The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater by Naomi A. Weiss (review)

Song culture was integral to Greek tragic performance since its earliest conception, but sometime in the fifth to fourth centuries bce, there was a musical revolution of sorts both on and off the stage. This "New Music"—to use a terminus technicus coined by modern critics—was characterized by multifaceted experimentations with traditional musical styles (such as innovations on modulation, diction, and instrumentation) and was associated in particular with the dithyramb and kitharodic songs. Scholars generally regard Euripides as a key pioneer, among other poets and musicians, ushering in this "new" musical era.

The Music of Tragedy, on the one hand, offers a "corrective" of the adjective "New," questioning whether innovation is as much a matter of "radical departure" (24), as it is a complex and creative engagement with culture and tradition. But the book is more than a rectification of terms and genealogies, unfolding a much broader conceptualization of what Greek mousikē (a term which encapsulates the triad of music, song, and dance) could and can do in a drama.

In order to reveal what mousikē can do, Weiss first rejects what Aristotle says it does not do in the plays of Euripides: participate in the action (Poetics 1456a). Modern studies of Euripides and New Music have further strengthened Aristotle's designation of Euripidean choreia (choral song and dance) as "interludes" (embolima [ibid.]), suggesting that the musical pieces are more a respite from the intensity of the action rather than an integral piece of the dramatic puzzle. Focusing on the intra-(versus extra)-dramatic (9) significance of the chorus, Weiss argues instead for an inextricable bond between mousikē and mythos (story/plot) in Euripidean tragedy. The connection between music and plot, moreover, is much more than a matter of integration: music, both performed and imagined, "intensifies, varies, extends, and at times even challenges the mythos" (235).

The book reveals the link between music and mythos through its own narrative of metamusicality—a key term and method of analysis for Weiss that captures moments in the dramas where "references to song and dance engage with live performance" (8). Chapter 1 lays out an overview of the conventions of metamusicality in the choral performances of archaic lyric and the earlier tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Long before Euripides, Greek choruses drew attention to their own performances and performativity through a technique that Weiss identifies throughout the book as "imaginative suggestion." With the mention of animals, objects, or gestures (23), choruses frequently invited viewers to imagine external images and sounds so as to merge imagination with live performance. Here, Weiss introduces the dynamics of vision and visualization as well as the "multilayered sound pictures" (34) that were integral to Greek choral performance, and which Euripides evokes in his later tragedies. Overall, the chapter is a crucial contribution to the cultural history of choral performance, complicating the widely accepted trajectory of innovation by showing how Euripides' metamusicality (a self-referentiality often linked with New Music) is profoundly indebted to tradition.

But Euripides is still doing something new, as Weiss reveals in case studies that comprise chapters 2–5, with each covering a play from the last fifteen years of the playwright's career: Electra, Trojan Women, Helen, and the posthumous Iphigenia in Aulis. What sets these plays apart is the intricacy of metamusicality within their choral songs. In other words, these four plays reveal a high level of self-awareness on the part of the chorus that they are, in fact, a chorus, one that is part of a much longer cultural tradition of both dramatic and nondramatic choruses. No summary can do justice to the meticulous and productive performance of close reading in these four chapters, which at the same time subtly engages with more contemporary performance theory (for example, Phelan, 1993; Roach, 1996; Batson, 2005; Foster, 2010). Throughout these chapters, the reader witnesses Euripides' intricate self-conscious engagement with mousikē that points to Weiss's claim that contrary...