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ANCIENT DRAMA IN MUSIC
FOR THE MODERN STAGE
This page intentionally left blank
Ancient Drama in Music
for the Modern Stage
Edited by
PE TER BR OWN A N D S U Z A N A O G R A J E N Š EK

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 Preface

This book explores the relationship between ancient drama and music for the
stage from the late sixteenth century to the present day. It is a companion
volume to Fiona Macintosh (ed.), The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World
(Oxford, 2010). Like that book, it has been produced under the auspices of
the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) at the
University of Oxford. Chapters 4–11 are based on papers given at the
APGRD conference, ‘Ancient Drama in Modern Opera, 1600–1800’, held at
the University of Oxford on 12 July 2007.1 Chapters 13, 15, 16, and 19 are
based on lectures delivered at Oxford for the APGRD. The remaining chapters
have been written specially for this volume. In keeping with the objectives of
the APGRD, the focus of the book is on works based on ancient plays, an area
that has not been systematically explored to date, rather than more generally on
ancient mythology or history. As well as concentrating on some of the earliest
uses of ancient drama itself on the operatic stage, it charts the gradual assimi-
lation of individual ancient plots into the operatic repertoire, discussing the
relevant social, cultural, and intellectual context. The authors are experts in the
fields of Classics, Musicology, Dance Studies, English Literature, Modern
Languages, and Theatre Studies.
The first three chapters provide an introductory survey of various aspects of
the subject; the remaining chapters are organized largely in chronological order.
A full study even of this sub-branch of operatic history would be a very
substantial volume indeed, and our aim here has been both to chart the main
outlines of the subject and to advance it by offering new studies of important
aspects. Most of the chapters are concerned with opera, but chapters 3, 15, and
19 discuss music written to accompany spoken performances of Greek tragedies:
already in 1585, before the invention of opera itself, Andrea Gabrieli had
composed music for the choruses in the production of Sophocles’ Oedipus
Tyrannus that inaugurated the Teatro Olimpico at Vicenza, and such ‘incidental
music’ has played an important part in the modern reception of ancient drama;
Felix Mendelssohn’s music for Sophocles’ Antigone at Potsdam in 1841 is
another striking example. Since tragedies have loomed much larger than com-
edies in the musical reception of ancient drama, the volume mostly concentrates
on the tragic repertoire. In addition, however, there is one chapter (Chapter 13)

1 We are grateful to the British Academy, the Classical Association, the Society for the Promo-
tion of Hellenic Studies, and (within the University of Oxford) the Craven Committee and the
Faculties of Classics and Music for their generous support of that conference.
vi Preface
discussing comic opera; this chapter also discusses relevant incidental music,
ballets, and musicals.
The form of musical drama which we now call opera was invented at the end of
the sixteenth century in part as an imitation or emulation of ancient Greek tragedy,
in the belief that Greek tragedy had been sung throughout. That belief is now
thought to have been mistaken, and it was disputed even at the time; it may also be
suspected that a development on these lines would have taken place in any case,
since the new form was not entirely uninfluenced by performing styles already in
existence in genres such as the pastoral play and the intermedii (interludes) per-
formed between the acts of spoken plays. Nonetheless, it was the interest of a group
of Renaissance intellectuals (members of the Camerata at Florence) in ancient
Greek music, and in the relationship between words and music in Greek tragedy,
that stimulated the development of a style of performance—expressive monody—
that gave particular attention to conveying the meaning and the dramatic and
emotional force of the words being sung. This was an exceptionally fruitful
development in the history of European music, and the relationship between
words and music has been at the heart of debate about opera ever since.
However, the interest of the Camerata in the style of delivery of Greek tragedy
did not extend to a desire to reproduce the plots of the plays, and it was sixty
years before librettists took the surviving Greek tragedies themselves as the basis
of their texts. This is perhaps not surprising, since the main focus of the Camera-
ta’s interest had been on Greek music rather than Greek drama, and in the
cultural context of the time mythological and pastoral stories were more obvi-
ously acceptable—see in particular Chapter 9 below for a discussion of this point.
Admittedly, a subject which early became popular was the story of Andromeda,
staged as early as 1610 at Bologna; Euripides’ play on this subject has not
survived, and Ovid was undoubtedly the main source for the story, but anyone
who knew Aristophanes’ Frogs or Women at the Thesmophoria would know that it
had formed the subject matter of a very famous tragedy.2 So there was no
absolute ban on Euripidean material. But it remains true that the use of surviving
Greek tragedies can be traced back only to the 1660s, starting with Antigona
delusa da Alceste (‘Antigone tricked by Alcestis’, libretto by Aurelio Aureli, music
by Pietro Andrea Ziani, Venice, 1660), based in part on Euripides’ Alcestis (but
not at all on Sophocles’ Antigone!).
The subject matter of ancient drama has not always been at the forefront of
operatic composition, but it has been there at particularly important moments in
the history of the genre. Those who have called for a reform of the theatre have
tended to return to ancient drama to seek support for the ideas that they were
promoting, for opera as well as for spoken drama. It is notable that Euripides’

2 This point has been stressed by Blair Hoxby as part of his argument that the importance of
Euripides for the early development of the genre has not been sufficiently appreciated: see Hoxby
(2005), drawing attention to the fact that several of Euripides’ plays have ‘happy endings’.
 Preface vii
Alcestis was the catalyst for two important debates about operatic reform: Jean-
Baptiste Lully’s Alceste (Paris, 1674) helped to win acceptance for French-
language opera; and Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Alceste (Vienna, 1767) had a
preface to the score, signed by Gluck but probably written by his librettist
Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, outlining proposals for a return to the original ethos of
the genre, with a renewed emphasis on poetic expression and dramatic force and
a reduction in the opportunities for virtuoso singing. Calzabigi had been to some
extent anticipated by Francesco Algarotti in his Saggio sopra l’opera in musica
(‘Essay on Opera’, 1755), which urged that all the elements of an opera should be
subordinated to a unifying poetic idea; Algarotti concluded the treatise with the
full text of a libretto for Iphigenia at Aulis, based on Euripides and Racine, as an
example of the simple style he advocated. Algarotti also influenced Christoph
Martin Wieland’s approach to the creation of a German operatic tradition at
Weimar in 1773; once again Alcestis was the subject, and the opera, with music
by Anton Schweitzer, was a striking success.
Two notable operas called Médée and based ultimately on Euripides’ Medea
were those of Marc-Antoine Charpentier (Paris, 1693) and Luigi Cherubini
(Paris, 1797), the latter particularly famous as a vehicle for Maria Callas in the
mid-twentieth century. The subject of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s first opera Hippo-
lytus and Aricia (Paris, 1733) can be traced back to Euripides’ Hippolytus and
Seneca’s Phaedra, though Jean Racine was an important intermediary, as he was
for a number of the operatic librettos on classical subjects—see Chapter 7.
Rameau’s intensely dramatic composition seemed revolutionary at the time and
provoked furious debate between Ramistes and Lullistes, supporters of Rameau
and of his predecessor Lully respectively; it was the first musical work to which the
(at that time) pejorative term ‘baroque’ is known to have been applied.
It was Richard Wagner’s reading of Aeschylus that prompted him to reform
opera in the nineteenth century, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s interpretation of
Sophocles’ Electra that prompted Richard Strauss to compose his highly original
version of that play (Elektra, Dresden, 1909). As Chapters 2 and 15–19 show,
there was a particular flowering of interest in ancient drama among some of the
most adventurous composers of the twentieth century, in terms of both operas
and incidental music; and recent decades have seen a considerable interest in
ancient drama on the part of composers from all over the world.3 Among others,
Mark-Anthony Turnage made his mark at Munich in 1988 with his first opera,
Greek, based on the play of that name by Steven Berkoff which transposes the
story of Oedipus to contemporary London; Turnage’s opera was commissioned
by Hans Werner Henze, who had himself composed the music for a notable
version of Euripides’ Bacchae, The Bassarids (Salzburg, 1966).
The book covers four centuries of musical production and could not possibly
discuss everything of importance in that time. We have tried to offer a representative

3 See Brown, P. (2004).

viii Preface
sample. Some major works are not included, either because they have been fully
discussed elsewhere (e.g. Wagner’s Ring, to which Ewans (1982) is devoted, and
Strauss’s Elektra, discussed by McDonald (2001), Goldhill (2002), and Ewans
(2007)) or simply for reasons of space. Details of several hundred relevant musical
works may be found in the database on the website of the APGRD (www.apgrd.ox.
ac.uk).4 The magisterial study of Flashar (1991, 2nd edn. 2009) gives an overall
survey of modern productions of Greek drama, including an account of many key
operatic productions; but his main focus is on productions of the ancient plays
themselves, as he acknowledges explicitly in the preface to the second edition.
We are very grateful to Stephe Harrop for putting the list of References in
order, to our eagle-eyed copy-editor Tom Chandler, and to Brenda Hall for
providing the index.
P.B.; S.O.

4 Work on this part of the database was made possible by a grant from the Arts and Humanities
Research Council, with additional funding from the Onassis Programme at the University of
Oxford; we are grateful to both bodies for their support. Much of the research for the database
was carried out by Suzana Ograjenšek.
 Contents

Illustrations xi
Contributors xiii
Note to the Reader xvii

1. Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts: The Institutions of Greco-Roman

Theatre and the Development of European Opera 1
Roger Savage
2. Greek Tragedy and Opera: Notes on a Marriage Manqué 31
Michele Napolitano
3. Incidental Music and the Revival of Greek Tragedy from the
Italian Renaissance to German Romanticism 47
Jason Geary
4. Phaedra’s Handmaiden: Tragedy as Comedy and Spectacle in
Seventeenth-Century Opera 67
Wendy Heller
5. Dance in Lully’s Alceste 85
Jennifer Thorp
6. The Ghost of Alcestis 96
Amy Wygant
7. The Rise and Fall of Andromache on the Operatic Stage,
1660s–1820s 112
Suzana Ograjenšek
8. Opera Librettos and Greek Tragedy in Eighteenth-Century
Venice: The Case of Agostino Piovene 139
Robert C. Ketterer
9. Ancient Tragedy in Opera, and the Operatic Debut of
Oedipus the King (Munich, 1729) 160
Reinhard Strohm
10. Establishing a Text, Securing a Reputation: Metastasio’s Use
of Aristotle 177
Michael Burden
11. The Gods out of the Machine . . . and their Comeback 193
Bruno Forment
x Contents

12. Who Killed Gluck? 210

Simon Goldhill
13. The Metamorphosis of a Greek Comedy and its Protagonist:
Some Musical Versions of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata 240
Simone Beta
14. Taneyev’s Oresteia 258
Anastasia Belina and Michael Ewans
15. Crossings of Experimental Music and Greek Tragedy 285
Christian Wolff
16. The Action Drama and the Still Life: Enescu, Stravinsky,
and Oedipus 305
Stephen Walsh
17. Sing Evohe! Three Twentieth-Century Operatic Versions of
Euripides’ Bacchae 320
Robert Cowan
18. Re-staging the Welttheater: A Critical View of Carl Orff ’s
Antigonae and Oedipus der Tyrann 340
Nicholas Attfield
19. ‘Batter the Doom Drum’: The Music for Peter Hall’s
Oresteia and Other Productions of Greek Tragedy by
Harrison Birtwistle and Judith Weir 369
David Beard

