Stephen Sondheim at 80 - BBC Prom concert

Not much scope for the classicist, it would appear, at the BBC promenade concert on 31st July 2010 celebrating the 80th birthday of Stephen Sondheim. To most, Sondheim is a composer of Broadway musicals featuring numbers like “Send in the Clowns”, “Broadway Baby” and “Side by Side by Side”. This view does not take full account of his highly varied output which stretches well beyond the popular stage musical to the Bergman-inspired “A Little Night Music” to the operatic “Sweeney Todd”, the Seurat-based “Sunday in the Park with George” and (for the classicist) versions of Aristophanes and Plautus. Sondheim’s version of Aristophanes’ “The Frogs” is best known for being first performed in the Yale University swimming pool with Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver in the chorus. It is not often performed although a CD exists, but the opening fanfare and “Instructions to the Audience” began the evening at the Proms. Simon Russell Beale and Daniel Evans formed a double act calling on the gods to look down on the actors (in both senses), and in a really Aristophanic way combined religious solemnity with informal addresses to the audience, telling us what not to do (sing along, clap in the wrong place, and so on) and particularly to switch off our mobile phones (not something Aristophanes had to worry about). The breezy dialogue and the deceptively simple music gave an idea of what kind of atmosphere might have been created by an Aristophanes comedy where action, song, dance and dialogue would have combined to give the overall effect, much more than the concentration on the text which some Aristophanic study seems to consist of. I have always thought that Aristophanes’ metrical ingenuity and variations greatly influenced W S Gilbert’s verse in the Savoy operas, and these have always been recognised as influencing the lyrics of American musicals. Is there scope for a study of the “Influence of Greek Comedy on the Broadway Musical”?

Then there is the case of Sondheim and Plautus. “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” is a conflation of several of Plautus’s usual plots involving a young man in love with a slave girl who turns out to be the free born daughter of the absent master who comes back to be told he cannot enter his own house because it is haunted (but really because the young man in inside with his girl-friend). The central figure is the clever slave who eventually sorts out all the misunderstandings and all ends happily. The featured number here was the patter song “Everybody ought to have a maid” delivered by Simon Russell Beale and Daniel Evans with Julian Ovenden and finally the great Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel, who was last seen on the same stage as Hans Sachs in Wagner’s Meistersinger. (The comedy always comes after a long dose of the serious stuff.)

Sondheim draws on many traditions in his work: fairy tale, film, art, horror story as well as the conventions of musical theatre. But these two examples show that he is fully aware of the origins of his craft which stretch back to the stages of Athens and Italy. I think Aristophanes could well have sat in the audience, tapping out the rhythms and enjoying the show, while thinking at the same time how he could write a piece that would send up Stephen Sondheim something rotten.

Welcome to Thebes

This new play by Moira Buffini is running at London’s National Theatre. It updates a number of Greek stories to modern West Africa, taking on big geopolitical issues with a mainly black cast. Thebes is an unspecified country where civil was has recently ended in the election of Eurydice (Creon’s surviving wife) as president. She is trying amid the ruins of her country to re-establish some kind of civilisation. To help her in this Theseus (Athens’ “first citizen”) is visiting to try to arrange some kind of international aid. The drama thus raises the questions of democracy v. tyranny, women in politics, race (Theseus has white aides), religion (the charismatic warlord Tydeus is possessed by Dionysus), the state v. the individual, child soldiers, and many others. It is perhaps too issue-driven for its own dramatic coherence and it contains enough material for a whole trilogy with a comedy to follow.

