Athena Sings: Wagner and the Greeks (review)

Father Owen Lee's survey of the influence that ancient Greek literature and culture had on the works of Richard Wagner first began in 1984 as a lecture to the Toronto Wagner Society. Now expanded into a brief monograph, Athena Sings: Wagner and the Greeks provides the general reader with an interesting and accessible introduction to its subject. As Lee states in his preface, his intention is to explore the discoveries of others rather than to break new ground himself, although the book does include several new observations. Most of Lee's argument will be familiar, however, to those who have read the previous studies of Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Michael Ewans, and Duane Roller.¹ Nevertheless, for readers whose knowledge of Wagner greatly surpasses their familiarity with Aeschylus, there will be many new perspectives to discover in Athena Sings: Wagner and the Greeks.

Two of the book's most remarkable strengths—its brevity and clarity—at times nearly become weaknesses, as the reader is led to desire more information than Lee tends to provide. At one point, for instance, the author expresses his support of a conclusion drawn by L. J. Rather "that if you really want to understand Wagner's [Ring] cycle you will read Sophocles' Oedipus—and to detail that would take another book the size of this one" (pp. 70-71).² Since Athena Sings: Wagner and the Greeks contains fewer than eighty pages of actual text (not counting the notes, index, chapter title pages, and music examples), a book twice the size of the current volume would certainly not have been overlong. Similarly, Lee's imaginative reconstruction of what it may have been like to attend the original production of Aeschylus's Oresteia in 458 B.C. may obscure how little we actually know about ancient performances of Greek tragedy. He includes such statements as "By 9:45 [ A.M.] the second play is starting—the Choephoroe or Libation Bearers" (p. 35), and he goes on to envision a performance interrupted by regular fifteen-minute intermissions and discussions of lit crit around the snack bar. Certainly, Wagner's own beliefs about what it must have been like to experience a drama in the Theater of Dionysus, even when they prove to have been little more than romantic illusions, helped shape his plans for the annual festival at Bayreuth. However, Lee's fanciful visions about Greek drama, consuming nearly a third of his brief text, are less likely to affect the reader's understanding of or appreciation for Wagner's works.

None of these admittedly minor reservations will likely, however, detract Lee's intended audience for very long. As the author notes in his preface, "In my first chapter, I try to convey to the Greekless reader what it might have been like to witness a performance of Aeschylus in Athens in the fifth century B.C. It was something Wagner himself undertook to do on several occasions, imagining a performance of the Oresteia in his mind, or reading its three parts to friends and providing his own commentary. I have chosen, like Wagner, to traverse the Oresteia and refer forward to the Ring" (pp. ix-x). As a result of this choice and in deference to his stated audience, Lee devotes much of the book's first chapter to an extended plot summary of the Oresteia. Lee's readers will thus learn, if they did not know it already, that Aeschylus made broad and complex use of animal images that develop and become redefined as the trilogy progresses; such images provide intriguing parallels to Wagner's own use of musical leitmotifs, a compositional technique they almost certainly inspired. Readers will also gain some understanding of the structural similarities between the Oresteia and the Ring (three long dramas plus one shorter work, although Aeschylus and Wagner differed in their placement of the shorter work) and various plot elements that connect the two cycles (the curse that extends over many generations, the way in...