References 399
Index 425
 Illustrations
1.1 Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza: design by Palladio (1580) with street-
perspectives added by Scamozzi, 1584. 15
1.2 Reconstruction by G. F. Barlow of Vanbrugh’s Queen’s Theatre, London
as at 1705: Barlow (1989), 519. Reproduced by permission of the Editor
of Early Music and the Estate of G. F. Barlow. 17
1.3 Gripsholm Castle, Sweden: theatre by Erik Palmstedt (1784). 18
1.4 Festspielhaus, Bayreuth (1876), by Wagner and Brückwald. 20
4.1 Fedra Incoronata, Act II: Teseo spies on Ferebea trying to seduce Ippolito.
Set design by Francesco Santurini in the printed libretto in the Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 82
4.2 Fedra Incoronata, Act III. Ippolito on his chariot. Set design by Francesco
Santurini in the printed libretto in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manu-
script Library, Yale University. 83
6.1 Pierre Peyron, La mort d’Alceste, ou l’heroı̈sme de l’amour conjugal (1785),
Paris, musée du Louvre, reproduced by permission of the Agence Photogra-
phique des musées nationaux (Copyright # RMN / René-Gabriel Ojéda). 105
6.2 Christoph Willibald Gluck, ‘O Dieux! Soutenez mon courage!’ (Act II,
sc. iii) from Alceste/ Alkestis (Pariser Fassung von 1776), ed. Rudolf Gerber,
in Sämtliche Werke (Kassel, Basel, and London: Bärenreiter, 1957), I. 7,
pp. 201–2, reproduced by permission of the publishers and of the
Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (shelfmark Mus. 1c. 265/1 (7)). 108
11.1 Chéron’s illustration to Iphigénie in Racine’s Œuvres (London: Tonson,
1724), reproduced by permission of the Central Library, Ghent University. 207
12.1 Viardot as Orphée, from Gazette de Beaux Arts, 1860; also reproduced in
Musical Quarterly 2 (1916). 227
12.2 Viardot: a self-portrait. Reproduced in Musical Quarterly 1 (1915). 228
12.3 Mrs Bovill as Orpheus. 233
12.4 Viola Tree as Iphigénie, surrounded by the worthies of British arts, from
Illustrated London News, 26 February (1910), 306. 236
12.5 Edyth Walker as Elektra from Illustrated London News, 26 February
(1910), 307. 237
14.1 Title page of the 1900 edition of Oresteia, reproduced by permission of
the National Library of Russia, Department of Music. 260
14.2 An excerpt from Taneyev’s Greek exercise book, reproduced by permis-
sion of the Tchaikovsky House-Museum Archive, Klin. 261
18.1 Caspar Neher’s model for the premiere of Orff’s Antigonae at the Felsen-
reitschule, Salzburg, 1949 (with thanks to the Orff-Zentrum Munich). 359
xii Illustrations
18.2 Caspar Neher’s sketch for the premiere of Orff’s Oedipus der Tyrann at
the Württemburgische Staatstheater, Stuttgart, 1959 (with thanks to the
Orff-Zentrum Munich). 360
19.1 The layout of the percussion section for the 1981–2 Oresteia perform-
ances in the Olivier Theatre of the National Theatre, London. Page
located with the promptbook (the Bible), stored at the National Theatre
Archive. 375
19.2 The opening page of Birtwistle’s unpublished Oresteia score, from the
clarinet parts stored at the NTA in London. RNT/MU/2/102, folder
2 of 5. 380
 Contributors
NICHOLAS ATTFIELD is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at Oxford
University, and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College. He has published from his D.Phil.
thesis on the twentieth-century reception of the symphonies of Anton Bruckner, and is at
work on a monograph exploring the activities of culturally conservative musicians in the
Weimar Republic.
DAVID BEARD is a Lecturer in Music at Cardiff University. He has published extensively
on British post-war music, including articles in Music Analysis, Cambridge Opera Journal,
and twentieth-century music. His book Harrison Birtwistle’s Operas and Music Theatre is
forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, and he appears in Peter Maxwell Davies
Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2009). He is co-author of Musicology: The Key
Concepts (London: Routledge, 2005).
ANASTASIA BELINA is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Leeds. She specializes in
nineteenth-century Russian music and opera and in the reception of Wagner in Russia,
and has published a number of articles on the works of Sergey Taneyev. She makes
frequent appearances at international conferences and guest lectures on various aspects of
Russian music, and she writes and translates for Naxos and Toccata Classics recording
labels.
SIMONE BETA is Aggregate Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Siena.
His main research centres on Greek and Roman drama (mostly comedy) and on the
reception of classical antiquity in opera. He is also interested in Greek and Latin
epigrams, the ancient novel, and wine. His books include a commentary on Lucian’s
On the Dance (1992), a book on wine in Greek literature (Oinos. Il vino nella
letteratura greca, with L. Della Bianca, 2002), a monograph on Aristophanes (Il
linguaggio nelle commedie di Aristofane. Parola positiva e parola negativa nella commedia
antica, 2004), an anthology of Greek epigrams on wine (Vino e poesia. Centocinquanta
epigrammi greci sul vino, 2006), and an anthology of fragments of Greek Old Comedy
(I comici greci, 2009).
PETER BROWN is a Lecturer in Classics at Oxford University, a Fellow of Trinity College,
and a member of the Advisory Board of the Archive of Performances of Greek and
Roman Drama. He has published extensively on Greek and Roman drama (mainly
comedy), and his translation of the Comedies of Terence appeared in the Oxford World’s
Classics series in January 2008.
MICHAEL BURDEN is Reader in Music at Oxford University and Fellow in Opera
Studies at New College, Oxford, where he is also Dean. His published research
is on the stage music of Henry Purcell and on aspects of dance and theatre in
the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries; it includes an analytical
xiv Contributors
catalogue of Metastasio’s operas as performed in London. He is currently com-
pleting books on the staging of opera in London from 1660 to 1860 and on the
London years of the soprano Regina Mingotti (1722–1808). He is President of
the British Society for Eighteenth-century Studies, a Visitor of the Ashmolean
Museum, Oxford, and director of productions of New Chamber Opera, www.
newchamberopera.co.uk.
ROBERT COWAN is a Lecturer in Classics at Oxford University and Fairfax Fellow in Latin
Literature at Balliol College. He has published on, among other things, Flavian epic,
Roman satire, and Greek and Roman drama.
MICHAEL EWANS is Professor of Drama and Music in the University of Newcastle,
Australia, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His publications
include three books on opera; Janácek’s Tragic Operas, Wagner and Aeschylus: the ‘Ring’
and the ‘Oresteia’, and most recently Opera from the Greek: Studies in the Poetics of
Appropriation. He is also the editor and chief translator of the Everyman Aeschylus and
Sophocles in four volumes.
BRUNO FORMENT is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Art, Music, and Theatre
Studies of Ghent University. His work on opera comprises aspects as diverse as the
libretto, score, and scenography, and is currently funded by the Flemish Fund for
Scientific Research. In the recent past he received fellowships from the Fulbright-Hays
Foundation and the Belgian American Educational Foundation, and he was awarded the
Jacques Handschin Prize by the Swiss Musicological Society.
JASON GEARY is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Michigan. His
research centres primarily on the intersection of music and Hellenism in Germany in the
nineteenth century. Currently he is at work on a book titled The Politics of Appropriation:
German Romantic Music and the Ancient Greek Legacy, to be published by Oxford
University Press.
SIMON GOLDHILL is Professor of Greek at Cambridge University. He has published very
widely on many aspects of Greek literature, including the books Reading Greek Tragedy,
The Poet’s Voice, Foucault’s Virginity, and Who Needs Greek?. He also has written Love, Sex
and Tragedy for a broader audience as well as The Temple of Jerusalem and City of Longing:
Jerusalem, which won the Gold Medal for History from the Independent Publishers
Association. He is a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and Director of the Cambridge
Victorian Studies Group. His next book, shortly to appear, is The Victorians and Classical
Antiquity: Art, Opera, Literature and the Proclamation of Modernity. He is a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
WENDY HELLER is Professor of Music at Princeton University and Director of the
Program in Italian Studies. She has published extensively on Baroque opera, gender,
and the classical tradition. A Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the Villa I
Tatti Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies, Heller is the author of Emblems
of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice. She is currently
completing a book on Ovid and opera in early modern Italy.
 Contributors xv
ROBERT C. KETTERER is a Professor of Classics at the University of Iowa. He has written
on ancient drama and its reception in early modern Europe, and was co-editor of Crossing
the Stages: The Production, Performance and Reception of Ancient Theater : Syllecta Classica,
vol. 10. He has a special interest in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opera, and is the
author of ‘Why Early Opera is Roman and Not Greek’ (Cambridge Opera Journal 15.1)
and Ancient Rome in Early Opera (University of Illinois Press, 2009).
MICHELE NAPOLITANO teaches Greek Literature at the University of Cassino. He is
interested mainly in the Athenian theatre of the fifth century BC, above all comedy and
satyr-play. In addition to numerous articles, he has published a commentary on
Euripides’ Cyclops (2003), and his monograph on Eupolis’ Kolakes (Flatterers) is
expected to appear in 2011. An article on Luigi Dallapiccola’s opera Ulysses appeared
in 2009.
SUZANA OGRAJENŠEK is a Research Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, and a
former Research Assistant at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama in
Oxford, responsible for the operatic segment of the APGRD database. She is a specialist
in baroque opera and has worked extensively in Handel studies. She is a contributor to the
Cambridge Handel Encyclopedia and the editor of Il pastor fido (‘The Faithful Shepherd’)
for the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe.
ROGER SAVAGE taught for thirty-five years in the Department of English Literature,
Edinburgh University, where he is now an Honorary Fellow. He has published essays
on eighteenth-century poetry, on operas by Gagliano, Purcell, Rameau, Vaughan Wil-
liams, and Stravinsky, and on the Dido myth, the staging of court entertainments,
neoclassical linkings of antiquity and nature, and the history of opera production.
REINHARD STROHM is Professor of Music at Oxford University and Emeritus Fellow of
Wadham College. He is interested in late-medieval music, the history of opera, eight-
eenth-century composers, and the historiography of music. His publications include
critical editions of operas, libretto translations, and the recent books, Dramma per musica:
Italian Opera Seria of the Eigheenth Century (New Haven and London, 1997) and The
Operas of Antonio Vivaldi (Florence, 2008).
JENNIFER THORP is the Archivist of New College, Oxford University. She is also a dance
historian, specializing in dance in Paris and London during the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries. She has published numerous articles and contributed to academic
publications on subjects ranging from dance in late seventeenth-century opera to the
nature of dance at court and in the theatres of eighteenth-century London.
STEPHEN WALSH holds a personal chair in music at Cardiff University, is a former music
critic of the Observer, Times, and Daily Telegraph, and the author of several books and
long papers on Russian and Hungarian music. The second volume of his two-volume
biography of Stravinsky was published in 2006.
CHRISTIAN WOLFF is Strauss Professor of Music and Professor of Classics Emeritus,
Dartmouth College. He is also a composer, whose work, some 180 pieces now, is
published by C. F. Peters, New York, and is widely recorded. He has published articles
xvi Contributors
on Euripides. His introduction and notes for Tom Sleigh’s translation of Euripides’
Herakles in the Oxford Greek Tragedy in New Translations series was reissued in 2009.
AMY WYGANT lectures in early modern literature and culture at the University of Glasgow.
She is a co-founder of Women in French in Scotland (WIFIS), and the editor of
Seventeenth-Century French Studies. She is interested in witchcraft and demonology,
tragedy, opera, and psychoanalysis, and her most recent monograph is Medea, Magic,
and Modernity (Ashgate, 2007). She is currently working on early modern cookery and
imagination.
 Note to the Reader

For the most part, we have tried to use the forms of ancient names that are most
likely to be familiar to English-speaking readers and to refer to ancient works by
the title most commonly given to them in translated versions (though we have
retained Oedipus Tyrannus as an exception). We have encouraged contributors to
translate texts in any language other than English, even to the extent of providing
translations of titles whose meaning will seem obvious to many readers; we have
preferred to err in the direction of translating too much, though we are sure we
have not achieved complete consistency.
We hope that readers will be familiar with basic musical terminology. In some
chapters pitches are identified by the Helmholtz system, where middle C is
identified as c’, the C above as c’’ and the C above that as c’’’; the C below
middle C is identified as c, the c below that as C.
The abbreviation APGRD stands for the Archive of Performances of Greek
and Roman Drama.
This page intentionally left blank
 1
Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts:
The Institutions of Greco-Roman Theatre
and the Development of European Opera

Roger Savage

The opera is set in Sicily in the twelfth century AD. As the curtain rises on Act III
we see the ruins of an ancient Greek theatre there: auditorium to the right, stage
to the left. It is night. Though the building is decayed, it still has its votive altar in
place. Soon a Norman king sacrifices at that altar—and experiences a Nietz-
schean epiphany. The auditorium fills with spectral presences and the god
Dionysus himself appears on the stage, an audible chorus attending on him,
calling seductively to the king . . . This scene from King Roger, the symbolist opera
of 1918–24 with a score (and much of the libretto) by Karol Szymanowski, must
be the most complete evocation in the whole operatic repertoire of the physical
theatre of antiquity: its shape, its performance conventions, its tutelary spirit, its
allure.1 However, significant evocations of aspects of that theatre had preceded it
in the centuries since the first Euridices and Dafnes at Florence and Mantua in the
late 1590s and 1600s, though they were used not as part of the decor and action
of a particular work, but in support of projects which might affect the develop-
ment of the operatic mode as a whole. For while we may tend to think of the
contribution of ancient theatre and drama to opera very largely in terms of the
later medium’s adaptations of a dozen-or-so surviving performance-texts (King
Roger as a reworking of Euripides’ Bacchae is a case in point), the ‘institutions’ of
ancient theatre as a practical concern—one involving architects, performers, and
organizers—have had their parts to play too. The roles of four of these institu-
tions are especially worth investigating: the singing of actors on the ancient stage;
the presence behind that stage of a controlling or enabling figure; the shaping of
the auditorium; and the placing of choric odes around the episodes of the drama.
Each of these has been seen at one time or another as the precursor of some

1 On this opera, see Robert Cowan, Ch. 17 in this volume.

2 Roger Savage
important aspect of operatic activity, supplying a stimulating precedent perhaps,
or perhaps a convenient pretext that would add respectability to something
which was in fact an innovation.

I. OPERA AND ANCIENT STAGE-SONG

The importance to the early operatic world of the notion that the performers in
Greek and Roman theatre sang their roles comes over well in the tribute paid by
Marco da Gagliano to one of the triumphs of opera’s first decade, the Arianna
(‘Ariadne’) of Claudio Monteverdi and Ottavio Rinuccini, first staged in 1608 at
Mantua. In the preface to his own opera of the same year, Dafne (‘Daphne’),
Gagliano (a Florentine who was almost certainly in the audience for Arianna’s
premiere) claims that Monteverdi had set Rinuccini’s words for the heroine ‘in so
exquisite a way that one can truly affirm that the excellence of ancient music was
revived [si rinovasse il pregio dell’antica musica], since he visibly reduced the
whole theatre to tears’.2 It might seem strange at first that Gagliano links
Ariadne’s ‘Lasciatemi morire’—seventeenth-century monody at its most expres-
sive and significantly the only part of the score to survive—with an ancient music
whose excellence (a tiny handful of fragments aside) he would have had to take
entirely on trust; but it becomes less so if we set what he says against three decades
of a particular strain of Italian humanist thought about the nature and science of
music: thought that was especially coloured by the surviving writings on the
subject by the ancient Greeks and Romans.
Monody was a buzzword—a buzz-concept rather (the word itself wasn’t used in
this sense until the 1640s)—with the so-called ‘Camerata’: the circle of humanist
gentlemen and musician-protégés who gathered in Medici Florence in the 1570s
and ’80s around the scholar, poet, and courtier Giovanni de’ Bardi. The concept
of a single vocal line (monolinear, monophonic, monodic) pitched somewhere
between traditional solo song and heightened speech appealed to them strongly
because they were convinced that its promotion and dissemination would restore
a long-lost balance between the sister arts of music and poetry, making sung texts
audible, significant and properly powerful again after far too many decades of
barbarous madrigalian polyphony: a music they considered ‘Gothic’ (or so Bardi’s
son tells us). Added significantly to which, they believed that pure monody had
been omnipresent in the performance of metrical texts in antiquity—‘one single
air, such as we hear in church’, as their Roman mentor in classical matters
Girolamo Mei put it—which meant that antiquity could be a stick with which

2 Carter and Szweykowski (1994), 53. (Where there are modern editions and/or translations
of the texts referred to in this chapter, it is they that are cited in these notes. Translations are
taken from such modern volumes as provide them; where they do not, the translations are my
own.)
 Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 3
to beat depraved polyphonic modernity.3 Ancient drama was particularly
interesting in this respect to Bardi’s especial protégé Vincenzo Galilei and to the
Ferrara-based literary historian and theorist Francesco Patrizi, a good friend of
Bardi’s, perhaps because the evidence they collected about it suggested something
counter-intuitive. They would surely have been justified in assuming at the outset
that the performance of a Greek tragedy, with its series of choric odes framing
episodes of dramatic monologue and dialogue, had involved the odes being sung
in three- or four-part harmony and the episodes being delivered in plain speech.
But their research suggested that the odes had in fact been sung in unison,
probably with the unison support of an aulos or kithara, and—even more
intriguing—that the monologues and dialogues had all been sung too. Galilei
in his Dialogue of Ancient and Modern Music (1582) and Patrizi in the ‘Historical
Decad’ of his Poetics (Della poetica, 1586) found support for these views in some
paragraphs about the chorus in Plato’s Laws (665) and in sentences and passing
phrases to do with individuals acting and singing in Cicero, Quintilian, Sueto-
nius, and the rubrics to the comedies of Terence; but they put especial weight
on their prize exhibit: sentences from the collection of Problems attributed to
Aristotle (918b and 922b). These talk of ‘songs sung by stage actors’ and suggest
that there are certain especially noble musical modes that are apt for the stage-
singing of heroes but not for the chorus, whose members should be content with
humbler ones. This they interpreted as implying that the heroes did nothing but
sing, and their faith in their interpretation led them to play down the statement in
Aristotle’s Poetics (1449b30–31)—borne out by scholarship in our own time—
that the episodes in tragedy were in fact part-spoken and part-sung: ‘some parts
delivered with metre alone and others delivered with song’, as Aristotle puts it. (If
they had paid more attention to the likelihood that the book of Problems was only
‘pseudo-Aristotle’, Bardi and his friends might have had second thoughts and
given more weight to the information in the Poetics, instead of dismissing it—as
Patrizi did—as only applying to the decadent phase of tragedy.)4
Still, however shaky their case for all-sung Greek tragedy—and by no means
all savants of the period went along with it—the humanists’ combined distaste
for sixteenth-century polyphony and enthusiasm for their vision of antiquity
led soon to practical experiments in writing and performing a new monody; and
before long these included brief theatrical scenas which could be put into court
entertainments that in the main used quite other musical techniques. (A signifi-
cant instance was the big set of dramatic interludes or intermedii which Bardi

3 P. de’Bardi to G. B. Doni: Strunk (1998), 524. Mei to Galilei: Palisca (1989), 57; cf. Galilei
(2003), 251 and 261. For monody in the ‘Camerata’ and related circles, see Carter (1989), vol. 1,
ch. 4; Palisca (1994), chs. 12–17, and Palisca (2006), ch. 7.
4 Patrizi (1969), 1. 331–6, and Palisca (1985), 412–18 and 424–6. Galilei (2003), 152–3 and
362–3; cf. liii–lxi. For a recent gathering of ancient sources on solo- and chorus-singing, see Csapo
and Slater (1995), 331–68 (whence the translations from Aristotle above). For modern studies of
the subject, see Easterling and Hall (2002), 3–68 (essays by E. Hall and P. Wilson), and Hall
(2006), 288–320.
4 Roger Savage
himself helped to devise for the performance of the comedy La pellegrina (‘The
Pilgrim Woman’) celebrating the marriage of Ferdinando de’ Medici to Chris-
tine of Lorraine in 1589, which had four monodies slotted into it, among them a
lament with echo-effects for the mythical musician Arion.) It is not surprising
then that, when figures connected with the Bardi circle and the related circle of
Jacopo Corsi—notably those rather uneasy bedfellows Emilio de’ Cavalieri,
Giulio Caccini and Jacopo Peri—began about a decade later to write music for
the new all-sung plays (which developed generic subtitles like favola in musica
and tragedia in musica), they should make extensive use of monody and in so
doing feel pleasantly in touch with antiquity. True, their subjects were pastoral or
piously Christian rather than fully Aristotelian-tragic; their choruses in the main
were harmonized rather than sung in unison, and their monody wasn’t 100 per
cent monolinear or speech-like, since it involved a supporting basso continuo
played on a keyboard and/or a plucked stringed instrument and even occasionally
indulged itself by calling on more traditional song-forms (‘arias’ in the making).
Nonetheless, these composers were using a technique for solo singer-actors that
could be linked to classical practice and might achieve an affecting eloquence
approaching what they imagined was that of an Antigone, Electra, or Medea on
the ancient stage. So Caccini could announce in the dedication to Bardi of his
music for Euridice (‘Eurydice’) in 1600 that it was composed in a dramatic style
(the stile rappresentativo) which Bardi himself had said at Camerata gatherings
‘had been used by the ancient Greeks in performing their tragedies’; and Peri
could add in the preface to the Euridice music he composed in the same year
that, in his ambition to ‘imitate with song him who speaks’, he had ‘judged that
the ancient Greeks and Romans (who, according to the opinion of many, sang
their tragedies throughout on the stage) used a harmony which, going beyond
that of ordinary speech, fell so short of the melody of song that it assumed an
intermediate form.’ Such classical precursors were worth taking seriously. And if
we factor in Alessandro Guidotti’s description in 1600 of Cavalieri’s recent
compositions as ‘done in likeness of that style with which it is said the ancient
Greeks and Romans on their stages and in their theatres were wont to move the
onlookers to various emotions’, we can see that Gagliano’s praise for Monte-
verdi’s Arianna, an opera which at its climax had ‘visibly moved the whole
theatre to tears’ and so revived ‘the excellence of ancient music’, made good
sense as part of a tradition. It was a tradition which Gagliano himself was sure
would yield even finer fruit if there was enough creative talent and princely cash
forthcoming, since the operas of the north Italian courts would then be on
course ‘to arrive at a much greater perfection, and perhaps such that one day
they might be able to come close to the so celebrated tragedies of the ancient
Greeks and Romans’.5

