearand pity usually
fall well before the catastrophe.Think of Le Cerf de la Vieville's account of the
audience'sreactionto the end of Act II of Quinaultand Lully'sArmide(1686), when
they are ravishedby the mere spectre of an impending evil: 'When Armide nerves
herself to stab Renaud ... I have twenty times seen the entire audience in the grip
of fear, neither breathingnor moving, their whole attention in their ears and eyes,
until the instrumentalair which concludes the scene allowed them to draw breath
If the
again,afterwhich they exhaledwith a murmurof pleasureand admiration'.73
no
there
is
reason
of
the
is
and
to
stir
passions,
purpose tragedy simply
purge
up
why it should not stage scenes like this, and there is every reason for it to introduce
a deusex machinaat the end to arouse a final sense of wonder. Such endings became
so conventional that Pierre-Jean-BaptisteNougaret could explain that, because 'a
machine nearlyalways ends serious operas in France, in imitation of Greek plays',
it 'can be said to fall within the rules' of dramaticpropriety.74
I do not believe, any more than Palisca or Pirrottado, that seventeenth-century
tragedians or librettists were under the impression that their productions were
historicallyaccuratereconstructionsof ancient Greek tragedies.Nor do I wish to
deny that Latin literatureor pastoraldrama- which GiraldiCinthio traced back to
Euripides's late play Cyclops- contributed to the development of opera.75The
pioneers of opera read widely in classical sources from a variety of genres and
periods, consciously rejectingthe use of masks when they would interferewith the
expression of the passions, drawingfreely on accounts of Alexandrianand Roman
actors, dancersand machinists,and alwaysbearingin mind that the first duty of the
poet was to please his contemporary audience. A mournful sense of the gulf
dividing modern Europe from the ancient world, the contemporarystage from the
72

Giacomini,Orationi
e discorsi,
51-2.

de la musiqueitalienneet de la musiquefranfoise,
73 Jean-LaurentLe Cerf de la Vieville, Comparaison
trans. in FrenchBaroqueOpera:A Reader,ed. CarolineWood and Graham Sadler (Aldershot,

2000), 39.

Pierre-Jean-BaptisteNougeret, De l'Art du thaitre,2 vols. (Paris, 1769), II, 211.

le satireattealle scene(1554). Cinthio cites Cyclops,the
7 See Cinthio's Discorsosoprail comporre

74

only completesurvivingexampleof an ancientsatyrplay,as the modelof his Egl6,which

has been variouslydescribedas a satyricdrama,a pastoraldramaand a tragicomedy.

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The originsof operaand the spiritof tragedyreconsidered

269

ancienttheatre,runs through some of the very writingsin which they piece together
the fragmentaryevidence of the past. Indeed, it could be argued that it was their
very consciousness of belatedness that reinforced their taste for Euripides and for
the 'decadent' performers of Alexandria and Rome - who were themselves
confronted with the task of renewing a revered,yet increasinglyalien, literaryand
dramatictradition.But when scholarsdismiss the claims of earlyopera or tragidieen
to being 'true tragedy',they obscure both how open and contested were the
musique
generic boundariesof tragedyin the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and how
avidly Baroque opera fed on a particularstyle of tragic dramaturgy.It is time we
recognisedthat in imaginativelyrespondingto Euripides'smusicaldramaturgy,early
opera helped to disentanglehis tragic style from Seneca's sententious revision of it,
and, by so doing, to secure his position as the premier model of classicaltragedy,
spoken or sung, by the time the abbe d'Aubignac announced 'our Poets have
With its musical
recovered the Way to Parnassus,
upon the Footsteps of Euripides'.76
representationof the passions, its episodic plotting, its choral interludes and its
felicitous catastrophes,Baroque opera is a strong and coherent readingof a set of
Euripideantragediesthat were highly prized in Hellenistic Greece but that fell from
gracein the nineteenth century.Although the prevailingtheories about the meaning
of tragiccatharsisand the sources of tragicpleasurechanged severaltimes between
1550 and 1800, only the rise of German idealism in the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries displaced the passions from their central place in the critical
analysisof tragedy,thus deprivingEuripidesof his distinction as the most tragicof
the poets and transforminga revivalof ancient tragedyinto the birth of melodrama.

76

D'Aubignac, La Pratiquedu th'itre,I, 12.

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