Chinese Semele

I told my Baccalaureate Latin class, as we were reading Ovid’s Diana and Actaeon, that the evening before I had been to see an opera in Brussels performed by Chinese and international singers, directed by a Chinese artist, conducted by a Frenchman, of an opera in English by a German composer based in England, based on a version in Latin by Ovid of a Greek myth. This extraordinary production has been taking place at La Monnaie/De Munt, the Brussels opera house throughout the month of September. The contemporary artist Zhang Huan has been the overall inspiration for the show, making his directorial debut in opera. He is best known as a performance and installation artist and has an exhibition on in London at the same time featuring a pig (don’t ask for more details). The root of this production of Handel’s Semele is a Buddhist temple taken down and reconstructed by Zhang Huan, first in his Shanghai studio, and then transported to Brussels for the performances (above middle). Behind this temple there is a long and tragic story, which is shown to the audience in a video during the overture, concerning the couple who were living in this abandoned temple for a time before Zhang Huan came to ask to remove it. It is a tale of love, jealousy, murder, arrest and violent death when the husband is convicted of killing one of his wife’s lovers and executed. Though not exact, the parallels to the story of Semele appear to be what attracted Zhang Huan to the project of directing his first opera. He fills the show with many elements of his art: the temple itself used as a set; sumptuous costumes (above middle) from both Chinese and European cultures; a group of musicians from Mongolia playing and singing traditional music; his trademark ash paintings (above top); and finally the wife of the temple couple herself bringing the drama to its conclusion. This whole creation was intrinsic to the performance and Zhang’s interventions in the opera (including cutting the last scene) cannot be separated from the whole experience. One of his sculptures has been placed outside the opera house (above bottom) and the audience have to walk through it, smelling the incense (which provides the ash for the paintings) as they enter. Then in the interval Aruhan and her Mongolian musicians perform their version of Semele outside under the legs of this sculpture. The opera critics in the newspapers I have seen seem to have been baffled by all this, and have concentrated on the things they feel comfortable with: the singing and the superb orchestral playing of Les Talens Lyriques under Christophe Rousset. However, what they have failed to indicate is that this is one of the most thought-provoking current opera productions, combining visual, musical, cinematic and dramatic effects in such way as to achieve a total artistic experience; and it does this without the predictable “shocking” tactics too often employed by European opera directors. At the very end, one of the ash paintings of a woman (Semele or the temple wife?) is shown on a screen in front of the stage. We see water trickle down over it, as slowly the image is washed away and Semele is dead and the show is over.

This is really a Classics blog and I haven’t gone into detail about Ovid yet, but the main thing to take away from this seems to be that Greek myth is so deeply ingrained in European culture that we take it for granted. Of course, a story about overwhelming passion that ends in violent death has to be Greek, and the sensational narratives of Ovid’s Metamorphoses are the means by which we have absorbed such tales into our archetypal consciousness. But how can this be the case for Chinese culture? When this production transfers to Shanghai will the cultural commentators there be asking: who is this writer Ovid? What does he have to offer us? Will there be translations of the Metamorphoses in bookshops in Beijing and Shanghai? How can European classicists respond to that? Zhang Huan has shown how such a cross-over between cultures can work and enrich both of them.

The Myth Painter

The Myth Painter 31st July 2009
J.W. Waterhouse The Royal Academy London


Classicists may well know John William (or Nino) Waterhouse (1849-1917) for his paintings of Greek Myths. The images are probably well-known as illustrations of texts of Ovid or Homer. Calendars using his paintings often sell well. Yet this is his first major exhibition in London for many years and shows the largest ever retrospective collection of his paintings. Many are in Tate Britain (though not always on display), others are in English provincial galleries, and some have come from as far as Australia for this show.

He has been out of fashion as a Victorian painter, often regarded as sentimental and conservative in style, and recently the young women who feature in nearly all of his works have been looked at with disapproval and a suspicion of an unhealthy fascination. His reputation ought to be enhanced by this exhibition for, whatever comparisons can be made with other more modern work being done at the same time, he is clearly a terrific painter.

Look at Circe Invidiosa, for example (above middle).