5 Carter and Szweykowski (1994), 37 (Caccini), 25–7 (Peri), 71 (Cavalieri), 53 and 49

(Gagliano); cf. Rinuccini at 17–19.
 Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 5
Such prefatory declarations of emulation and association largely faded out
once opera as a form was fully up and running; but the question of the form’s
connections or lack of them with the drama of antiquity went on concerning
people. Was opera’s birth around 1600 in fact a rebirth of ancient drama or was it
in essence a new thing? (It was acceptable, it seems, to be undecided about this;
witness the anonymous author of the treatise Il corago of around 1630 (on which
see Section II below), for whom the form was equally to be welcomed whether it
was ‘newly discovered in our own times or taken from ancient usage’: a view
shared by Andrea Perrucci in his book on the theatre arts at the end of the
century.)6 Again, was opera a worthy equivalent to what had flourished in Athens
two millennia before—and if it was, was it perhaps part of an unbroken tradition
going back to the Greeks which had survived incognito in the centuries inter-
vening? Of course assertions of equivalence and/or continuity required as prem-
ise a continuing conviction that Greek drama had been all-sung. Some notable
writers would not accept this, among them the Seigneur de Saint-Evremond in
his letter on opera to the Duke of Buckingham (c.1677) and Pier Jacopo Martello
in his treatise on tragedy of 1714. The latter quotes the former’s epigram that ‘the
Greeks made fine tragedies where some things were sung while the Italians and
French make bad ones where everything is sung’, glossing it by limiting song on
the ancient stage to choric odes and declaring that solo-actors at the time simply
relied on sonorous speech:7 a view taken further by Jean-Baptiste du Bos in the
third volume of his Réflexions critiques (1740), which spends much time arguing
that Greek dialogue in performance was a matter of ‘composed declamation’ (III. v).
Other writers, however, took the Camerata line. Claude-François Ménestrier, the
Jesuit chronicler of all types of spectacle and performance, attests in his Repré-
sentations en musique of 1681 that ‘the Greeks had no kind of poetry that was not
sung’ and that ‘their theatre pieces were sung things, as it is easy to establish’. In
his Della tragedia of 1715 the dramatist and critic Gianvincenzo Gravina is
equally convinced, using the same ‘testimonies’ as Mei, Galilei, Patrizi and their
friends but adding a few more from other parts of Cicero and from Livy, Strabo,
Lucian, and Donatus. And Gravina’s famous pupil Pietro Metastasio silently
takes over much of this evidence when making the same assertion in chapter 4 of
his ‘abstract’ of Aristotle’s Poetics, the Estratto dell’arte poetica d’Aristotele (1782)
which he worked on from the 1740s to the 1770s and which serves as an apologia
for his own practice as an opera-librettist in the light of what he sees as the best of
ancient theory. The concept of all-sung tragedy among the ancients is far too
good a precedent for the most illustrious writer of modern opera-texts to be in a
hurry to question it, especially since he considers the witnesses he cites to be
‘sufficient, authoritative, and indisputable’.8

6 Anon. (1983), 41. Perrucci (1961), 74 and 87.

7 Martello (1963), 273 and 303–5. Cf. Freeman (1981), 38–9 and 47–8.
8 Ménestrier (1972), 36. Gravina (1973), 557–68. Metastasio (1947), 2. 978. Cf. Burney
(1935), 1. 133–42.
6 Roger Savage
Not that expressing this opinion, and even pointing out that there might be
formal points of comparison to be made between ancient drama and modern
opera, necessarily implied that the commentator was an enthusiast for the latter,
let alone thought that it was a wholly worthy equivalent to the works of antiquity.
Voltaire is a case in point. In his ‘Greek Tragedies Imitated in Certain Italian and
French Operas’, the first part of the Dissertation on Ancient and Modern Tragedy
which he places before his own tragedy Sémiramis (1747), he is happy to assert
that Italian recitative is ‘precisely the melopoeia of the ancients’—melopoeia being
Aristotle’s term for the ‘song-making’ element in tragedy—and that operatic
choruses mesh with recitative in the same way that choric odes meshed with
episodes in Greece. Yet in spite of this (and in spite of his admiration for some of
Metastasio’s librettos), he holds that opera as a form is ‘monstrous’ on account of
its addiction to arias. Gravina had made a similar point. For him, aria-grounded
opera had about as much mimetic validity as a Chinese painting or a Gothic
statue (very little, that’s to say); yet the works of the ancients had structural
similarities to it. ‘The song of the episodes’ in Greek tragedy, he says, ‘had to be
closer to nature and that of the choruses more artificial’, much as, in ‘the
ridiculous dramas of the infamous theatre of today’, recitative is ‘more simple
and natural’ while aria is ‘so figurative that it loses resemblance to nature’.9
Of course, Gravina’s one-time protégé Metastasio will have none of this
sniping. As he sees it in the Estratto, ancient tragedy and the operatic mode
that has come to be known as opera seria are both great forms, with the latter
perfectly reconcilable to Aristotle’s ideas about the former, provided those are
interpreted with a proper latitude. Any connections demonstrable between the
two forms, then, can only be grist to his opera-promoting mill. One connection
he notes links him with several seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers who
in their differing ways see opera in at least some of its elements as stretching back
far, far beyond 1600, or ancient drama as stretching forward towards the
medieval period. For instance, in a paper on ‘The Performance of Ancient
Tragedy’ given in 1729 to the Parisian Académie des Inscriptions et Belles
Lettres, the Abbé Vatry (another believer in all-sung Greek drama, who felt
that its episodes and choruses were like modern French opera’s récits and airs)
argues from antiquity forwards, speculating that theatrical song found its way
into early Christian liturgy during the decline of the Roman empire:
The theatre [of antiquity] was still open when chant was introduced into the Church and,
the Passion of Our Lord being a kind of tragedy, it is very likely that tragic song was
imitated in the singing of it to the people, from which comes its being sung by different
persons in different tones. I leave it to the savants to decide if this notion has any merit.
(Any enthusiastic savant contemplating going one stage further and linking late
ecclesiastical chant with operatic recitative c.1600 might relish Cavalieri’s report

9 Voltaire (2003), 141–3; cf. Ménestrier (1972), 78–9. Gravina (1973), 556 and 560.
 Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 7
of the general response to the premiere of Peri’s Euridice: ‘the music was
tedious, . . . it seemed like the chanting of the Passion.’)10 Then Antonio Planelli,
Metastasio’s younger contemporary, looking at the prehistory of opera in his
Dell’opera in musica of 1772, claims that, broadly defined, the form can be traced
by way of various kinds of Italian music-theatre as far back as the mid-thirteenth
century at least, which leads him to speculate whether at that stage it may have
been ‘a continuation of ancient tragedy’. For Metastasio himself it is a matter
of prosodic links. Thinking of the connections as he sees them between the
strophe–antistrophe–epode form of the ancient choric ode (‘A.i–A.ii–B’, so to
speak) and the ‘A–B–A’ form, strophic in a sense, of the operatic ariette for
which he provided the words, it strikes him that the two work in the same way—
as well as contrasting similarly with ancient episode-singing and modern operatic
recitative—‘by virtue of an immemorial custom, apparently handed down to us
from the ancient theater’. It strikes him too that both have something in
common with the whole long tradition of Italian odes, canzoni and canzonette.
Aren’t all these Italian forms past and present parts of one continuity, ‘visible and
evident relics of the theatre of the Greeks’?11
Well, perhaps not. From the beginnings of Italian opera there had been
sceptical voices cautioning against over-confident, over-precise claims that the
stile rappresentativo, let alone any lyric forms that came to be associated with it,
reproduced the actual song of the ancient stage or could be very directly
connected with it. Jacopo Peri had spoken for the sceptics in his Euridice preface
of 1600 where, although happy to regard the theatre music of antiquity as a
precursor of the new monody, he refused to be ‘so bold’ as to claim that his own
monodic style was ‘the type of song used in Greek and Roman plays’.12 But the
most trenchant ‘No’ to any suggestion of continuity or resemblance between
ancient drama and opera on the Italian model would come a hundred years after
Metastasio, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik
(The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, 1872). It is Nietzsche’s argument
that true Dionysian tragedy was driven from the earth in the fifth century BC by
the unholy alliance of Euripides and Socrates, and that only now is it returning in
the form of such music-dramas as Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. So for him, the
monodic, logocentric operatic project of the 1600s was a false dawn. The
inventors of recitative were, he felt, profoundly mistaken in their belief that
‘stilo rappresentativo had solved the mystery of ancient music, the secret that alone
was able to explain the enormous effect of . . . Greek tragedy.’ Only ‘truly
unmusical listeners’, he growled, could have ‘demanded that the words should
be understood above all else; so that a rebirth of music could only occur when a

10 For Metastasio, see Weiss (1982) passim and Michael Burden, Ch. 10 in this volume. Vatry:
Recueil (1717–48), 211, 223–4; cf. Ménestrier (1972), 38–9. Cavalieri: Palisca (1994), 403.
11 Planelli (1981), 7–8. Metastasio (1947), 2.970 and 1068: the former in the tr. on p. 389 of
Weiss (1982). 12 Carter and Szweykowski (1994), 29.
8 Roger Savage
way of singing was discovered in which the words would hold sway over
counterpoint as a master holds sway over his servant’. He was especially amazed
that this demand should be made at the turn of the seventeenth century:
Is it conceivable that the music of opera, thoroughly externalised and incapable of
reverence, should have been enthusiastically welcomed and cherished, as a rebirth, so to
speak, of all true magic, by an age that had just produced the ineffably sublime and sacred
music of Palestrina?13
So much for the Camerata! Of course, Nietzsche is doing intelligent composers
c.1600 less than justice, since they were aware all along that there could be no
absolute abandoning of the contrapuntal principle. Monteverdi himself made the
point trenchantly six years after the premiere of Arianna by reworking its
heroine’s solo-voice-and-continuo monody ‘Lasciatemi morire’ in a rich five-
voice polyphonic texture and publishing it as a sequence of madrigals. Any
surviving diehards of Bardi’s circle must have thought that the Goths were
back at the gates.

I I . C H O R E G O S — C H O R A G U S — C O R A G O — C H O R È G E

Poetry and music; acting, dancing, and instrumental playing; costumes and
props; ‘scenes and machines’: people had been aware from its beginnings of the
variety of media, techniques, and talents that opera involved. Some had been
aware too that, in consequence, the preparation and performance of a particular
piece would need careful supervising; and it would not have been a new notion
that the responsibility for this might be vested in one person or a close partner-
ship of two or three. It was an idea that had antecedents in the activities of the
performance-controllers of the big late-medieval religious festival dramas (the
‘regent’ of the Lucerne Passion Play for instance), and more recently in the skills
of the drama teachers at the new Jesuit colleges and of the gifted courtiers or
associates of polite academies who were charged with devising, casting, rehears-
ing, and staging ambitious shows of one sort and another: pastoral dramas,
classicizing tragedies, dramatic intermedii, and so on. There was Leone de’
Sommi at Mantua for instance, theatrical servant of the Gonzaga through
much of the second half of the sixteenth century; there were Angelo Ingegneri
at Vicenza in the 1580s and the not-too-fractious duumvirate of Bardi and
Cavalieri to whom the Grand Duke gave overall responsibility for mounting
the big Florentine intermedii of 1589. So, when the first operas were staged in
northern Italy, the necessary skills were to hand; and, like their immediate
predecessors, operatic performance-coordinators (or admiring colleagues of
theirs) might occasionally write treatises or detailed memoranda in connection

13 Nietzsche (1993), 89–91.

 Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 9
with their work. The most revealing of these perhaps is Gagliano’s account, in the
preface to his 1608 Dafne, of the circumstances of that opera’s premiere, of the
variety of media involved in its success, and of the techniques employed in almost
all departments of its production: matters of musical balance, synchronization
and ornamentation, of stage movement and apt posture for soloists and chorus,
and of special effects and significant props.14
What these figures holding the show together lacked was a widely accepted
title that would set them off as masters of a particular metier. Perhaps they were
content to be characterized by the verbs that commonly described what they did:
controlling, guiding, directing, arranging, executing, setting in order (regolare,
guidare, dirigere, disporre, condurre, ordinare). But was there an appropriate noun
to be found for them? Well, yes; and in the records of Greco-Roman theatre. The
chief singer-dancer of the chorus in early Greek tragedy had been known as the
choregos (‘chorus leader’) before gaining the more common classical name of
coryphaeus (‘head man’), at which point the term choregos attached itself to the
chorus’s non-playing captain, the moneyed citizen who, once appointed by the
city’s chief archon, had the privilege and responsibility of organizing choric
matters: recruiting the chorus members, finding a space in which they and the
aulos player could rehearse, providing the means to feed and water them, and
fitting them out with costumes and masks for the performance. (It was left to a
chorodidaskalos to do much of the practical ‘directing’.) Later—to confuse or
enrich things—the word ‘choregos’ gained a further and different kind of life,
migrating from Attic to Doric Greek and then to Latin, changing vowels as it
went, losing class somewhat but maintaining its acquired Greek sense of ‘pro-
vider’ and coming to be used in Roman theatre for a troupe’s supplier of
costumes, perhaps of props too: a practical working choragus now, contracted
to the aediles who bought in the shows that were staged for the citizenry.15 So
sixteenth-century commentators could find a range of meanings attached to the
one word (which they generally spelt the Latin way)—and they proceeded to add
another. Looking at choregia and choragia in Aristotle’s Poetics (1453b8) and the
De Architectura of Vitruvius (V.xi.1), they hazarded that these terms, beyond
their primary meaning of ‘theatrical gear’, were connected with the active
preparation and rehearsal of a show, taking the hint perhaps from the Greek
lexicographer Phrynichus, who had defined the choregeion as ‘the place where the
choregos, bringing together choruses and actors, would knock them into shape’.
From the angle of the Renaissance, then, the choragus of the Greeks and Romans
might be seen as a rehearser as well as an organizer, financier, performance-
leader, costumier, and props master. (Mid-century writers on poetics seem

14 Carter and Szweykowski (1994), 46–67; cf. Savage (1989) passim and Savage (2002a), esp.
297–307.
15 Greek choregos: see Wilson (2000), esp. 50–95, 114–16, 260–2, and Csapo and Slater (1995),
139–57. Roman choragus: see Gilula (1996), 479–84, and Marshall (2006), 26–8.
10 Roger Savage
particularly keen to see him as a kind of stage manager too.)16 It is hardly
surprising therefore that theatre folk with humanist connections in the 1590s
and early seventeenth century were moved on occasion to give the word a modern
application, and one that implied a wide competence. For instance, in 1591 the
dramatist Muzio Manfredi wrote to Leone de’ Sommi at Mantua about the
costuming of one of his tragedies there. Manfredi offered some details but
allowed that he could leave most of the decisions in de’ Sommi’s capable
hands, believing that his would be ‘the office of corago’ for the show and knowing
that he was a ‘master of those arts’.17 The modern man-about-practical-theatre
seemed to have acquired a classical precursor.
Around that time the term choragus began to get institutionalized at the Jesuit
colleges. These regularly staged pious plays in Latin, often involving dance and
song: plays which were important events educationally, socially, and sometimes
artistically. They were generally the responsibility of the college’s professor of
rhetoric or languages, and in his capacity as writer, caster, rehearser, and general
organizer of a show he was sometimes called its choragus. The term may have got
into the Jesuit mindset from learned commentaries on relevant classical texts, or
helpful syntheses like the chapter on the Greek choregos in book 9 of the
Historical Decad of Patrizi’s Poetics, or from literary borrowings such as the
passage (deriving from Lucian’s journey-to-the-shades dialogue, Menippus) in
Erasmus’ Praise of Folly where the controller of the roles that humankind plays on
the Great Stage of the World is called the choragus. Thus the German Jesuit
Jakob Bidermann, active in college dramatics at Ingoldstadt, Augsburg, and
Munich from 1598 to 1615, is described in the preface to his collected Ludi
Theatrales (1666) as a busy, multi-tasked choragus, hard put to find time to sit
down and write his plays because
he had to see the theatre readied, instruct the performers on stage, attend to matters of
costume and scenery, get the stage-machines to function, prepare the programme-
synopses for the printer, and on top of this to undertake all the other tasks needful in
someone seeing to a theatrical enterprise. . . . I’ve often heard grave men say that they
believed that the leader of a great army on the day he had to fight with a fierce enemy was
not troubled with more cares than the choragus of a big show on the day it was to descend
into the theatrical arena.
(The coupling at the end here perhaps derives indirectly from Demosthenes’
striking contrast, in the First Philippic of 351 BC, between the efficiency with
which the Athenians could organize a choregia and the inefficiency that charac-
terized their military expeditions.)18