For the classicist the interest is in the use of mythological figures in the modern setting. All the characters have Greek names which fit their character role. One of Theseus’ (white) aides is called Talthybia after the tragic message-carrying figure; one of the child-soldiers is named after one of the Furies (Megaera) who she tells us she represents; some cabinet ministers are named after the Muses, while others are called Strife (Eris, chief of police) and Force (Bia). The main characters (Eurydice, Theseus, Antigone, Ismene and Tiresias) are recognisably derived from their equivalents in Athenian tragedy. The emphasis from the author and the production team seems to be on the recreation of ancient myth in a modern setting, but there is also a large input from Greek literature as well. Sophocles’ Antigone is the main narrative line and it follows the story closely: Polynices’ body is found and lies bloodily to the side of the stage throughout. Eurydice (standing in for her dead husband Creon) forbids its burial in an autocratic decree at odds with her democratic credentials. Antigone (the “mad one”) decides to bury the body, while Ismene (the “nice one”) agonises over whether to help her. After a very tense scene in which one the black child-soldiers is shot by a white security guard, Eurydice changes her mind and the two victims of the violence are buried together. Buffini chooses not to make this motivate the final section of the play where Theseus changes his mind and decides to help the tottering state of Thebes, but it becomes just one of a number of highly-charged scenes racing the action forward. This pushes things on at a furious pace but does not allow the dramatic conflicts to linger and come to a slow climax. Instead she turns to another tragedy, Euripides Hippolytus, for the event that makes Theseus see things differently. He has been in touch by mobile phone with things at home and the events familiar to National Theatre audiences from last year’s highly successful Phèdre have been taking place off-stage. With extra extended references to Euripides’ Bacchai as well as Aeschylus’s Eumenides this is a rich mix of tragic themes. Even Aristophanes gets a look in with reminiscences of his Lysistrata in the takeover of government by women.

For all its serious themes, it is a very funny play with some excellent lines, but perhaps sometimes it appears as if Aristophanes had contributed extra jokes to a Sophocles script. At one point a character says to Antigone and Ismene “… and as for your motherf…ing father!” The Athenian festival of Dionysus knew better to keep tragedy and comedy firmly separated.

With strong performances from all the large committed cast, pacy direction and an atmospheric set this production shows how the old Greek stories can be used creatively to speak to each generation afresh. The dialogue with the Greeks continues to be lively, with that competitive edge which shows how the moderns can attempt to go one better. As Theseus says in the play “Tragedy shows us how to live”.

Italian Renaissance Drawings

The British Museum has brought together a stunning collection of drawings by all the big names of Italian renaissance art: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Verrocchio, Raphael and many others. With informative displays and videos about the technique and materials of drawing including the manufacture of paper, this is an exemplary exhibition. This drawing of Raffaellino del Garbo (left) shows the risen Christ based on Roman copies of Greek originals of the god Bacchus (right).

The explanation label beside this drawing says that Italian renaissance artists did not slavishly copy Classical models, but used them to spark their creativity. They engaged with these Greek and Roman predecessors in a dialogue, often with a competitive edge. That comment, overturning years of prejudice about the dead hand of classicism on contemporary art, seems to me sum excellently what Classicists are seeking to do in making the Classical world in all its facets (languages, literatures, art, history and so on) available to each new generation. How refreshing to be thought of “engaging in a dialogue with a competitive edge” with our classical models rather than the usual dreary assumptions of dryness, pedantry and outmoded ideas. Top marks to the exhibition and the curator Hugo Chapman.

Semele/Salome

Semele/Salome

Which young female heroine asks a powerful male figure to grant her whatever she wishes? The granting of this favour then leads to her destruction. By a curious juxtaposition we had tickets for two operas on consecutive nights which provided two answers to this question. Handel’s Semele asks Jupiter to appear to her as a god, and Richard Strauss’s Salome asks Herod to give her whatever she wants in return for performing a dance before him. Semele as a mortal cannot withstand the sight of Jupiter and is burnt up, while Salome wants John the Baptist’s head on a silver charger, which Herod egged on by his wife Herodias, Salome’s mother, gives her. Herod is so repulsed by her favour that he orders her death. Handel is comic and amusing where Strauss is violent and shocking. (What would it be like to have Handel’s Salome and Strauss’s Semele? Could Handel be as striking and could Strauss be as light?) This was my second Semele of the year, with the same conductor and orchestra (Christophe Rousset and the Talens Lyriques) but was a very different affair to the earlier Chinese production in Brussels (see earlier post in September 2009). The singing here was much stronger with Danielle De Niese and Vivica Genaux in the roles of Semele and Ino/Juno, but without the theatrical production by David McVicar from Paris in the concert version I saw at the Barbican in London. Here the comedy was more apparent with Ovid’s rather ditzy heroine causing her own downfall by her vanity (De Niese making the most of her mirror aria “If I persist in gazing”). David McVicar was also responsible for the production of Salome at the Royal Opera Covent Garden. Here the strength of his vision made the lack of it at the Barbican all the more apparent. Set in the grim kitchen area of a swanky restaurant the violence and raw emotion was always there just under the surface and even in the bloody final scene was never overdone or indulgent. The figure of the naked executioner emerging covered in blood from the cistern with John the Baptist’s head is one of the strongest stage images I have seen. With Angela Denoke’s soprano soaring over the orchestra this scene packs a shocking punch, with Salome cradling the severed head in her lap like Agave with Pentheus’s head in Euripides’ Bacchae. It is not often that a biblical story can rival the mythical power of a Greek myth, but Oscar Wilde in his original play saw the potential of this episode to produce a new kind of Greek tragedy. Both pieces are based on strong literary texts: Congreve’s Semele and Wilde’s Salome. The surtitles projected to clarify the sung texts carried their own richness unusual in the librettos of operas. The highly contrasting treatments of two broadly similar stories show how classical myth can supply the raw ingredients for art which can be served up in different ways according to taste.

