"Greek Tragedy and Opera": An Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Seminar

There are few art forms whose birth is so well informed—and so well documented—as that of opera. In the later decades of the sixteenth century, a group of humanists who called themselves La Camerata weregathering regularly in Florence, as were so many other intellectual salons at that time, to discuss literature, art, and music. Among this particular assembly was one Vincenzo Galilei, an accomplished musical performer and theorist whose more scientific son would, decades later, shake the intellectual and spiritual landscape of Italy. During the 1570s and 1580s Galilei and the group's host, Count Giovanni Bardi, seem to have dominated the musical portion of La Camerata's discussions as a lively debate raged upon the "true" nature of Greek tragedy and especially upon the possible construction of its lost music. Fascinated with the expressive speech of ancient drama, the members of what we now know as the "Florentine Camerata" sought a way to set poetry to music so that its words would remain clear and unimpeded, yet be emphasized and supported by a flexible instrumental accompaniment. What they thus created is today called "recitative," and the dramme per musiche in which some of their associates employed it are traditionally honored as the first operas.¹ Iacopo Peri's Dafne (1595), a setting in Italian of the Apollo-Daphne myth (best known to the Florentine Camerata, and to modern readers as well, from Ov. Met. 1.452–567), is lost. But his Euridice (1599), with a libretto by the poet Ottavio Rinuccini, does survive, and it is here that the history of Western opera—and our new course on the operatic reception of Greek tragedy—begins.

In spring 2003, my co-instructor, Dr. Andrew Earle Simpson (Assistant Professor of Music), and I proposed the addition of a new interdisciplinary undergraduate seminar to The Catholic University of America's course listings for the following fall. "Greek Tragedy and Opera" sought to explore the integral connection between these two creative genres from the time of opera's origins down to the present day. The course began with a one-meeting study of the cultural position of fifth-century Athenian drama and its influence upon Roman literature such as Ovid's Metamorphoses and Vergil's Aeneid. The seminar then constantly revisited and expanded upon these concepts as it engaged in a historical survey of selected Italian, English, French, Russian, German, Greek, and American operas based upon the plots and concepts of Greek tragedy.² Our rather ambitious goal as instructors was that by the conclusion of the seminar our students would gain a good general knowledge of the literary structures and priorities of Greek tragedy, of the performance practices of some four hundred years of European and American opera, and of some of the intellectual and cultural influences that have governed the constant reinterpretation of ancient art forms in the Western world.

As we ourselves had just finished creating and staging a new opera, Agamemnon,³ based upon Aeschylus' tragedy (Simpson is Agamemnon's composer; I am its translator and librettist), at The Catholic University of America (hereafter CUA), we were in a uniquely appropriate position to offer this new seminar: we would be able to offer our students an experience-based perspective on both the literary and the musical aspects of operatic composition and performance. We therefore remain very grateful to our respective CUA divisions, the School of Music and the Department of Greek and Latin, for agreeing to host and register "Greek Tragedy and Opera" as a joint effort. The cross-listing of the seminar provided wider opportunities for the fulfillment of various degree requirements, and we therefore were able to enroll students from such diverse disciplines as history, elementary education, political science, and English, as well as from music and classics. Despite the lack of formal prerequisites other than sophomore standing (no foreign language or music-reading skills were required for entry into the seminar), the subject matter of the course appeared to generate a self-selecting membership. Nearly all of the students indicated on a paper survey conducted at the first class meeting...