16 Phrynichus: see Revermann (2006), 93. Vitruvian commentators and writers on poetics: see
Savage and Sansone (1989), 508–9, n. 21, and 496.
17 MacClintock (1966), 176–7.
18 Patrizi (1969), 1. 421–5; cf. I. 300–301. Bidermann (1967), I. (þþ)[1]v.- (þþ) 2r; cf. (þþ)
3v. Demosthenes: Wilson (2000), 50–1.
 Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 11
From the 1610s onwards there is a growing number of references in surviving
documents to the activities of choragi at some of the Jesuit colleges;19 and it is
against such a background, where its title is concerned at least, that one could
place an anonymous manuscript of about 1630 which was only put into print in
the late twentieth century and which its editors have speculatively attributed to
Ottavio Rinuccini’s son Pierfrancesco: The Corago, or Certain Observations on
the Good Staging of Dramatic Works (Il corago, o vero alcune osservazioni per metter
bene in scena le composizioni drammatiche).20 The corago here, evoked as a
wonderfully necessary figure and given twenty-three chapters of helpful instruc-
tion and urbane advice, is a courtier rather than a college professor, and spoken
drama and all-sung opera—musica recitativa is the term used—are both import-
ant to him, with opera (‘one of the most esteemed of theatrical pleasures’) getting
special attention. The first chapter makes it clear that the author’s approach to his
subject is practical and up-to-date yet also as rooted as he can make it in the
classical tradition. Regretting that the provision of public entertainments is not
what it was, he claims that the relevant skills have become rusty. Among them,
the art of the ancient corago, a vital support for dramatic poetry, is so obliterated that to
Italians it no longer even has a name of its own, or if it does keep the old one, most people
do not know what it means. The correct meaning of the word corago, then, was that
person whose task it was to find, maintain and set up when needed all the decorations,
devices and equipment pertaining to plays and other shows and entertainments. (Hence
in Vitruvius the corago is the back room or hall where all the decorations and furnishings
used for the scenic apparatus were stored.) But, keeping pace with the individuals who
held the office and arising from specific needs, this corago sometimes extended his
function to include the arrangement and planning of performances (even to the extent
of directing the chorus: corago among the Greeks originally having the same meaning
that coryphaeus has for us). So, since staging dramatic works with artistry and perfection
calls for—or makes extremely useful—a person who directs and sees carried out not
only matters of external décor but also many other necessary activities, and since the
traditional office of corago was at least close to this, the corago’s art will here be taken to
mean that competence which enables a man to lay down all the needful ways and means
by which a drama, once it has been written by a poet, may be staged with the perfection it
requires . . . It seems that in modern times he should be most trained and proficient in the
arts of stage machinery and acting, [ . . . the latter including the art of] directing the
choruses (which is said to be the origin of the corago’s name).21
The philology and theatre history may be a little wobbly here, but they indicate
the concern that runs through the whole manuscript to call on classical parallels
and contrasts wherever possible. For instance, the author mounts a full-dress if

19 e.g. for Fribourg before 1635, see Ehret (1921), 45 for the year 1619, 125 for 1625 and 1629,
and 75 for 1634.
20 See Anon. (1983) for Italian text and editorial introduction; see Savage and Sansone (1989)
for partial Eng. tr. and commentary.
21 Savage and Sansone (1989), 499–500.
12 Roger Savage
inconclusive disputation on the relative merits and defects of ancient and modern
theatrical architecture and decor; he contrasts ancient scales, harmonies, and
tunings with modern ones, and adduces page after page of Julius Pollux’s
Onomasticon as evidence in considerations of stage-dancing and the pros and
cons of wearing theatrical masks. But along with all this, opera gets several
chapters of prime focus, and the operatic duties of a court corago are made
clear: among other things to foster the writing of effective librettos and telling
settings of them; to supervise the invention of fine theatrical machines; to deploy
choruses so that their movements can be read with pleasure and ease by the
audience; to cast singers in appropriate roles, instruct them about stance, move-
ment, and the alliance of musical and physical gesture, and to make sure on the
night that they have proper wardrobe assistance, that the instrumentalists ac-
companying them have the chance to tune up discretely, and that the machines
are safety-checked.
Perhaps if Il corago had found its way into print at the time, as did significant
treatises by Sabbattini and Saint-Hubert on stage decor and theatrical dance, the
term corago might have taken off as the proper one for the person staging a
spectacular show, an opera particularly. But it stayed in manuscript and so didn’t
provide an easily citable alternative to staging’s tendency over the next century
and a half to be subsumed under the responsibilities of another figure connected
with the piece in hand: the librettist perhaps (as with Giulio Rospigliosi in
Barberini Rome in the seventeenth century or Metastasio in Habsburg Vienna
in the eighteenth), the composer (for instance Jean-Baptiste Lully at the court of
Louis XIV or Niccolò Jommelli at that of the Duke of Württemberg), court
Intendants such as Farinelli during his stint with the royal opera in Bourbon
Madrid, or house-poets on the staff of commercial companies—a sizeable tribe
that included Carlo Goldoni in Vivaldi’s Venice. Yet the term itself stayed alive
in some corners of practical theatre well up to and into the eighteenth century.
Thus Andrea Perrucci, the Sicilian/Neapolitan dramatist and theorist who in-
cludes opera and scripted-spoken drama as premeditated forms and commedia
dell’arte as the most notable improvised one in his Dell’arte rappresentativa
premeditata ed all’improvviso of 1699, insists on the importance for each of
these modes of the corago: ‘the man who guides, harmonises and governs the
performers’. He is ‘the good Palinurus who will get the ship into port’ and
company members are urged to obey him, since ‘to be frank, in these matters a
monarchy is better than a republic’.22 Again, at some Jesuit colleges the professor
in charge of plays went on being called the choragus, notably the Bavarian Franz
Lang, who put a lot of his teaching on stage movement (and advice on writing
plays too) into his posthumously published treatise on acting, the Dissertatio de
actione scenica (1727). This includes a lively job description:

22 Perrucci (1961), 143; cf. 144, 263–4 and 266. Cf. also Martello (1963), 277 and 311.
 Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 13
In a choragus I require these gifts. Besides natural ability . . . , he should first be a poet and
fluent in Latin, should have an acute fancy or imagination, should be an outstanding
moralist, a fine actor, and finally adept in manual theatre-skills. . . . If he can further have
abilities in music and visual art, . . . he will win all votes.23
By the mid-eighteenth century, however, ‘choragus’ seems to have lost most of its
currency as a term referring to contemporary theatre practice, at least where opera
was concerned, perhaps because the word’s natural habitat was the court or college
at a time when the operatic world as a whole had become more and more
dominated by commercially-minded impresarios in the public theatre: men of a
tribe founded back in the Venice of the 1640s by the likes of Marco Faustini, and
men who would be unlikely to include a corago on their pay-roll. So the word
shrank back to the sphere of ancient history, though it still had a resonance and
relevance, as when the French Encyclopédie suggests in 1753 that the position of
a chorège in fifth-century Athens was analogous to that of a directeur—one of the
company administrators under government surveillance—at the Paris Opéra, or
when Francesco Algarotti calls in his influential Essay on Opera (Saggio sopra l’opera
in musica, 1755) for a centralizing, coordinating, standard-maintaining operatic
figure, another Palinurus who will ‘steer everything’, and declares that he would be
the equivalent to the ‘corago or aedile’ who had supervised the theatres in happier
times. Yet two decades later, when Planelli writes his Dell’opera in musica in 1772
with a view to forming and educating just such a figure—one who is especially
concerned to combat the creeping power of those impresarios (grasping fellows so
unlike the ‘respectable magistrates’ who ran theatre in the ancient world)—the
word corago never appears and he consistently refers to his ideal as il direttore,24
quite possibly deriving the term from the French court-connected directeurs at the
Opéra. After which (at a time when a person primarily dealing with the day-to-day
practicalities of operatic staging was coming to have some such title as regolatore di
scena, Regisseur des Schauspiels, metteur en scène, ‘stage manager’), any currency the
term choragus had outside classical studies seems to have been figurative, notably in
Britain, perhaps because of the existence since the 1620s of an office of choragus at
the University of Oxford: in that context a director of practical music-making
under the professor of music theory. But the word had its figurative uses on the
Continent too. Witness the nineteenth-century German architect Gottfried Sem-
per enthusing that in the ancient world it was the role of his art to be choragus to all
the others in order to ensure that they contributed harmoniously to the project in
hand, as a result of which ‘the [architectural] monument became the quintessence
of the arts’: an idea which can’t have been lost on Semper’s great friend Wagner,
then contemplating music’s role in his vision of the Gesamtkunstwerk.25

23 Lang (1975), 61.

24 Faustini: Glixon B. L. and Glixon J. E. (2006), ch. 3, esp. 62–3. Diderot and d’Alembert (1969),
1. 574 (¼ 3 (1753). 367), s.v. ‘Chorege’. Algarotti (1963), 151. Planelli (1981), 125–9, esp. 128.
25 Semper (1989), 52; and see Mallgrave (1996), 60.
14 Roger Savage

Still, actual choragi have occasionally appeared on the physical stage in the last
150 years. The leader and spokesman of the chorus-group that performed the
prologues to the many acts of the Bavarian Passion Play at Oberammergau in the
nineteenth century was known as its Choragus. Pietro Mascagni and Giovanni
Illica include the speaking part of Giocardo, ‘Impresario e Corago’, in their
commedia dell’arte opera The Masks (Le maschere, 1901), opening it with a scene
in which Giocardo in his corago-role calls a cast meeting to discuss the plot and
characters of the show to come: a homage to Perrucci perhaps, who recommends
such meetings in Rule 14 of the commedia section of his Dell’arte rappresentativa.
And a character named Choragus is not backward in coming forward in Harrison
Birtwistle and Stephen Pruslin’s opera Punch and Judy of 1968, where he is
chorus leader, presenter, narrator, confidant, props master, and twice a victim of
Mr Punch’s homicidal tendencies (though happily he comes back to life again
quite soon on both occasions).

III. CAVEA AND ORCHESTRA

The classicizing impulse that led to the evocation of ‘the music of the Greeks and
Romans’ in connection with the earliest operas and to the adoption of a Greco-
Latin word to characterize a man adept at staging them did not show itself at
once in the creation of opera houses drawing on the theatre designs of the ancient
world. Still, in a related musical field a few years earlier—and then much later in
connection with theatres for opera during periods of reform—there was a
concern to build practically on the example of antiquity. This above all involved
the auditorium’s reflecting the classical cavea, a stepped arrangement of seats
rising on a curved rake, rather like a substantial segment cut from a shallow bowl:
something that had been illustrated in such printed editions of Vitruvius’ De
Architectura as Cesare Cesariano’s (1521) and had been proposed for incorpor-
ation in modern theatre-construction as early as Sebastiano Serlio’s Second Book
of Architecture in 1545.
Thus when the Accademia Olimpica of Vicenza staged Orsatto Giustiniani’s
Italian version of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus in 1585, the show was notable not
only for the mise en scène of Ingegneri (its corago in all but name) and for the
classicizing chorus-settings by Andrea Gabrieli, who had been charged by the
Academicians with ensuring that the text was enunciated ‘distinctly’ and ‘clearly’,
but also for its being the inaugural production in the academy’s flamboyantly
classical theatre (Fig. 1.1), designed a few years earlier at the end of his career by
Andrea Palladio. Filippo Pigafetta, a first-night enthusiast who reported that the
Teatro Olimpico was built ‘in the ancient manner’, could see—as we still can—
that its auditorium comprised a steeply raked cavea of thirteen curved steps or
gradi, crowned above by a colonnaded gallery and centred below on a derivative
of the Greek choric dancing floor or orchestra, the whole facing a wide stage
 Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 15

Figure 1.1 Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza: design by Palladio (1580) with street-perspectives
added by Scamozzi, 1584.

backed with an elaborate permanent architectural feature, the frons scaenae, its
doors and grand central archway fitted out by Vincenzo Scamozzi in the years
after Palladio’s death with illusionistic street perspectives. The design in its
pristine Palladian state paid homage to the theatres of antiquity, theatres which
had commonly been planned on the grid of a circle, though the nature of the
Vicenzan site forced Palladio to squeeze his ideal circle into an ellipse. The line of
the ellipse’s maximum diameter marks the meeting of cavea plus orchestra with
the front of the stage, for in terms of Vitruvius’s treatise (V. vi–vii), the
Olimpico’s design is not Greek but Roman. Rather than the near-fully circular
floor of pre-Hellenistic theatres, its orchestra alludes elliptically to the semicircle
typical of Roman practice: a space envisaged by Vitruvius as being filled not with
a dancing chorus but with seated VIPs—as it was by ‘the ladies’ at that inaugural
performance of Edipo tiranno in 1585. Which means that the audience looked to
the stage not only for the play’s episodes—spoken ones, monody being as yet
unknown in Vicenza—but for its sung choruses too.26 Sophocles would have
been surprised.

26 See Gallo (1973) passim, esp. liv and 53–5; also Schrade (1960) for Gabrieli etc. For circularity
and semicircularity, see Wiles (2003), ch. 6.
16 Roger Savage
The Olimpico was a humanist academy-theatre and so had only a limited
impact on the design of those auditoria and stages for opera at seventeenth-
century Italian courts—temporarily erected in some cases, permanently set up in
others—whose influence would spread around the rest of Europe by the mid-
century, in the process generating new-fangled commercial opera houses, initially
and most famously in Venice: houses which followed the Venetian pre-operatic
theatrical model by incorporating boxes for the city’s nobility and other special
people.27 (These courtly auditoria and their commercial progeny tended to a
‘U’-shape rather than a semicircular one, in part so as to give stronger emphasis
to the prince’s seat at the base of the ‘U’; and the installation of boxes—as many
as five tiers by the time of the high baroque—tended to minimize any rake the
auditorium’s floor might have.) Still, the Olimpico and the Vitruvian ideas it
embodied did have their admirers. In distant London, for instance, theatre
designs by Inigo Jones, John Webb, and Christopher Wren show the influence
of the Vitruvian–Palladian ideal. True, these were not intended for opera, but
John Vanbrugh, heir to that ideal in his theatre architecture at least, did build a
commercial theatre in 1705, the Queen’s in the Haymarket, which was ear-
marked for opera as well as spoken drama and which quite soon became
exclusively a home for the former, became indeed London’s principal Italian
opera house for most of the eighteenth century. The building seems at first to
have been strikingly Vitruvian (Fig. 1.2). Its design, recent scholarship has
suggested, was based on a series of interlinked circles, the one that contained
the auditorium being articulated by dome-supporting columns and featuring a
semicircular cavea of pit-benches, gently raked and backed (where Vitruvius
would have placed a colonnade) by a single wall of boxes facing the scenic stage.
However, acoustic and other problems with the building soon led to its auditor-
ium being modified, in part to allow for the incorporation of boxes at the sides to
join those already at the back. So Vanbrugh’s singular humanist theatre became
something close to a standard baroque one, regressing to what had become the
norm of the pan-European opera house with its ‘U’-shaped or horseshoe-shaped
or bell-shaped auditorium and fairly flat floor: a norm which was largely
unchallenged until the middle of the eighteenth century and which lingered on
in some places long after that.28
From the 1750s onward, however, there were signs of a classicizing backlash.
Algarotti in the Saggio sopra l’opera of 1755, Enea Arnaldi (a champion of
Palladio from Vicenza) in his Idea di un teatro of 1762, Planelli in Dell’opera
in musica (1772) and George Saunders in his Treatise on Theatres (1790) all
celebrate the perfection of Greco-Roman theatre-building, especially its curv-
aceous auditoria and (in Saunders’ words) ‘the great elevation of the seats rising
their whole height above each other’. These features, they agree, are conducive to

27 Glixon and Glixon (2006), 17–23 and 295–304.

28 Jones etc.: Leacroft (1973), 65–98; Orrell (1988), 119–85. Vanbrugh: Barlow (1989), passim.
 Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 17

Figure 1.2 Reconstruction by G. F. Barlow of Vanbrugh’s Queen’s Theatre, London as

at 1705: Barlow (1989), 519. Reproduced by permission of the Editor of Early Music and
the Estate of G. F. Barlow.
good sightlines and fine operatic acoustics, and although they allow that there are
some seemingly irreversible modern developments—instrumentalists at the front
of the pit, boxes around the walls, a wide proscenium arch downstage—that are
likely to put a brake on headlong neoclassicism, they urge that the great classical
precursors should become precedents and their principles be adopted in the
building of new theatres, so as to make these—Saunders again—‘the most
analogous to the antique that it is possible for our arrangements to permit’.
Advanced theatre-practice follows their lead.29 At Besançon in 1784 Claude-
Nicolas Ledoux sets up a semicircular auditorium with something of a cavea-
rake. Semicircularity also reigns in Étienne-Louis Boullée’s huge, visionary, never
realized ‘Projet d’Opéra’ for Paris in 1781 and equally in the tiny court theatre
for opéra-comique and spoken drama devised in the late eighteenth century to fit
into one of the circular medieval towers of Gripsholm Castle in Sweden, where it
can still be seen. In its final form as designed by Erik Palmstedt in 1781–4

29 Algarotti (1963), 187–8. Arnaldi (1762), 4–13. Planelli (1981), 105–8. Saunders (1790), 51
and 87. For theatre practice, see Forsyth (1985), 108–19.
18 Roger Savage

Figure 1.3 Gripsholm Castle, Sweden: theatre by Erik Palmstedt (1784).