Proses

When I was first learning Latin, prose composition was regarded by us students as completely old-fashioned and a waste of time. The way we were taught to compose into Latin from English was rigid and prescriptive and seemed to us young radicals as pointless. We wanted to get to grips with sexual ambiguities in Ovid and Propertius, and in the state propaganda underneath the text of the Aeneid. We didn’t want to have to churn out reams of Ciceronian prose, and Cicero was right out as well: a pompous old windbag, in our opinion. Just as with many opinions these have now run their course and can be seen as symptomatic of their time. Some of our attitudes have been developed and vindicated and have become mainstream thinking, and I find Cicero much less of a windbag these days and a much more interesting rounded character. Yet I begin to wonder if we were right about prose composition. Certainly the way we were taught seemed to make even more rigid the grammatical rules of certain books. Any attempt to break the sentence structures as laid down in Hillard and Botting (or was it North and Hillard?) was greeted with scorn and multiple underlinings in red ink, and any protest that Tacitus actually uses that construction on a number of occasions was regarded as a serious challenge to authority. But then that was the Zeitgeist: authority and challenge; but the rendering of prose as optional in final examinations and even in Oxford entry was taken as a kind of token victory. I am still not sure if my refusal to do the prose paper at Oxford entrance was serious folly or brave individualism. Anyway the examiners did not have much idea of what to do with the alternatives set instead: to have offered them was enough. I was able to take Greek Sculpture instead of prose composition at Oxford, which is surely justification enough.
And yet I am now not convinced that my principled opposition to proses was the right decision. Now I am quite pleased to be required to compose a letter or document in Latin that will allow a little individual expression and the opportunity to put down in a few elegant Latin phrases exactly what is required. In the European Schools this is sometimes a good solution to the otherwise laborious necessity of having to issue a document to Latin teachers of many linguistic origins in a language that a) they will understand and b) not be offended by. Never underestimate the susceptibility of certain nationalities to object to being addressed in one language rather than another.
So my position today is rather that composing in Latin is a creative act, a vehicle for the transmission of ideas in a pleasing form. There is a pleasure to be had from finding an exact equivalent and in using the clearest idiom or construction. Familiarity with the great prose authors is a necessity of course, but trying to imitate them is a form of literary criticism and one which teaches you a lot about the text you are trying to read. The art of parody may be much closer to prose composition than we think. Good parody plays with a well known text and even pokes fun at it. But a good parody will always contain a knowing appreciation of the author in question. Think of all the wonderful parodies of Shakespeare, by practising poets and writers. They are not written out of contempt or slavish imitation, but out of playful admiration and respect. As many other aspects of twentieth century Classics, the teaching of proses became rigid and paid too much attention to its own made-up rules. By emphasising the creative and aesthetic elements of composition could we possibly revive it? I recently came across a copy of Bradley’s Arnold Latin Prose Composition (a volume I cheerfully hurled across the room several times as a student) and found it immensely balanced, informative and encouraging. In looking for the mot juste it was very useful. Should we Classicists start to revive the practice: not as mechanical translations but as free composition or ironic parodies?

