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Ancient Drama in Music for the Modern Stage

Cover of 'Ancient Drama in Music for the Modern Stage', with the title written above Jean Bérain père's drawing, 'Thétis dans son char marin pour l'opéra Alceste'
Peter Brown and Suzana Ograjenšek
2013
About

This collection of essays by leading authorities in the fields of Classics, Musicology, Dance Studies, English Literature, Modern Languages, and Theatre Studies provides an exceptionally wide-ranging and detailed overview of the relationship between opera and Greek drama. The volume mostly concentrates on the tragic repertoire, but a chapter on musical versions of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata is included, as well as discussions of incidental music, a very important part of the musical reception of ancient drama, from Andrea Gabrieli in 1585 to Harrison Birtwistle and Judith Weir in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. 

Publisher
Oxford University Press
See the volume on the OUP website
  1. Roger Savage, ‘Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts: the Institutions of Greco-Roman Theatre and the Development of European Opera’ 
  1. Michele Napolitano, ‘Greek Tragedy and Opera: Notes on a Marriage Manqué’ 
  1. Jason Geary, ‘Incidental Music and the Revival of Greek Tragedy from the Italian Renaissance to German Romanticism’ 
  1. Wendy Heller, ‘Phaedra's Handmaiden: Tragedy as Comedy and Spectacle in Seventeenth-Century Opera’ 
  1. Jennifer Thorp, ‘Dance in Lully's Alceste’ 
  1. Amy Wygant, ‘The Ghost of Alcestis’ 
  1. Suzana Ograjenšek, ‘The Rise and Fall of Andromache on the Operatic Stage, 1660s-1820s' 
  1. Robert C. Ketterer, ‘Opera Librettos and Greek Tragedy in Eighteenth-Century Venice: The Case of Agostino Piovene’ 
  1. Reinhard Strohm, ‘Ancient Tragedy in Opera, and the Operatic Début of Oedipus the King (Munich, 1729)’ 
  1. Michael Burden, ‘Establishing a text, securing a reputation: Metastasio's Use of Aristotle’ 
  1. Bruno Forment, ‘The Gods out of the Machine . . . and their Comeback’ 
  1. Simon Goldhill, ‘Who Killed Gluck?’ 
  1. Simone Beta, ‘The Metamorphosis of a Greek Comedy and its Protagonist: Some Musical Versions of Aristophanes' Lysistrata’ 
  1. Michael Ewans & Anastasia Belina, ‘Taneyev's Oresteia’ 
  1. Christian Wolff, ‘Crossings of Experimental Music and Greek Tragedy’ 
  1. Stephen Walsh, ‘The Action Drama and the Still Life: Enescu, Stravinsky, and Oedipus’ 
  1. Robert Cowan, ‘Sing Evohe! Three Twentieth-Century Operatic Versions of Euripides' Bacchae’ 
  1. Nicholas Attfield, ‘Re-staging the Welttheater: A Critical View of Carl Orff's Antigonae and Oedipus der Tyrann’ 
  1. David Beard, “Batter the Doom Drum': The Music for Peter Hall's Oresteia and other Productions of Greek Tragedy by Harrison Birtwistle and Judith Weir’