(Fig. 1.3), the Gripsholm auditorium features quite steeply raked semicircular
gradi which seat about 100 people. But as in all these eighteenth-century theatres,
the audience faces not a semi-abstract architectural frons scaenae like Palladio’s at
Vicenza but a wide baroque-rococo scenic stage fitted with the standard illusion-
istic paraphernalia and fronted by a space set aside for the theatre band.30
Alluring classical precedents and pressing modern concerns combine again
sixty years later in the fertile conversations between Gottfried Semper and
Richard Wagner, first at Dresden in the 1840s and later at Zürich and Munich.
Wagner had been struck in his operatic wander-years from 1833 to 1839 by the
very occasional theatre in which a steeply raked auditorium, a semi-sunken
musicians’ pit or a restriction of the number of side-boxes gave the audience as
a whole a better chance of seeing the scene-stage clearly, saved it from being
distracted by the band’s having too distinct a presence (visually, acoustically), and
allowed it to feel like a socially united entity. These fine features suggested to the

30 Mattsson (1991), 104–19 and 138–45.

 Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 19
composer that an overall reform of physical theatre was possible, and since he was
becoming more and more taken with the connections he saw between ancient
Greek tragic drama and his ‘music drama of the future’, a ‘Greek’ solution to the
problem of bringing such reform about would have appealed to him. As for
Semper, his own Wanderjahre in the early 1830s had taken him to Italy and
Greece, where he had seen and—keen archaeologist and erudite theatre historian
that he was—stored up memories of theatrical sites such as those at Pompeii and
Epidauros (treading gingerly through the aftermath of the Greek War of Inde-
pendence to see the latter). Returning, he made his mark with the Hoftheater at
Dresden, finished in 1841 and extending the classicizing tradition with its use of
a semicircular outer wall which expressed the shape of the auditorium within.
But heavier with future significance perhaps was his project for a full-fig Roman
theatre—elaborate frons scaenae and all—to be built in one of the transepts of
Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace when it was re-erected at Sydenham in south
London after the Great Exhibition of 1851.31
Though the idea came to nothing, Semper held on to his plans, coming back
to them a few years later when Wagner and his wayward patron King Ludwig II
of Bavaria called him to Munich to build a very grand opera house there for
the premiere staging in 1867 (or so it was hoped) of The Ring of the Nibelung.
Ideas were to be tried out in a temporary theatre within Munich’s Glaspalast
(a derivative of the Crystal Palace); and in Semper’s plans for this we can see him
adding a sunken pit for the band to the Sydenham scheme and rethinking its
frons scaenae so that it could become the picture frame for an extensive receding
Wagnerian scene-stage. It was from these amended plans, also unrealized, that
the design for Ludwig’s mighty Wagner Theatre proper was developed. This
reduced the cavea-area from the full 180-degree semicircle of the Crystal and
Glass Palace designs to a fanlike segment of close on 100 degrees. Semper’s
guiding concept, he said, was governed by two specifications:
(i) Complete separation of the ideal world on the stage from the reality represented by the
audience. (ii) In accordance with this separation, the orchestra [i.e. Wagner’s instrumen-
talists] to be unseen, perceptible only to the ear. . . . The only way to conceal the orchestra
from every member of the audience, without placing it so low beneath the floor of the
auditorium and the stage as to impair [co-ordination with the latter] is to model the
auditorium on the ancient Greek and Roman pattern with rows of seating rising step by
step (cavea), and to abandon altogether the modern convention of vertical tiers of boxes.32
Semper’s coup, plotted probably in connivance with the composer, was to house the
instrumentalists in the area of the ancient orchestra, reconfiguring this as a flight of
broad, steeply plunging gradi screened off from the auditorium and spreading into a

31 Wagner: Baker (1998), 242–4; and see Borchmeyer (1991), 59–72. Semper: Mallgrave
(1996), 38–53, 117–29, 215–16 etc.
32 Barth (1975), 206. For Munich (and Bayreuth subsequently), see Mallgrave (1996), 251–67;
Forsyth (1985), 179–92; Baker (1998), 258–69.
20 Roger Savage

Figure 1.4 Festspielhaus, Bayreuth (1876), by Wagner and Brückwald.

further space created by building a ‘double proscenium’: one arch at the front of the
audience’s cavea and the other further back at the front of the scenic stage.
This Munich house of Semper’s was destined to be the grandest opera house
never built; but Wagner carried the ideas that he and his architect had worked
out for it to Bayreuth, where in 1872–75, with Otto Brückwald, he did finally
build his still-standing Festspielhaus (Fig. 1.4). There the cavea-segment facing
the Semperesque double proscenium was further reduced to about 60 degrees of
the implied circle centred a few feet back from the mid-front of the stage, and the
quasi-Greek orchestra was further extended under the stage itself to house (and
intentionally to mute) a full symphony orchestra. Wagner gave his reasons during
his speech at the laying of the foundation stone:
 Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 21
The orchestra had to be placed . . . at a depth such that the spectator could look directly over
the top of it to the stage; [ . . . and] the only way to place the seats was in rows climbing in
regular steps. [ . . . The] system of tiers of boxes was thus ruled out. . . . And so the arrange-
ments of our seating took on the character of the amphitheatre of ancient Greece, except that
there could be no question of the amphitheatre’s extending itself so far round on both sides as
to form a semicircle or even greater segment, because while spectators in the Greek theatre
directed their gaze on the chorus in the orchestra that was thus almost entirely surrounded,
the object of the spectators’ vision in our theatre is the stage. . . . As soon as he has taken his
seat, the spectator finds himself quite truly in a ‘theatron’, . . . while the music rising ghostlike
from the ‘mystic abyss’, like the vapours arising beneath the seat of Pythia from the holy
womb of Gaia, transports him into that visionary rapture in which the scene spread before
him now becomes the truest image of life itself.33
As Houston Stewart Chamberlain, one of Wagner’s most fervent apologists, put
it in the 1890s, ‘however different the technical demands of modern art are from
those of the time of Sophocles, everyone who enters the festival house feels the
summer breath of Greek art playing around him, [though] here is no mechanical
restoration of things long past; it is spiritual rebirth of that which is old and yet
eternally young.’34
The Festspielhaus soon had descendants and derivatives of its own: a few in bricks
and mortar, like the Prinzregenten Theater designed by Max Littmann at Munich
in 1900 and the Künstlertheater by Littmann and Georg Fuchs that opened there
seven years later—and a few in vision. The poet W. B. Yeats, for instance, enjoying a
Shakespeare season at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1901, felt nevertheless that the old
Memorial Theatre’s interior needed remaking in ‘the shape of a half-closed fan, like
Wagner’s theatre’; and the librettist and animateur Reginald Buckley tried with no
success in the early 1910s to get the Stratford theatre entirely replaced by a
Bayreuth-type house with classical portico added and with Teutonic and ‘Anglo-
Celtic’ opera staged alongside Shakespeare. Later he collaborated with the architect
Stanley Adshead in planning just such a building for the Glastonbury Festival he was
helping to found, though the sad coincidence of the first Festival’s opening within a
day of the declaration of the Great War led to the project’s being abandoned.35

IV. CHORIC ODE—INTERMEDIO—ACT

TUNE—ZWISCHENSPIEL

With its orchestra taken away from it, did the Greek chorus have any significant
place in the development of opera? It was certainly much discussed in the late
Renaissance,36 and as we have seen, at least one attempt was made in the

33 Barth (1975), 221–2. 34 Chamberlain (1900), 370.

35 Yeats (1924), 117–35. Buckley (1911), 119–32. Adshead: see Hurd (1993), 65–8. For further
developments along this line, see e.g. Breton (1989), esp. 6–13 and 106–17.
36 See e.g. Palisca (1989), 140–51.
22 Roger Savage
non-operatic music-theatre of the period to give a re-creation of it something
apt and affecting to sing: the settings by Andrea Gabrieli of four of the odes in
Giustiniani’s Edipo tiranno of 1585.37 But in opera the chorus of antiquity
wasn’t a strong presence for at least a century and a half, and then only fitfully.
That is not to say that, from the beginnings to the mid-seventeenth century in
Italy and later in other parts of Europe, operas did not field choruses on
occasion, but rather that these tended to function differently from the Greek.
Their ancestry lay more in the Renaissance’s own dramatic intermedii, pastoral
tragicomedies, court ballets, and masques.38 True, Ottavio Rinuccini had
looked to the ancient chorus in his pioneering librettos; thus the anonymous
nymphs and shepherds of his Dafne are constant in their presence and sym-
pathy, and the attendant fisherfolk in Arianna even rise to something of a
classical kommos by interspersing the heroine’s lament with their expressions of
concern, which reflects the hope Rinuccini expresses in his prologue to the
opera that the audience may ‘admire the ancient honour of the Argive stage in
[these] new songs’. But it wasn’t a line much followed. Most operatic chorus-
groups did not, once they had entered, stay on stage in the one character till the
bitter end in the antique manner but came and went as the twists of the plot
dictated; and besides, they might be rustics in one scene and infernal spirits in
the next, fairies and then fairground folk, satyrs then soldiers. Partly perhaps
because they were making relatively brief appearances, they tended too to
foreground their picturesque or grotesque characteristics rather than take the
reflective, philosophizing stance that could characterize Greek tragic choruses.
Librettists and composers did manage sometimes to achieve that stance in
passing. It would be hard, for instance, to avoid an adjective like ‘Sophoclean’
for the fairly brief Spirits’ choruses about Orpheus’ experiences in Hades in
Acts III and IV of the Monteverdi/Striggio Favola d’Orfeo (‘Story of Orpheus’)
of 1607 or for the even briefer meditation of the courtier-chorus before the
queen’s lament and suicide in Henry Purcell and Nahum Tate’s Dido and
Aeneas of the 1680s. But these are exceptions that prove the rule: one spelt out
by Metastasio in his Abstract of the Poetics of Aristotle with respect to the
constant presence of a single choric group. Times have changed, he says,
since the ancient City Dionysia:
As a flower or fruit emerges from its covering, so the [Greek] drama emerged from the
bosom of the chorus, [ . . . and] it could never detach itself from that covering . . . because
the religious cult of Bacchus and his praises sung by the chorus formed the principal
object of the festivals. [ . . . But] our modern authors, lacking the excuse of superstition
and habit, would no longer be pardonable if, to parade their masterly (as they might

37 See Jason Geary, Ch. 3 in this volume.

38 For the first and second, see Grout (1963) passim; for choral variety, see Perrucci (1961),
153–5.
 Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 23
think) and rare erudition, they persisted in considering the permanent chorus as an
essential and principal part of the drama.39
Operatic choruses acting rather more consistently like Greek ones do return,
however, in works that, according to their lights, are fairly close adaptations of
Greek originals, notably the Gluck/Guillard Iphigénie en Tauride after Euripides’
Iphigenia among the Taurians of 1779, with its much-in-evidence sisterhood
of priestesses,40 and the Stravinsky/Cocteau ‘opera-oratorio’ Oedipus Rex after
Sophocles of 1927, where the assembled men of Thebes see all the stage action
and comment on much of it. And if after the Gluck the technique didn’t really
take on in the following decades, after the Stravinsky there are occasions when
the choral practice of antiquity does seem to be evoked throughout operas
unconcerned with classical myth, as when a chorus of ‘laughing children’
watch, comment on, and are never very far from the ritual action in Michael
Tippett’s Midsummer Marriage (1955)—Tippett gives them a high-profile par-
odos and exodos as well—or when in John Adams and Alice Goodman’s Death of
Klinghoffer (1991) a series of big choric odes frame and intersperse the presen-
tation of a very specific news-event so as to widen its resonance and significance.
However, a mutation of the choric tradition had taken place in the ancient
world which could be seen as leading eventually to a different but equally
remarkable development in opera. Paradoxically, this arose from the decline in
expressive importance of the choric ode in the Athens of the late fifth and fourth
centuries BC. After being central in different ways to the plays of dramatists like
Aeschylus and Aristophanes, the ode, though remaining structurally important,
made over time a less and less significant contribution to the argument and
import of a play, so that by the age of Menandrian comedy around 300 BC
a dramatist could content himself with providing an ode-cuing speech like ‘Here
come the revellers’ without feeling the need to give that revelling chorus anything
specific to sing or to integrate it further with the plot. This marks the beginning
of the ‘interlude’: an irruption of music (with or without song, with or without
dance) which maintains the energy of a play, allows the actors a chance to get
their collective breath back behind the scenes, covers the passing of time in the
plot, provides the dramatist with the means to distinguish the play’s ‘acts’ when
such things become a preoccupation—but adds little or nothing to its action
or ideas.
With the blessing of the admired tradition of New Comedy, such interludes
or intermedii became important in Italy in the late fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. Free-standing songs and courtly or characterful dances might serve
as entr’acte material, and out of such things grew the ‘dramatic intermedii’ we

39 Metastasio (1947), 2. 1059 and 1061, tr. Weiss (1982), 393. Cf. Carter and Szweykowski
(1994), 173. 40 Ewans (2007), 44–6.
24 Roger Savage
have encountered already: quite short, often mythological or allegorical pieces
which at sixteenth-century courts on festive occasions could be things of great
splendour—and could give ideas to the pioneers of opera. But the less grandiose
purely instrumental or vocal interlude kept its end up too. (For instance, it had
enough appeal to the academicians of Vicenza in the 1580s for them to consider
inserting ‘concerti di musica vocale ed instrumentale’ between the ‘acts’ of their
Edipo tiranno before deciding to stick instead with Sophocles’ own choruses.41)
The use of this simple type of interlude spread in the seventeenth century to
northern Europe, where, after something of a detour, it would have its own
impact on opera.
Fiddle music between the acts—‘act tunes’ in London theatre parlance—
became a particularly important element in the French and English theatre of
the later part of the century, but it was music which for decades had little
integration with the text of the spoken play. However, there were classicizing
theorists in Paris and London who found the modern act tune in spoken drama
embarrassingly unsatisfactory. Some argued that its total abolition and a return
to sung choruses à l’antique was the only way to give plays a proper unity, but
others felt that they had to find some way of living with the act tune since, as
Boileau put it in his Art poétique (3. 92), fiddles had irreversibly taken the
chorus’s place: ‘le violon tint lieu de choeur.’ To which the English dramatist
and critic John Dennis suggested a solution: accept this, but rethink inter-act
instrumental music so as to make it at one with the action and changing moods
of the drama. He worked his idea out with the composer John Eccles in the
prefatory material, script, and score for their Rinaldo and Armida of 1699. It was
a remarkable prefiguring in theory—the inter-act score itself is lost—of ‘inci-
dental music’ as it later flourished, and it embodied ideas which were reflected
and developed in the 1730s (quite possibly through direct influence) by the
German theatre composer and musical theorist Johann Adolph Scheibe in his
periodical Der Critische Musikus. Scheibe’s essay of 8 December 1739 on instru-
mental numbers specifically and sympathetically fashioned for new plays and
providing proper continuity between scenes is particularly important because in
1767 it would be quoted and given overall approval by Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing in his influential set of essays on theatre, the Hamburgische Dramatur-
gie.42 Lessing is explicit: ‘the orchestra in our dramas in a measure fills the place
of the ancient choruses’; so the entr’actes or Zwischenspiele the band plays have to
live up to the responsibility implied by that. There must be ‘suitable symphonies
to every play’.43 It is a view which seems to colour some at least of the
composition of such things in the Viennese ‘classical’ period, most momentously
in the case of Beethoven’s 1810 score—overture and songs but especially the four

41 Gallo (1973), lii. 42 For Dennis, Scheibe etc., see Savage (2002b), 144–59.
43 Lessing (1962), 70; cf. 70–7 (i.e. Nos. 26–7 of HD). For partial antecedents to such ideas in
the sixteenth century, see Sadie (2001), 12. 479–80.
 Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 25
entr’actes carefully cued into the play-script—for Goethe’s historical tragedy
Egmont.
It was the Egmont music that had an operatic significance. Wagner loved it
dearly. He had a lively distaste for the run of music in unreformed spoken
theatre, finding almost all of it trivial, intrusive, not integrated à la Lessing,
and anyway largely ignored by the audience; but he made a big exception for the
‘splendid’ Beethoven. In his youth it had been the first stimulus to his taking
composition lessons, as he wanted to write music like it for a callow play of his
own; in his maturity he conducted it (on one occasion complete, on two others in
part) at his concerts in Zürich.44 And its influence can surely be felt in his
pioneering of the orchestral interlude in opera, moving the audience’s imagin-
ation seamlessly, with no musical break, from one episode to the next during a
general stage-blackout or lowering of the curtain: from the big quintet in Hans
Sachs’s workshop to the arrival of the guilds at the St John’s Day meadow in the
last act of The Mastersingers, from the Rhine to Valhalla and Valhalla to
Nibelheim in Rhinegold. Here, as Lessing might have put it, the orchestra fills
the place of the ancient choruses in a measure; and there are parts of the Ring
where it attempts to fill it completely. As we have seen, Wagner is often happy to
link his ideas about progressive music-drama with instances of ancient Greek
achievement, and one of his ways of doing so is to compare the orchestra’s
reflective role during the dialogue scenes of his later operas with the chorus’s
role—and more particularly that of the coryphaeus—in antiquity. Indeed, he
thinks that if anything his orchestra is more Greek than the Greeks, since its
continuous eloquence beneath the action beats the occasional interjections of the
coryphaeus and his chorus members at their own game.45 From this it might seem
to follow that Wagner’s orchestra would never need to express itself in the
equivalent of a formal ‘ode’. Yet at the tragic climax of The Twilight of the
Gods there is such an ode: an orchestral movement explicitly marked Zwischen-
spiel in the full score and best known today as ‘Siegfried’s Funeral March’.
As Wagner put it to his wife Cosima:
I have composed a Greek chorus . . . but a chorus which will be sung, so to speak, by the
orchestra; after Siegfried’s death, while the scene is being changed, the Siegmund theme
will be played, as if the chorus is saying ‘This was his father’; then the sword motive; and
finally his own theme; then the curtain goes up. . . . How could words ever make the
impression that these solemn themes, in their new form, will evoke? Music always
expresses the direct present.46