Final Demands - Frederic Raphael

This is the final part of a series of three books chronicling the lives of Cambridge graduates from the 1950s to the recent past. Adam Morris first appears in The Glittering Prizes as a young undergraduate who becomes a writer in literary London. Fame and Fortune continues the careers of the group of students through their working lives which culminate in this last series as they reach the beginnings of old age. Frederic Raphael was a brilliant classicist at Charterhouse (an English public school; the English public school?) and began Classics at Cambridge before switching (as you are allowed, even encouraged, to do at Cambridge) to Philosophy. Classics, however, continues to play an important role in his writing and he one of the few writers who include Latin and Greek literature seriously, without condescension, as a major part of European literature. He is one of the most European of writers in English, drawing for his inspiration on a wide range of authors of all languages into which he draws the Classical authors as a matter of course. For the classicist interested in how the subject is portrayed in a modern novel the figure of Adam Morris’s daughter Rachael is the most involving. She is a young classicist who surprisingly goes to California with Bill Bourne, also a classicist and one of Adam’s Cambridge contemporaries. Her work on Catullus is well received, although Adam takes a little of the credit for himself; but he should be ashamed of himself for the muddled line of poem 51 on page 185. It should read identidem te (not et) and the line ends after te. Can he really be quoting the text of a JRS article? Or is FR having an elaborate game with us here? Is Adam supposed to be so well-read that he can misquote Catullus? Not with the text in front of him, surely. Nevertheless it is a pleasure to have a young, female and pretty cool character given Latin literature as her subject in a modern novel.
The reviewers all recognise that Adam is a thinly veiled autobiographical version of Raphael himself: the polished wit, the long-windedness, the Jewishness, the prickliness. He is not always a likeable character, but I guess he is not meant to be. Hearing Tom Conti from the BBC television and radio versions say the words in your head, however, makes him a more real person than just the words off the page.
Reviewers are less forthcoming about the basis for the other characters. So who are they based on? Is Bill Bourne based on John Sullivan who worked on Martial and Petronius, as Bill did? Sullivan did, I think, die relatively young, but did he also run into trouble with the black faculty for alleged racism? Adam gets embroiled in a Black Athena-type argument at Bill’s memorial gathering in Los Angeles. As for the others: is Joyce Hadleigh drawn from Joan Bakewell? Is Alan Parks Clive James? Or could he be David Frost? Is Samuel Marcus Cohen George Steiner? Is there a website devoted to this kind of pointless but intriguing speculation?

What a Carve Up!

The theme for the set text for Latin at the European Baccalaureate in 2011 will be Virgil Aeneid 6 and the Descent to the Underworld. My colleagues and I have been looking for passages from European art and literature to accompany the Virgil and to give an idea of the use of this theme in later periods. We came up with the usual suspects: Dante, Milton, Sartre, but a French colleague said she had been reading a novel by an English writer whose title I didn’t recognise. The author, Jonathan Coe, I had read, but this particular work was a puzzle. In the end it turned out that the title is What a Carve Up! which defeated the French translator who had to make do with “Testament à l'anglaise”. The title refers to an old film starring Sid James and Kenneth Connor which is woven into the novel in original ways, that combine comic horror with social satire of Britain in the 1980s. The passage (page 94-5, Penguin edition) which relates to the underworld is a scene where the narrator goes down into the tunnels of the London Tube system for a dreadful journey. (A sort of Descent into the Underground.) There is embedded into the text a line of Latin: perque leves populos simulacraque functa sepulchro (Ovid Metamorphoses 10. 14) which is unusual in a modern English novel, where writers often wish to conceal their learning for fear of putting off readers by a show of perceived elitism. Nothing much more is made of this at the time, but slowly through the book other allusions begin to appear to the myth of Orpheus. The narrator meets a young painter, Phoebe, whose work he unwittingly misunderstands and which she then destroys. These paintings are an interpretation of the Orpheus and Eurydice story and the theme of the search for the past by a descent into Hell becomes clearer step by step as the novel progresses. Though not slavishly following the outline of the mythical story, it becomes clear that Michael (the writer and narrator) bears some resemblance to an Orpheus figure and Phoebe has elements of Eurydice. She repeatedly urges him at the end of the book: “Don’t look back.” As a result the scene of the katabasis earlier on is not a casual classical reference but an integral part of the novel’s structure. A quick trawl through some of the reviews of this novel do not appear to have picked up on this Orpheus reference although one or two did make a connection to Cocteau’s film of the Orpheus tale. The author, Jonathan Coe, makes wide use of film in all his work and may have been thinking of Orpheus through Cocteau, but the inclusion of the line of Ovid seems to indicate a wish to go further back to the original myth. Or at least to Ovid’s version of it. So I was introduced to this accomplished postmodern piece of English literature by a French colleague to include in a collection of Latin texts. The European School is often full of surprises like this. At the same time I found I was introducing, by way of the same process, my German colleagues to the writing of Max Sebald, who wrote in German but is perhaps better known in England. He also has a key passage in Austerlitz featuring a descent into Hades by way of Liverpool Street railway station. There must be something about London train stations that makes writers think of Hell. I can’t imagine what it is.