Classics and Opera

The more than four hundred years of the operatic genre have produced thousands of works involving Greco-Roman plots, characters, and themes. The musical drama labeled with the imprecise term “opera” maintained an intimate relationship with the classical tradition since its inception. Late Renaissance Italian scholars and artists who created the first operas (drammi per musica) studied and imitated ancient Greek music theory and practice, mistakenly thinking that ancient poetic drama had been sung in its entirety. The result was a wholly new dramatic form. The plots of these earliest productions for the courts of north Italy (Daphne, Euridice, Orpheus, Ariadne) derived from ancient mythological literature, as did most of the lavish French lyric “tragedy” at Versailles such as Phaeton, Perseus, or Theseus. As opera developed and spread throughout Europe, it also incorporated plots and characters from ancient Greek and Roman history and epic. The Habsburg court in Vienna produced titles like The Elements of Epicurus, and The Clemency of Titus, while the commercial productions in Venice for carnival premiered Jason and Agrippina. The tension between box-office appeal of musical spectacle and a desire for effective drama on the Greek model generated an Italian operatic reform around 1700 and the resulting librettos of Metastasio on subjects like Cato in Utica, Dido Abandoned or Artaxerxes defined serious opera for two generations. The second half of the 18th century saw another reform with Gluck’s settings of Euripidean tragedies (Alcestis, Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphigenia in Tauris), and with Cherubini’s Medea, all of which remain in the modern repertoire. In the 19th century, Hector Berlioz adapted Virgil’s epic Aeneid for his Les Troyens (The Trojans), Richard Wagner infused the tragic dramaturgy of Aeschylus in his Ring tetralogy, and the setting for Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida was derived from Greco-Egyptian literary, historical, and archaeological sources. The 20th century saw the von Hofmannsthal/Strauss Elektra, Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex (in Latin), Carl Orff’s Prometheus (in ancient Greek), William Walton‘s Troilus and Cressida, and more than a half dozen operas based on the story of Medea. The new millennium has begun with ambitious stagings of Aeschylus’s Eumenides for the 2004 Athens Olympics and Europa Riconosciuta (Europa Identified) for the reopening of Teatro alla Scala.