44 Wagner, R. (1892–99), I. 4–5 and VII. 348–9; Wagner, R. (1911), 1. 36–7 and 2. 580;
Walton (2007), 178.
45 Wagner, R. (1892–99), 1. 32–3, 2. 335–6, 3. 338–9, 5. 306 etc.; see Borchmeyer (1991),
160–77 (and cf. 73–80). 46 Wagner, C. (1978–80), 1. 417–18.
26 Roger Savage

‘As if the chorus is saying . . . ’ It’s a fine blend of Wagner’s nineteenth-century

Hellenism with his extension of the Dennis–Eccles–Scheibe–Lessing–Beethoven
tradition, a tradition which had a Hellenic origin too.
After the Funeral March, and arguably as a result of it, the big symphonic
interlude in opera comes to flourish, for example in Debussy’s score for Mae-
terlinck’s Pelléas and Mélisande and Berg’s for Büchner’s Wozzeck. The interlude
in the Debussy after Mélisande is tormented by Golaud in the presence of King
Arkel and that in the Berg after Wozzeck is drowned beneath a blood-red moon
are especially choric in Wagner’s sense: ‘sung, so to speak, by the orchestra’. And
the tradition has gone on: one could instance Hindemith’s Mathis the Painter
after the death of Regina or the Richard Strauss/Clemens Krauss Capriccio before
the Countess’s final entrance. An anti-Wagnerian, modernist reaction has been in
evidence too. Thus in The Rape of Lucretia by Benjamin Britten and Ronald
Duncan, what in Wagnerian mode would have been a big orchestral interlude
depicting Tarquin’s ride to Rome—think of Siegfried’s to the Rhine—and an
even bigger one reflecting on the rape itself become respectively a narrative by
a single solo singer called the Male Chorus and a chorale in unison for just two
voices, Male Chorus joined by Female (choric figures that had been the invention
of André Obey in his source-play, Le viol de Lucrèce). The wheel has come almost
full circle—though for the monodic aulos-player of ancient Athens the formid-
able complexity of Britten’s instrumental accompaniment to the chorale would
be like something from another planet.

‘The melopoeia of the ancients’; the corago with his double life in Greek and Roman
theatre; the semicircular cavea; the choric ode as at least a structural element and
sometimes as much more: each of these can be seen hovering at some distance
behind things we now think of as important in operatic composition, performance-
organization, and architecture, though it might not occur to us to look for them
there unless we were specially alerted. Other more ‘classicizing’ ages were more
aware of such things, and it is not surprising that operatic developments citing
ancient precursors have tended to happen at times we might associate more
generally with classical revival. Thus opera itself as a through-sung favola in musica
and the corago as a figure equipped to service it came into being near the end of a
great age in Italy of classically influenced literary criticism and eager discussion of
the relations between ancient and modern music. The idea of the structural
equivalence of choric ode and act tune along with the urge to do something
reformative about it grew out of the classicist concerns of the bevy of intellectuals
under Louis XIV and of some English admirers of theirs. (The same bevy of savants
and the French tragedians they most admired were to influence the development of
the opera seria libretto too.) Enlightenment neoclassicism in the later part of the
eighteenth century lay behind the return to ideas of the cavea in books and on
building sites from the 1750s to the 1780s and to the invocation of the ancient
choragus as a guardian of theatrical probity in blueprints for the proper running
 Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 27
of modern opera houses. And nineteenth-century philhellenism in northern
Europe—‘the Tyranny of Greece over Germany’ (to borrow the title of
E. M. Butler’s ‘Study of the Influence of Greek Art and Poetry over the Great
German Writers’, 1935)—clearly fuelled Wagner’s obsession with the circumstan-
ces and achievement of Greek tragedy, manifested inter alia in his aligning the
chorus of antiquity with the modern symphony orchestra and his pioneering, arm-
in-arm with Semper, of the ideal of the cavea-segment for the operatic auditorium.
Classical renaissances didn’t stop there. The next phase of thought about the
ancient world to resonate influentially outwards and make an impact on opera was
that initiated by James Frazer in the 1890s with The Golden Bough and carried
forward by the so-called Cambridge Ritualists, especially Jane Ellen Harrison,
Gilbert Murray, and Francis Cornford: scholars eager to impregnate the study of
the arts, sports, and ceremonies of Greece with the period’s new archaeology,
anthropology, and sociology. Their joint study Themis of 1912 (masterminded
and largely written by Harrison) and Cornford’s Origin of Attic Comedy (1914)
celebrate the ritualized contest or agon which they see at the centre of Greek drama
and of athletics too, a seasonal rite of the triumph of the ‘new year spirit’ which is
reflected all over the agrarian world: in village games for instance, in primitive
dramas like the English Mummer’s Play, and in rough presentations of conflict
such as the traditional Punch and Judy Show. It may well be that Ralph Vaughan
Williams, who knew Murray and Cornford personally and who in 1909, at the
height of Ritualist activity, had written elaborate incidental music for a Cambridge
production in Greek of Aristophanes’ Wasps, called on the group’s ideas when
devising the plot for the ‘Romantic Ballad Opera’ he finished in vocal score in
1914, Hugh the Drover, with its mumming-play structure, Maying ceremony, and
agonistic prize-fight. It is certain that Michael Tippett drew on them when
working out the action thirty years later for The Midsummer Marriage, which he
described as ‘a mixture of pantomime, Aristophanic comedy (as conceived by
Cornford) and ritualism’, and which presents the triumph of summer fire and the
thwarting of the king of the old year: events witnessed by those choric ‘laughing
children’ between whose parodos and exodos there is a seasonal agon plus almost all
the other ritual building-blocks of Greek drama as identified speculatively in
Themis and the Origin (though if one didn’t know those books in depth one
might well not realize that that was what they were). And it is evident that Ritualist
ideas lie somewhere behind much of the work of Harrison Birtwistle, which
includes not only Tragoedia, a concert piece shaped by Greek choric conventions,
but several ritual operas: among them the ‘dramatic pastoral’ with Michael
Nyman, Down by the Greenwood Side (which incorporates a Mummer’s Play)
and the hyper-stylized, Tragoedia-related ‘tragical comedy or comical tragedy’
Punch and Judy with Stephen Pruslin (the opera with the resurrecting Choragus).47

47 Vaughan Williams: Savage (2002c), 392–9. Tippett: Kemp (1984), 224–30 and Tippett
(2005), 292. Birtwistle: Adlington (2000), 6–12, 16–17, etc.
28 Roger Savage
Tippett, like his mentor T. S. Eliot in the case of his own ‘Aristophanic
melodrama’ Sweeney Agonistes, acknowledged the influence of the Cambridge
Ritualists on the making of his libretto, though only in private correspondence
and one or two oblique public remarks,48 while Vaughan Williams and Birtwistle
seem to have stayed silent on the subject. In contrast, our earlier advocates of
operatic development, living at times in which connections with antiquity were
at a premium, are upfront and forthcoming about their having precursors in the
classical world. It’s something of an open question, however, whether they
treated the activities of those precursors as real precedents on which to build or
as pretexts for activities that were in fact largely innovative. Given the complex
ways of the working of the classical tradition in Renaissance and Enlightenment
Europe, a precedent–pretext distinction may actually be something of a blunt
instrument; but it does help to show how the four cases we have been looking at
differ in their uses of antiquity. Thus at one pole the summoning of the corago
can be seen as an adroit piece of sleight-of-hand: a manipulation of the classics so
as to come up with a plausible, well-meant pretext. The ancient world presents
the sixteenth century with a range of instances and definitions of choregos /choragus
and choregeion /choragium. Looking at these, at commentaries glossing them, at
humanist books of poetics and theatrics and at literary borrowings by such
writers as Erasmus, theatre people confect a serviceable, multi-skilled choragus /
corago: a seemingly classical figure who strictly speaking never was, but who could
be cited as a fine role-model for people entrusted with the staging of modern
sung and spoken drama. The central treatise on the subject, Il corago, gives the
game away when it allows that the figure of the corago in the book will be defined
‘perhaps more exaltedly and extensively than was ever the case among the
ancients’.49 He certainly is.
At the other pole, we are clearly dealing with real precedent in the recommen-
dation of the cavea to modern theatre-designers. The monuments were there;
plans of ancient theatres existed; Roman ruins could be visited and from around
the turn of the nineteenth century Greek ones too. Beyond their grandeur and
allure—Szymanowski captures these well in King Roger—the buildings had fine
acoustics and sightlines, but, apart from Semper in his Crystal Palace jeu d’esprit,
their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century champions didn’t have the production
of exact architectural facsimiles in mind. They acknowledged that, in adapting
those shapes to modern opera-house use, difficult issues to do with the placing of
instrumentalists, with theatre-boxes and with the taste for illusionistic scenery had
to be faced, accommodations made, and bold or cunning solutions found. Their
concern was simply that architects should build sensibly on sound precedent.
George Saunders articulates this nicely in 1790 when, mixing idealism and
realism, he commends designing theatres ‘the most analogous to the antique

48 Eliot: Crawford (1987), 161–6. Tippett (1959), 80–1; Tippett (2005), 292, 300–1, 363.
49 Savage and Sansone (1989), 499.
 Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 29
that it is possible for our arrangements to admit’: a phrase relevant also to the idea
of the instrumental interlude as the modern equivalent to the ancient choric ode.
Once the analogy between ode and act-tune had been drawn in the late seven-
teenth century, a remarkable process of analogy-enrichment began, rather as
though the history of the Greek chorus were being run backwards from Menander
to Aeschylus, so lending weight perhaps to Nietzsche’s view in The Birth of
Tragedy that his age was ‘experiencing the great epochs of Hellenism in reverse
order’.50 This meant that by the 1870s Wagner could claim that the last act of
The Twilight of the Gods would include a choric ode but that (as was right ‘for
our arrangements’, in Saunders’ phrase) it was purely for orchestra: something
very apt to the Age of the Symphonic Poem. Controversial analogy becomes
stimulating precedent.
And what are we to make of the pseudo-precedent of all-sung Greek and Latin
drama that fascinated certain humanists in the late sixteenth century? From the
evidence of the dedications and prefaces c.1600, the composers of the first operas
seem to have behaved scrupulously within the terms of the precedent they were
given. This appeared to come with good credentials and it provided an intri-
guing, possibly exciting stimulus, though the composers sensibly drew back from
claiming that what they wrote with it in mind was a simulacrum of actual ancient
Greek or Roman music-drama. The problem—if scholarly accuracy is one’s
criterion—is that the precedent was flawed. The theorists of the 1570s and ’80s,
devoted as they were to the idea of monody, assumed that the considerable body
of evidence from antiquity establishing that solo-actors sang proved that they did
so all the time. Still, if it doesn’t speak very well for their scholarly standards that
they failed to tease out the implications of the use of different metres in Greek
tragedy—failed even to attend properly to Aristotle’s words in the Poetics—this
was surely a felix culpa, since it enabled them to give Peri, Caccini, Cavalieri,
Gagliano, and Monteverdi an especially bright green light for some rather
important innovations and achievements.
But just as interesting as the factors that separate our four cases is the factor that
brings them together. They can all be seen as instances of calling on precursors
from antiquity in aid of a cause which can benefit from classical support but
which has an independent existence and validity. In the case of ancient melopoeia,
establishing that the music of the ancients was monodic was a great boost and
boon in the first and largely theoretical phase of late sixteenth-century Florence’s
preoccupation with pure melos, while in the second, practical phase—the writing
of favole in musica for a courtly audience—the card of connection with ancient
tragic practice was a telling one to play, as the nobility would have to sit up and
listen. In the case of the corago, opera, like Jesuit college drama, was a new form in
the early seventeenth century, and both of them needed to make a case and space
for themselves, and to deliver efficiently. It would help if they could promote

50 Nietzsche (1993), 95.

30 Roger Savage
a specialist skill, that of the ‘director’, with a professional name that had a classical
derivation of sorts: a name combining respectable authority from its Greek strain
with hands-on practicality from its Latin. With the cavea, its cult (which didn’t
impact directly on opera until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) can almost
always be seen as helping with needful reformation: a calling on classical prece-
dent, geometry, and acoustics partly to suggest that there are better performance
conditions for opera than can be delivered by the standard baroque ‘horseshoe in a
rectangular shoebox’ and partly to give opera a becoming seriousness, this latter
having its apogee in 1870s Bayreuth. (Wagner’s associations of his opera house
with the Theatre of Dionysus—‘which reared itself around the God’s altar’ and
which was a ‘broadening of the temple of the Gods to the assembled People’s
show-place of the highest human art’51—could help with the stand he needed to
take against the prima donna, the impresario, the chatter in the boxes.) And
similarly with the orchestral interlude as Greek chorus, first in spoken drama and
then in opera. The citing of a serious classical precursor and the setting of it up as a
point of departure helped defend theatre against charges of randomness, lack of
focus, and triviality, instead promoting integration, continuity, earnestness.
In each of these instances, then, the theatre of antiquity is brought in to aid a
good cause. And it is not accidental or even simply attributable to the long-
standing glamour of classical connection that it can do so. European opera and
Greco-Roman drama after all are both major manifestations of music-theatre in
the broadest sense. They ought to be able to help each other. The Abbé Vatry,
thinking about links between them in the 1720s in that paper on ‘The Perform-
ance of Ancient Tragedy’, makes a shrewd and nicely Dionysian point when he
observes that, though modern opera is often lacking in good sense, it does have
other virtues. The transforming presence of music, which ‘adds to the liberties
that poetry has a right to take’, enables it to provide an acceptable home for
things that would seem ridiculous in spoken drama: sheer fictions, the supernat-
ural, lengthy monologues, transports of passion. But these things are to be found
in the poetry of the ancient tragedies too. And what is it that enabled them to find
a home there? Why, song of course.52

51 Wagner, R. (1892–99), 1. 158–9. 52 Recueil (1717–48), 210–11.

 2
Greek Tragedy and Opera: Notes on
a Marriage Manqué*

Michele Napolitano

If the relationship between opera and classical mythology boasts an extensive

bibliography, the same cannot be said of the relationship between opera and
fifth-century Attic tragedy. This is not a coincidence, since on the whole the latter
has been much less fruitful than the former, despite the fact that the very origins
of opera as a genre can be traced back to a set of theoretical formulations that,
however misguidedly, established themselves as an attempt to recover the specific
qualities of ancient Greek tragedy and music. We must therefore ask ourselves
why things should have turned out this way; why, that is, a marriage that the
precursors and founding fathers of the genre proclaimed from the beginning as
necessary, should have revealed itself in large part to be a marriage manqué.
A second question renders the matter more complex: why, in contrast, is the story
of twentieth-century music drama so rich in musical adaptations of tragedies, or
groups of tragedies, written by the great Greek tragedians of the fifth century (not
only Sophocles and Euripides, but also Aeschylus)? What circumstances, in the
twentieth century, produced a situation finally capable of allowing the celebra-
tion of a union which in the three preceding centuries had borne only sporadic
and isolated fruits? In revisiting in brief the history of opera from this point of
view, the present chapter proposes to seek out an answer to these two underlying
questions, keeping firmly in mind not only (i) the distinction between the setting
to music of a specific Greek tragedy, reworked and adapted as appropriate, and
the adaptation of events and characters drawn from the classical mythological
heritage more generally, but also (and here we are talking about a more subtle
distinction, though no less important) (ii) the difference between operas that

