Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Last night, with LW and AG, watched Iphigénie en Tauride by Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck. On the big screen, as it was, a part of the Met Opera’s annual HD Summer Festival. The plot reworks a play by Euripides, in which Iphigénie is not sacrificed by her father Agamemnon, but is rescued by Diana. Held captive by the Scythians, she (a passionate Susan Graham) is forced to conduct their human sacrifices as a high priestess. The drama really begins when the Scythians capture her brother Orestes (Plácido Domingo), still fleeing from the Furies unleashed by his killing of his mother in revenge for her murder of his father and her husband. A terribly ironic cycle would be complete if Iphigénie kills her brother as a Scythian sacrifice to the gods. The seemingly inevitable tragic ending is complicated and delayed by Pylades (marvelous Paul Groves), Orestes’ companion in his flight, who loves Orestes enough to die for him. He is the only guiltless one, unlike the House of Atreus. ...

As I was reading Hecuba for the reading group last Monday, Hamlet's question rang insistently in my head, "What's Hecuba to him?" Euripides had a penchant for depicting strong women in extreme distress. Medea, abandoned by her husband Jason for a royal marriage, kills their children to pay him back. Left with only two children after the destruction of Troy, Hecuba is deprived of both, Polyxena sacrificed to the ghost of Achilles, and Polydorus murdered by a traitorous friend, Polymestor. To take revenge, she lures Polymestor to her tent, and has her women blind him and kill his two young sons. I prefer Hecuba to Medea . Medea was written earlier, at the start of the Peloponnesian War, whereas Hecuba was written five years later, when the devastation of war became clear. Medea is motivated by sex-jealousy for Jason, but the play does not show us a man worthy of such jealousy. Instead, Jason is calculative, self-deceiving, and out-witted. Without sufficient motive...

Nietzsche published this essay in 1872 at the age 27. He explains the birth of Greek Tragedy by focusing on the chorus, which existed before drama, and gave rise to it. The chorus, sung by satyrs, and devoted to the worship of Dionysus, was deeply associated with the god. Its dithyrambic music invited union with all of nature, and loss of individuation. When this music was cast into an image, in the form of the dramatic scenes, Tragedy was born. This clarification into image and persons Nietzsche associates with Apollo. The sweet calmness of the Greeks was Apollinian (Walter Kaufmann, the translator, follows Nietzsche's spelling), but Nietzsche's point is that we cannot fully appreciate Greek civilization if we do not understand the Dionysian passions it brought under control. Less persuasively, Nietzsche associates the death of Greek Tragedy with Euripides. In the later playwright rose the spirit of Socrates, whose rationalism destroyed the power of the Greek myths. So Euripid...

March 27, Friday: I watched the Columbia-Barnard Classical Drama Group's performance of Euripides' Medea in the Minor Latham Playhouse, at Barnard. The actors spoke in Ancient Greek, which was glossed with English super-titles. Medea was played by two women roped to each other, in order to reflect her dual nature and internal conflict. My friend, who played the Nurse, spoke of her mistress' grief with genuine pathos. The other actors seemed too young to feel their parts. April 2, Thursday: Heard the NY Phil with TCH last night. Stravinsky's Concerto in E-flat for Chamber Orchestra, Dumbarton Oaks (1937-38) opened the concert. Lisa Batiashvili was the soloist in Prokofiev's modernist Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op, 63 (1935), a work he wrote before repatriating to the Soviet Union. Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64 (1888), after the intermission, was not subtle but rousing nevertheless. The horn in the second movement was lovely. The "fa...

A colleague has invited me to attend a reading of Racine's "Iphigenie en Aulide," in a new English translation by Rachel Hadas. Presented by Verse Theater Manhattan, Rutgers University and Handcart Ensemble, and directed by James Milton, the reading will take place at Kirk Theater on Monday Feb 9, and is free. I just finished reading "Iphigenia" translated by John Cairncross, the first Racine I have ever read. My first impression is that the play is a pallid thing compared to Shakespeare. The characters are rather flat, the plotting is tight but small, the imagery decorous instead of devastating. Long speeches take turns, and so the scenes lack the life-like spontaneity, the human contingency, the swelling progress, the ironic self-reflexivity of Shakespearian drama. The minor characters in "Iphigenia" are entirely negligible; in Shakespeare, even a nameless knight, in King Lear , is individualized through a brilliant speech. Racine took Euripides for...

I read the first part of the trilogy, in Philip Vellacott's translation, last week for a book group. If Euripides is the psychologist, and Sophocles the priest-philosopher, then Aeschylus is the historian of the big three Greek tragedians. Agamemnon is vitally concerned with the rise and fall of noble houses, and the engine of history, vengeance. Agamemnon, with Zeus's harness on his back, ploughs over Troy for Paris' violation of the hospitality code. But to become the God's instrument, he sacrificed his own daughter to gain fair winds, an unkind act that aroused Clytemnestra's vengeance against him. The Queens kills her husband, and stores up wrath against herself. Clytemnestra is a fascinating figure. Her speech on the passing of the fire signal is stunningly beautiful, a tour-de-force, really. Moving is her imagining the Greeks' victory and the Trojans' defeat, a passage that resonates today. Today the Greeks hold Troy! Her walls echo with cries That wil...