* The present study is a completely revised version, with notes, of an earlier article (Napolitano,
2003). Here I should like to thank again Pierluigi Petrobelli, as well as the editors of the present
volume, to whose kindness I owe many valuable observations. I am also grateful to the staff of the
library of the Musikabteilung of the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rome where I have spent
many long hours working in conditions that can only be described as ideal. Finally thanks are due to
Dr Francesca Southerden for the English translation.
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the B.S.A.P. Colonel Baden-Powell retained one squadron of the
Protectorate Regiment as reserve under his own immediate control.
These arrangements were subsequently much augmented. After the
convent had been practically demolished by shell fire and the railway
line all round the town pulled up or mined during the close
investment by the Boers, the small work was erected at the convent
corner, garrisoned by the Cape Police and a Maxim, under Lieutenant
Murray, who was also put in charge of the armoured train, which
had, however, been withdrawn to the railway station out of harm's
way. The Railway Volunteers garrisoned the cemetery, and had an
advanced trench about eight hundred yards to the front and
immediately to the right of the line. To the westward came Fort
Cardigan, and then again Fort Miller. In the south-west was Major
Godley's fort, at the north of the native stadt, with an advance fort--
Fort Ayr--crowning the down to the northern end of the stadt.
Although this was rather detached, it commanded a view and fire for
a great distance to the south of the northern portion of the stadt,
and here the Cape Police were entrenched with the Maxim. Five
hundred yards to the west front of Captain Marsh's post lay
Limestone fort, commanding the valley, on the other side of which
lay the Boer laager and entrenchments. At the south-western corner,
and on the edge of the stadt Captain Marsh's fort was situated. The
whole of the edge of the stadt was furnished with loopholes and
trenches, and garrisoned by the native inhabitants. By the railway
were situated two armoured trucks with a Nordenfeldt. Cannon
Kopje, with two Maxims and a seven-pounder, lay to the south-east.
And now to the immediate defence of the town. At the south-
western corner is the pound, garrisoned by Cape Police, under
Captain Marsh; then eastwards Early's fort, Dixon's redan, Dall's fort,
Ellis's corner, with Maxim and Cape Police, under Captain Brown. On
the eastern front, Ellitson's kraal, Musson's fort, De Kock's fort, with
Maxim, recreation ground fort, and so back to the convent, on the
left of which lies the hospital fort--all these, unless otherwise
mentioned, garrisoned by Town Guard. These so-called forts are
garrisoned with from fifteen to forty men, and furnished with head
cover and bomb proofs against artillery. Bomb proofs have been
constructed everywhere, traverses erected at the end of streets,
trenches giving cover leading from every portion of the town and
defences; and it is possible to walk round the town without being
exposed to aimed fire. The trenches are constructed with a view to
being manned in case of need. Telephones are established in all the
headquarter bomb proofs of outlying forts, and are connected with
the headquarter bomb proof, thus securing instant communication
and avoiding the chance of orderlies being sniped, which would
assuredly otherwise be the case. These defences were all improvised
on the spot--every conceivable sort of material being utilized therein.
 23rd, Monday. Bombardment threatened, so commenced by
forestalling it. Two guns under Captain Williams, B.S.A.P., and
Lieutenant Murchison, Protectorate Regiment, started at 3 a.m., to
take up a position at our end of the waterworks and the rail head
temporary line, respectively, with orders not to fire unless fired on. I
rode out with them and saw as pretty an artillery duel in miniature
as one would wish to see. We waited patiently, Lieutenant Murchison
laid his gun on the enemy's seven-pounder, which we could distinctly
see in their trenches at the head of the waterworks. We were under
cover from view. At last a puff of smoke came from their gun, and
before it was well clear of the muzzle ours had answered, and that
gun was out of action for a considerable period. In the meantime,
both of our guns were playing gaily on their trenches and remaining
gun. This went on intermittently till mid-day, and then both their
guns ceased fire altogether. We then returned, and since heard that
their guns were rendered useless for some time. On the south-
western portion of the defences a similar seven-pounder fight was
going on, and the Boers then fired their twelve-pounder high velocity
gun a few times. Their ninety-four-pounder Creechy (an abbreviation
for Marguerite) or, as the men call her, Creaky, has arrived and taken
up a position at Jackall Tree, 3400 yards S.S.W. of Cannon Kopje,
accompanied by some field guns.
24th. Creaky commenced her ministrations by firing about forty
shells and damaged property but hurt no one. The convent of course
was hit, and the twelve-pounders also joined in the fire. Marvellous
escapes reported all round.
25th. Creaky began in real earnest, and also seven-pounders,
twelve-pounders, Maxims, and all. They fired about four hundred
shells, mostly in the direction of the convent hospital, trying, I fancy,
to hit the station. I was in the trenches in the recreation ground. The
convent was struck several times. Their shell fire seemed very noisy,
but its effect was more moral than physical, as casualties therefrom
were few; the musketry fire, however, did more damage. The
advance party down the Malmani road had a man hit badly (since
dead), young Kelly, Protectorate Regiment, and when a party went
out to fetch him, though obviously wounded, they were exposed to a
hail of bullets--for at least half a mile. I saw the lad in the hospital,
and his only anxiety was to get out and have another go at them. At
the same time on the other flank the Boers made an attack on the
native staff, hoping on the assurance of the Baralongs to obtain a
footing there; and then when they had got us thoroughly engaged
on the south-western face, their real attack was to have been made
from the north. The Baralongs, however, supplemented by two
squadrons of ours, greeted them with a heavy fire, killing many.
Consequently that attack on our face never came off.
27th. Shelling continued, and now, having beaten the enemy in
the field, Colonel Baden-Powell resolved to give them a taste of cold
steel, accordingly, at 8 p.m. D squadron, fifty-three strong, paraded
under Captain Fitzclarence, with two parties of the Cape Police in
support. It was a fine dark night, and the squadron moved off with
injunctions only to use the bayonet. The two parties of Cape Police
moved towards the brickfields, one considerably further east than
the other to enfilade the rear of the Boer trenches. The object of the
attack was some trenches of Commandant Louw's on our side of the
racecourse and to the north of the Malmani road (which runs due
east of the town to Malmani). It was a still night, and lying waiting
one could hear the order to charge, and then the din began. The
first trench was carried with a rush; the Boers lying under tarpaulins
did not hear the advance till they were almost on them. Sword and
bayonet did their work well, and with the flanking parties firing on
the rear trench, and the Boers commencing a heavy fire in all
directions and from all quarters, things for a time were very lively
indeed. It was estimated that six hundred Boers were in laager, so
after giving them a thorough dose of the bayonet, the signal to
retire was given by a loud whistle, and carried out in the same cool
and orderly manner as the advance. In the meantime a furious fire
was being maintained by the Boers all round; the volleys from the
Cape Police completed their confusion, and they kept on firing even
after the wounded had been dressed and placed in hospital.
Something frightened them again about 2 a.m., and they
recommenced their fusilade at nothing and continued it for about an
hour. Our losses were six killed, eleven wounded and two prisoners,
including Captain Fitzclarence and Lieutenant Swinburne slightly
wounded. We subsequently heard that the Boers lost one hundred--
forty killed by the bayonet, and sixty whom they had probably shot
themselves in the hideous confusion that reigned in their camp.
Captain Fitzclarence used his sword with good effect. The Cape
Police, who were under Lieutenant Murray, lost none. The attacking
squadron did not fire a shot, but in the rush to the second trench
the occupants probably shot their own men in the dark at close
range. This story later shows the terror the Boers here have of cold
steel. Our snipers were now close to the enemy's trench, and one of
the Boers, probably an artilleryman, waved his sword over the top,
whereupon one of his comrades was overheard to shout, "For God's
sake do not do that, or they will come with their bayonets."

FITZCLARENCE'S BAYONET CHARGE.

What I said about coolness and gallantry in the first fight

applies in even a greater degree to this encounter. The men were
admirably led and did splendidly. Our success so far was marked.
The Boers had been kept at a respectful distance from the town.
They never felt safe at night; they had been beaten at their own
game in the open, and we practically disregarded their vaunted
artillery, on which they had pinned their faith to reduce the town.
Daily the situation became more a question of endurance.
 28th. Ambulance, under a flag of truce, fetched in our dead.
Boers very surly. The dead were buried that night. Shell-fire and
sniping continued; little harm done.
29th, Sunday. Band, &c.
30th. Transferred my residence to the western portion to watch
the Boers moving to and fro on our western front, about two miles
out, sniping going on both sides all round. Desultory shell fire.
31st. Enemy's force occupied a position on the south-eastern
heights and from Jackall Tree three thousand four hundred yards
S.S.W. of Cannon Kopje, where they had erected earthworks, their
artillery pushed forward to within two thousand yards, and opened a
heavy fire on the kopje, commencing at 4.40 a.m., under cover of
which their infantry attack was pushed from the south-east to within
three hundred yards of the kopje, but was repelled by the B.S.A.P.,
fifty-seven strong, with two Maxims and a seven-pounder under
Colonel Walford. They attacked with great resolution, but our fire
was held till they came within good range, and then after sustaining
it for some time they broke and fled. Their ambulances came to pick
up the dead and, under their cover, many who had been playing
"possum" got up and ran for their lives. Our losses were six killed,
including Captain the Hon. D. H. Marsham and Captain Pechell,
K.R.R., and two sergeant-majors, five wounded severely. I may
perhaps be permitted to say a few words about personal friends. It
seemed as if it could not be true. In Captain Marsham's case, well
known as he was to the Boers, and popular as he was on both sides
of the border, the enemy will regret his death almost as deeply as
his comrades here did. Captain Pechell had a brother serving here as
a private in the Protectorate, who has since got his commission in
that regiment; an additional sympathy must be felt for his family and
regiment, as almost at the same time his brother in the same
regiment was killed in a Natal fight. I only voice the one feeling here
of personal sorrow for their loss and sympathy with their relations.
The Boers were well thrashed, and my previous description of
Cannon Kopje will enable readers to grasp what a thoroughly gallant
fight it was. The Boers must have lost very heavily. Later in the day
they attacked the southern end of the native stadt, in a half-hearted
manner, but it was not pushed home, and were easily driven off.
Both these fights were easily visible across the valley, with the
exception of the commencement of the Boer infantry advance, which
one could only gather from the continuous musketry fire. This night
we buried the dead, all the available officers in the garrison
attending.
November 1st. The enemy shelled Cannon Kopje again, and
galloped up from the south within about a mile, dismounted, and
made a show of attack, but were driven away. Shell fire and sniping.
2nd. Desultory shell fire and lots of sniping at horses watering,
five horses wounded. At about 10 p.m. Lieutenant Murchison shot
Mr. Parslow, Daily Chronicle representative, but as the matter is still
sub judice, comments or opinions are undesirable.
3rd. Heavy shelling and sniping. The Boers having occupied a
position in the brickfields, Captain Goodyear and the Cape Boys
attacked them and turned them out, during which Captain Goodyear
was unfortunately severely wounded in the leg.
Inquest this morning returned a verdict of wilful murder against
Lieutenant Murchison, who will be tried by Field General Court
Martial. Mr. Parslow's funeral took place to-night, attended by the
staff and many others; the other correspondents and myself carried
the coffin to the grave.
4th. Heavy shelling and sniping all round, eight horses shot. The
Boers having experienced the delights of the dynamite explosion,
now determine to repay us in our own coin. Loading a truck with
dynamite, they brought it up to the top of the incline on the railway,
which runs from the north down to Mafeking Station, meaning to run
it into the station and explode it in the town. In this amiable
intention they were foiled, as either owing to the rustiness or
roughness of the line, which had not been used for three weeks, to
the defective fuse, or some other unexplained cause, it blew up a
mile and a half out of town, and I trust assisted a few of them to the
other world. The curious part of the explosion was that everyone
insisted that a shell had burst exactly over the spot he happened to
be in, and it was not until next day that the occurrence was
explained.
5th. Sunday. Band, and celebrated Guy Fawkes day with
fireworks, first warning the enemy not to be alarmed.
6th. A smart bit of work on the part of the Boers. Their big gun
opened fire at 4.30 a.m., and after firing one shot they took her
round to the south-eastern heights, where they had erected a work
for her, and fired again within twelve hours; by the remote road they
preferred, it must have been more than four miles; two field guns
and a large escort accompanied her.
 RELICS.

7th. Rumours were rife as to the intended attack on the native

stadt this morning, but this pleasant attention was anticipated. At 3
a.m. Major Godley paraded with Captain Vernon's squadron,
Protectorate Regiment and mounted Bechuanaland Rifles under
Captain Cowan, with two seven-pounders and the Hotchkiss gun,
under Lieutenant Daniel, B.S.A.P., Captain Marsh's Squadron P.R.,
being held in readiness to support, if necessary, from the southern
portion of the stadt. And here it must be explained that due west the
Boers had established a laager with about two hundred and fifty
men, two twelve-pounders and a diabolical one-pound Maxim in
entrenchments, and daily shelled the stadt and western defences,
and that it was from this quarter that the attack was expected.
However, Major Godley took up a position within good range of the
laager, and as day broke the Boers were roused by the seven-
pounders and the Hotchkiss, supplemented by long range volleys.
The Boers broke to ward Cronje's large laager, about three or four
miles south-west of the stadt. I was watching operations from the
top of the B.S.A.P. fort, and the whole fight was clearly discernible in
its earlier stages, an admirable example of Boer tactics, as their
advance to their attacking position was across our western front,
though at safe distance from rifle fire. Within ten minutes of the
commencement of fire knots of Boers came galloping from the large
laager, in tens, twenties, twos and threes, anyhow, in fact, and
about half way they met the Boers who were retreating, who then
rallied and returned with them to the attack. They swept over the
ridge towards the north, and as they drew nearer were assailed by
long range volleys from Captain Marsh, and then the fight began.
There could not have been less than five hundred, personally I fancy
eight. Their guns were in full swing and firing wildly fortunately, for
the majority of the shells burst by the women's laager and the fort,
which did not seem logical, as we were not hurting them. Their one-
pound Maxim, however, was putting in good work. The object of the
sortie had been attained in drawing the attack where we wanted it,
and a gradual and slow retirement on the works commenced. Then,
unfortunately, one of our guns was temporarily disabled, but under a
very heavy fire was righted without any casualty, which was
miraculous, as the one-pounder had got the range and put shells
around it all the time, shooting off the heel of a man's boot and
bursting all around and among the men and horses. However, all got
under cover all right. Captain Vernon handled his men coolly and
well, and retiring by alternate troops they kept the enemy at bay.
The fire was very heavy, and but that the majority of the Boer firing
was wild, we should have lost heavily. Major Godley was shot
through the hat, slightly wounded in the hand, and his horse shot.
The Bechuanaland Rifles at their baptism of fire behaved steadily
and well, and Captain Cowan was well justified at his pride in his
men. The Boers attacked the entrenchments, advancing to within six
hundred yards of them, but were beaten off with loss. Working
round to the northern flank, however, they managed to account for
eleven horses and two men in about as many seconds, but the
undesirable attention of the stationary Maxim convinced them that
their presence was no longer necessary. It was very hot whilst it
lasted, and then to the looker-on came the welcome sight of first
one, then twos and threes, then larger bodies, cantering off in the
direction from which they had come, and then, the most welcome
sight of all, three large wagons flying the Red Cross flag coming to
pick up their casualties, showing that their loss must have been
heavy. Our loss, six men wounded, six horses killed, nine wounded,
and many cattle and donkeys in the vicinity of the forts killed and
wounded.
8th. Sniping and shelling and a new earthwork being
constructed by the Boers three thousand yards due north of the
B.S.A.P. fort, called Game Tree fort.
9th. The cheering news from Natal of three British victories has
arrived, great excitement prevails, and naturally--it is our first news
for nearly a month. Shelling and sniping of course goes on, and one
shell burst in Colonel Walford's stable, where three horses were
together, and killed the centre horse, thirty-one shrapnel bullets
being found in it. The others were untouched, as were also the men
all round.
 10th. Game Tree fort has begun with high velocity twelve-
pounders. These are pernicious guns. Old Creaky can be provided
for. She is carefully watched from everywhere--if she is pointed a bell
rings, when the smoke comes from her muzzle another bell rings,
and everybody goes to ground till the shell does (or does not) burst.
But these smokeless guns give no warning; the report and the shell
arrive simultaneously. Twenty-seven shells were fired in a very short
time round the fort, three burst in it, and one knocked a bucket from
a nigger. But when they had got the range accurately the Boers
desisted. Their artillery tactics are marvellous. They fire in a casual
way at any thing; if they get the range accurately they seem
satisfied, and begin to shoot at something else. They keep on
shooting for some time and unexpectedly stop; then just as vaguely
begin again, with apparently no ulterior object, but general
annoyance. One thing only is certain, that from 4.30 to 5 a.m.
Creaky will fire a round or two, and probably stop till after breakfast,
and that from 8.30 to 9 p.m. she has never missed her farewell shot.
11th. Shelling all day, sniping getting really lively.
12th. News of Colonel Plumer's column. We were all grieved to
hear of poor Blackburne's death.
13th. Slight shell fire, very quiet all round.
14th. Sniping and shelling rather lively, to compensate for
yesterday.
15th. Very quiet. Heavy rain during the night; the Boers
entrenching themselves towards the brickfields. An American
despatch rider of Reuter's, Mr. Pearson, arrived, having ridden from
south of Kimberley--a great performance.
 16th. Heavy thunderstorm and rain; shelling and sniping all
round.
17th. Shelling and sniping. The big gun again shifted rather
farther back. Mr. Pearson started on his adventurous ride back to
Cape Town. I wish him every success.
18th. To-day is the beginning of the end, I hope. Cronje's laager
to the south-west is breaking up and trekking south. All squadrons
have been warned to be in readiness to start at once, and we hope
our turn is coming at last, but General Cronje is capable of any ruse
to draw us out and endeavour to overwhelm us in the open. They do
not forget to leave us Creaky, who gave us a heavy doing to-day;
sniping is going on continually daily on our south-eastern and
eastern front.
At this point of the siege it is worth while to review the
situation. The Boers have been compelled to detach a large portion
of their force to the south, leaving, however, ample men to invest
the town. They have had four severe lessons and seem more
disinclined than ever to come to close quarters. They have, however,
entrenched themselves in suitable positions round the town, and it is
impossible to say at any given point what their strength might be.
Our strength is about nine hundred rifles, including all available
white men, and a sortie, even if successful, might seriously impair
our strength; whereas, as we are, we can hold the town, which is
our primary object. For a sortie at the most we could only hope for
two hundred to two hundred and fifty men, and the rapidity with
which the Boers concentrate, and their vast superiority in artillery,
would give them a very good chance of inflicting a defeat, which
might be ruinous. No! their shell and musketry fire is annoying, but
with the precautions that have been taken they cannot inflict
sufficient damage to compel surrender. Thus, the whole thing
resolves itself into a matter of "patience, our turn is coming soon."
For if we cannot get out, neither they nor three times their number
can get in.
From this time on till the beginning of December it may be as
well to explain the situation in advance. The fighting on the western
and southern fronts had almost ceased, but the Boer entrenchments
were occupied by picquets, who indulged in occasional sniping, and
it was unknown how many were in the rear of them. The fort to the
north, Game Tree fort, was armed with a five-pounder gun, and was
occupied fairly strongly, and between that and the waterworks was
another trench, occupied by the Boers, from which they were
eventually ousted by the fire of the Bechuanaland Rifles. To our
eastern front lay the trench by the race-course, strongly held; and
south of that in front of McMullen's farm (the Boer main laager), a
trench about thirteen hundred yards from the town. There are four
or five brick-kilns about eleven to twelve hundred yards from the
town, running in a diagonal direction from the trench down towards
the Molopo, and it was about here that the continuous skirmishing
took place; our works being pushed out to meet theirs from the bed
of the river, which was connected with the town by a trench running
due south from Ellis's corner, past the old Dutch church. Their guns
were admirably placed for raking the town, stadt, and defences on
the south-eastern heights, about three thousand yards from the
town. To the south of the river the Cape boys occupied a trench,
near the eastern end of location, and about two thousand yards
from the enemy's big gun.
 19th, Sunday. Band and calls. Laager, to the north-east at Signal
Hill, trekking eastward.
20th to 23rd. Daily shelling and sniping. Captain Sandford
moved the Boers and the seven-pounders from the western
entrenchments. One of these guns they now abandoned with the
exception of a picquet.
24th. Shelling and sniping; the B.S.A.P. fort came in for most of
it; two men wounded.
26th, Sunday. We had our first game of polo, a concert, and a
football match. Church in the evening.
27th. An advanced trench had been constructed in the river
bed, six hundred yards from the Boer trench, and fourteen hundred
yards from the big gun: Lord Charles Bentinck occupied it after dark.
28th. The big gun was harassed by volleys all day, and did not
fire much, a lively skirmish going on at intervals throughout the day
on the eastern front, Maxims, guns and rifles; Cape Boys partaking
from the south of the Molopo. Fitzclarence relieved Lord Charles
Bentinck this evening. The Boers vacated the brick-kilns after the
firing had been going on for some time.
29th. The long-range volleys have undoubtedly had good effect.
The big gun cocked up her nose and fired two rounds wildly this
morning. On the eastern front was a crowd with telescopes and field
glasses, laughing at the gunners, who could plainly be seen dodging
about, and making many futile efforts to get off their piece safely
somehow. Ellis's corner, Fitzclarence's squadron, the Cape Boys in
the river bed and in the trench, volleyed him directly old Creaky's
muzzle was elevated. The enemy could not find out where the fire
came from, and fired their smaller guns and one-pound Maxim, on
chance, all about the place, but did no harm. Creaky only got off
three rounds to-day. When the Boers in the trench tried to join in,
the Maxim at Ellis's corner was turned on to them; while the Maxim
from De Kock's fort paid a similar attention to the race-course
trenches. The Boers in the north-west also shelled to-day. Lord
Charles Bentinck relieved Fitzclarence after dark.
30th. This was the hottest day's firing we have had for some
time. At 3 a.m. a heavy fire commenced all round. The Boers had
been annoyed by our native snipers in the river and brickfields, and
commenced firing so-called volleys from their trench in the direction
of the river bed. The Cape Boys and the squadron fired on the big
gun and Ellis's corner fired on the Boers. Our Hotchkiss also fired,
but the seven-pounder gun, concealed in the bed of the river, did
not fire, but awaited developments, as its position was still unknown
to the enemy; this went on with short intervals all day, but an hour
and an half before sundown began a most furious fusillade all round.
Creaky, who had now been furnished with cover for her gunners,
joined in the fray, and for over an hour heavy firing was incessant,
and a very pretty fight followed. In all this firing on the south-
eastern corner the bullets drop in the town, and the market square
and surrounding streets are no places for a contemplative stroll at
these times. The other day, during a game of football, a ninety-four-
pound shell passed through the players and burst in the town house,
in the centre of the square, but marvellous to relate, none were
injured though the interior of the town house has disappeared. To
return to the skirmish, after a vast expenditure of ammunition our
casualties were nil; I trust the enemy's were heavy. In a Transvaal
paper, dated December 2nd, they confessed to several being slightly
wounded lately by our continuous fire.
December 1st. To check an undesirable expenditure of
ammunition, Colonel Baden-Powell detailed an officer, Mr. Greenfield
and six men to accompany the Cape Boys (who invariably opened
the ball) up the river bed with orders not to fire unless sure of killing
some one, because, though they thoroughly enjoyed themselves
yesterday they got through an enormous quantity of powder and
shot. These Cape Boys are good men, fair shots, very brave, and
have accounted for quite a large number of Boers while out sniping.
In consequence of these orders sniping resumed its old condition,
and not many volleys were fired. Creaky, in consequence, fired
rather more.
2nd. The fire of the Bechuanaland Rifles drove the Boers from
their advanced trench to the north-east, which they had occupied,
but subsequently abandoned and destroyed, as it was too advanced.
But another trench was constructed midway between this trench and
our own advanced trench. Four railway men out sniping towards
Game Tree fort, came upon the niggers the Boers had posted in
advance of that earthwork, and shot one, the rest fled. The Boers
swarmed into the trench and their commander was heard to order
some men to go and cut the party off. Sharp came the answer, "No,
the rooineks are attacking in force." Eventually, after crawling a
thousand yards under fire, the party got off safely, having accounted
for two Boers.
3rd, Sunday. As our parties were digging late Saturday night
and early this morning in the vicinity of the Boer trenches the Boers
sent in a flag this morning to ask if we meant to fight on Sunday. We
sent back to say no. I rode round the western outpost from the
outside and was much struck by the admirable way Major Godley
had laid out the trenches; they were practically impregnable. I also
went up to Cannon Kopje which, with infinite difficulty, has been
much strengthened daily, or, I should say, nightly. We then had
sports, tilting at the ring, tent-pegging, &c., two pony races, and a
polo match, and all the rank and fashion of Mafeking assembled to
partake of Colonel Hore's and the Protectorate Regiment's
hospitality, and to "listen to the band." The only thing that has been
thoroughly levelled in Mafeking is the Polo ground, which is very fair,
and the ponies surprisingly good. Practising polo, and mounted
sports, however, have been forbidden during week days, as it draws
so much fire. Indeed, Creaky elevated her muzzle once during the
afternoon, which caused a certain amount of sensation, as we do
not exactly trust our foes, and one shell in the crowd would have
secured a good bag. It was probably to show her to the Dutch ladies
who drive out to their camp on Sunday. These ladies have ceased
watching the effects of the shells on the town since long range
volleys began. Church in the evening. Sunday is indeed a welcome
fillip all round, particularly for the poor women and children, who are
confined to the laager all the week; eleven of the latter have died
since the commencement of the siege. There are services for all
denominations, every Sunday; but I think the evening ones are the
more plentifully attended.
4th. A quiet day; not much shelling or sniping.
5th. Shelling and sniping. A shell burst in Well's store, killing a
nigger outside (at least he died afterwards), close to me. The pieces
flew all about, and I had not time to analyse where they were
falling; they came too quick, but it was a pretty close shave; but
then there have been innumerable close shaves and marvellous little
damage done to life so far. The shell passed through the roof, just
below the look-out man, whom the shot threw into the air.
Fortunately it exploded in the next store, otherwise no doubt he
would have been blown to pieces. As I write two shells have just
exploded, one blowing a Kaffir to pieces and wrecking a chemist
shop, the other knocking over a white man, who is just being
removed to hospital; how much hurt I do not know. (I hear that he
was killed.) About 3 o'clock began the most tremendous rain, which
lasted for two hours, the market square became a lake, the streets
rivers, whilst our little Molopo developed at short notice into a raging
torrent. It swept away all impedimenta, wooden bridges, &c., at
once. The squadron in the river bed had to retire and Captain
Fitzclarence while endeavouring to cross was nearly drowned. The
seven-pounder was nearly washed away; the ammunition was. The
trenches and bomb proofs were full to the brim, many of them
proving to be in the beds of regular streams. Had the Boers known
or been able to seize their opportunity they might have made it very
nasty for us with shell fire, but as it was they were in a worse plight
than we were, as they had no dry cover for drying their clothes, and
could not replace them, and when they emerged from their trenches
our Maxims opened on them. The headquarters' staff set to work
and had everybody fairly comfortable by 7 o'clock. Natives were at
work bailing all night; dry clothes were given to those who had no
change, brandy and quinine served out to all the trenches, the men
sleeping in adjacent cover. Wagons fetched up the women from the
laager, and blankets were distributed to all who required them. As
usual all rose to the occasion, and having proved themselves under
fire now repeated the process under this onslaught from water.
Perhaps the people who were worst off were the B.S.A.P. at Cannon
Kopje. A wet night--their shelters flooded--and literally everything
they possessed carried away, except their blankets, arms and the
clothes they stood up in, and no shelter at all. However, take it all
round, the enemy were much worse off than we, which is always
consoling, and consequently being miserable, and having nothing to
do, they opened a lively fire on the town generally, lasting about half
an hour.
6th. Shelling and sniping as usual. It is their custom now to
begin in the evening about 4, keep it up till dark, and then fire
Creaky once from about 8.30 to 9 o'clock. Mr. Gerrans, town
councillor, was extracting the fuse of an exploded shell--result--he
was blown down and severely injured. His foreman, Green, had his
foot blown off, and a passer by, Smith, a Johannesburg refugee,
returning to his trench, was so injured that he died in an hour.
Everybody was much depressed by this; it seemed so sad that more
damage should be caused among the whites by an accident than
had hitherto been the result of six weeks' shelling by the enemy's
heavy gun. However, since artillery has been invented mankind will
tamper with loaded shells, in spite of all warnings, orders, or
entreaties to the contrary.
7th. Lady Sarah Wilson arrived this morning, having been
exchanged for Viljoen who had been sentenced to six months'
imprisonment before the war began. He, I fancy, will look fatter and
in better condition than his friends outside, and did not appear over
keen to join them. This plucky lady was received with loud cheers
when she entered the town; she has indeed had a bad time, and
everybody was greatly relieved to see her back safely, though
perhaps this is not quite the best place that I know of to have a villa
residence. As she drove up to her house the firing commenced
again--they did not waste much time. Heavy shelling continued after
dark. Three men killed, eight wounded.
Apropos of shells, I presume in the course of his life Colonel
Baden-Powell has had many curious communications, but certainly
none more curious than this one. The other morning a Kaffir picked
up an unexploded five-pound shell; when the fuse was unscrewed,
instead of a charge the following missive was found:--
"Mr. Baden-Powell,
Pleas excuse me for sending this iron messenger i have no other
to send at Present. He is rather exentric but vorgive him if he does
not behave well i wish to ask you not to let your men drink all the
whisky as i wish to have a drink when we all come to see you. cindly
tell Mrs. Dunkley that her mother and vamily are all quite well.
I remaijn, Yours trewly, a Republican."
I am afraid the ingenious gentleman in question will have to
wait a while for his whisky.
8th. Quiet all the morning; but this afternoon shell fire began,
killing one man, Protectorate Regiment, and wounding two. Creaky
only fired one round, our snipers keeping her quiet; but sniping all
round made things pretty lively.
9th. Pretty quiet; not much shell fire in the morning, but began
in the evening, and pretty smart sniping continued all day. I must
now endeavour to describe the hospital arrangements, and the noble
work done by the ladies of Mafeking. The hospital arrangements for
the defence of the town were made under the supervision of Dr.
Haves, Major Anderson, R.A.M.C., and Surgeon Holmden assisting
him; Major Anderson being attached to the Protectorate Regiment,
which might have been moved at any time. In addition to being
under a hot fire the whole of the first fight, he accompanied the
ambulance to Cannon Kopje, during the fight there. Bullets whistled
round the Red Cross the whole way there and round the stretchers
(which he assisted to carry) on their return to the shelter of the
railway embankment. There may have been some excuse for firing
on the Red Cross during the first fight, on the second occasion there
can have been none; probably the Boers considered that we adopted
the same practice as themselves and brought up our ammunition in
ambulances. Whether this is a valid excuse or not, I will leave my
readers to decide. The Red Cross flag, at the commencement of the
siege floated over the railway embankment, the first dressing
station, the refugee camp dressing station, the women's laager,
Messrs. Weil's (who had placed their house at the disposal of the
authorities for the use of the wounded), the convent, which is fitted
up as a hospital, and the Victoria Hospital. General Cronje stated,
and with some show of reason, that he could only recognize one
hospital, and the women's laager. However, prior to this, he had sent
many shells through the convent, possibly from its being a two-
storied building and naturally a conspicuous mark. Consequently
Victoria Hospital, always the main hospital, became the only one
used throughout the operations. Dr. Haves was the P.M.O., Miss Hill
the matron; and here, on behalf of the garrison of Mafeking, I must
endeavour to convey our feelings of deep gratitude and admiration
for the work done by this lady, the nurses, and their assistants (the
ladies of Mafeking) during the siege. I can testify personally to their
devoted care and attention to patients, and Britain may well be
proud of them. One ninety-four pounder went through the hospital,
wrecking a ward and killing a little native boy. Shells fell all round it,
and bullets were continually hitting it, one, indeed, wounded an
already wounded man, but these ladies continued their work
undisturbed, assisted to the utmost by the sisters from the adjacent
convent, situated some fifty yards away. These poor ladies having
had to abandon their home (which was literally wrecked, and will
have to be entirely rebuilt), had to take refuge in a dug-out by the
hospital. The hospital arrangements and the attention of Dr. Haves,
Major Anderson, and Surgeon Holmden (who was himself sick in the
hospital), were beyond all praise. Fortunately the accommodation
was adequate, an additional building being erected for Kaffirs. But
these for the most part preferred being treated and returning to
their own abode. They appear nearly insensible to pain.
To give a few instances, one native was shot with a Martini
bullet through the lung; he roared with laughter when it was
extracted, and will not part with it for anything, and is now all right.
A Zulu wounded in the toe, on seeing a man's temperature being
taken, when given the thermometer, placed it between his toes, and
on being told to put it in his mouth, said he was not hurt in the
mouth, but in the foot. Another native was shot through the head
with a Mauser and lived; so, indeed, did a railway volunteer, Nelson;
the bullet went clean through his head, and he is well and out of
hospital. But the natives, though suffering from horrible injuries,
seem to regard them lightly. Most of the native wounded are by
shells; they are very careless, but I fancy the numerous casualties
are making them more cautious. The unfortunate man killed
yesterday was a man named Footman, of the Protectorate Regiment,
who was in a room singing a song, "Poor old Joe has gone to rest,"
to the accompaniment of a banjo, when the shell burst on him, and
literally blew him to pieces--two more men were slightly injured, and
a chaff-cutter knocked to pieces; but the remainder were
providentially untouched. The worst of sniping is that it consumes
such a lot of the ammunition which we may eventually require,
though it certainly has a quietening effect upon the enemy's artillery;
but I cannot believe the Boers will abandon this place without one
more serious attack, when they hear of the advance of our troops,
and the remnants of other commandoes join them. They must have
one tangible proof of success. So far, beyond doubt, the prolonged
defence of Mafeking has resulted in the natives either keeping quiet
or rising on our side, whereas had the Boers been successful in
these parts, the natives must have perforce sided with them, as their
emissaries had strained every nerve to induce them to do, prior to
the war. I sincerely trust that the penalties of treason will be rigidly
enforced, and that if not death, at least outlawry and confiscation
will be inflicted on the Colonial Dutch who have risen, for no man
has a right to a vote who has deliberately risen in British territory
and fought against Her Majesty. The Transvaal is another matter,
though they have raided our territory, burnt farms, and looted cattle
and annexed British Bechuanaland--that is a matter for settlement
by the Government and not for individuals to suffer. If the Boers are
well thrashed, and they have fought well, the two nationalities will
soon settle down together. But a Dutchman, or at least the lower
classes (which correspond, after all, to poor whites of America with
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