Reproductions cannot convey the quality of the green he has found to give this image its attractive yet troubling atmosphere. The story is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses 14 and shows Circe jealously poisoning the sea after Glaucus, who loves Scylla, has rejected her so that Scylla will be turned into a monster. Waterhouse’s women are almost always highly attractive yet slightly dangerous creatures. His paintings feature Circe, Ariadne, Proserpina, Penelope, Echo, the Sirens and the nymphs who tempt Hylas in perhaps his best known picture (above top).
Other paintings are based on figures from English literature: the Lady of Shalott and Miranda from the Tempest. While classics teachers may often use these images to illustrate the stories of Greek mythology and particularly the way they are told by Ovid, it is worth paying some attention to the context in which Waterhouse was working. The Pre-Raphaelite painters (Rossetti, Millais, Holman Hunt) were clearly a great influence, but Waterhouse was still painting in what appears to be a similar style long after the Victorian period and also long after Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. This exhibition enables us to look at Waterhouse not just as an illustrator of stories but as an individual stylist and original painter. Is it the use of Greek mythology which makes him appear old-fashioned? Or is his use of unusual and troubling stories from Ovid a precursor of the kind of criticism now current for Ovid, which sees him not as an amusing but slight poet but as a subversive and ironic writer reworking and recreating the old stories in a new way? Perhaps we should not be saying, “Look at this charming portrayal of the Echo and Narcissus story” but “How does Waterhouse create a disturbing image of the young woman in this story?” There are also hints in the notes to the exhibition of Waterhouse’s possible interest in the occult particularly in the figure of Proserpina who seems to appear in many of his pictures although she is not named as such. Claudian’s poem the Rape of Proserpina seems to have been important to him. Questions can also be raised over possible misogyny in his portrayal of women as femmes fatales, always tempting the men in the pictures to danger, and over his fascination with young women, girls even, in sexually ambiguous poses. It may be thought however that here we are retrospectively attributing the unease of our own period back onto the late nineteenth century when a portrayal of childhood may have had very different connotations. This show seems to have been popular with the public who have been brought face to face with a demanding series of images based on Latin and Greek authors. Without a basic knowledge of the foundation texts that classicists seek to keep before the gaze of young people in Europe, the subject mater of these paintings would be baffling to many viewers. Should we really just read them as examples of significant form, of just a collection of shapes and colours, or should we know or have to work out what story the painter is trying to tell?

Helen at Shakespeare’s Globe

Complementing Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is a new production of Euripides’ Helen in a version by Frank McGuiness. This is the first time the theatre, which reproduces the building of Shakespeare’s time, has put on a Greek drama http://www.shakespeares-globe.org/theatre/annualtheatreseason/helen/. One of Euripides’ lightest tragedies, it was played largely for laughs but the rapid production managed to slip from the comedy to the more serious almost seamlessly. Penny Downie was a sexy, lively Helen reaching up to the top of galleries with her appeals to the gods to rescue her from her fate of being abandoned in Egypt among barbarians.
For this is of course the real Helen: the one who went to Troy was merely an idolon. Menelaus (a strong and sympathetic Paul McGann) is shipwrecked on her shore on his return from the war and is surprised to find his real wife already there. These two fill the stage and the whole theatrical space, and take us through their disbelief, wariness and ultimate joy in their mutual recognition. This plot device of course enables Euripides to play with the idea of the war being fought for nothing, for an illusion: a thought that is always relevant to whichever war is being fought. It also enables him to include some clever wordplay over misidentification and misunderstanding. We can see the origin of all those future comedies of separation and reunification, of loss and restoration in Menander and Plautus and then the whole of European comedy, here in a so-called tragedy of Euripides. McGuiness’s version is in what is called “muscular” free verse, that is a kind of heightened poetic prose which suits the style of Greek drama well. It is the same solution adopted by Ted Hughes in his version of Racine’s version of Euripides (see the post above on Phèdre). Deborah Bruce as director has solved the problem of what to do with the chorus in the current fashion: a collection of individuals half recite their lines, half sing them to simple tunes (though the professional singer brought in to strengthen the music should have been left in the box with the musicians or incorporated properly into the chorus, not dressed in a dinner jacket and allowed to wander over the stage). I know the deus ex machina is difficult to deal with too, but the knockabout act of Castor and Pollux was unfunny and spoiled the hard work of the two principals.

A curious incident before the play started. One of the great things about the Globe is that you can often go along at the last minute and get a standing ticket for five pounds (six Euros), as was possible for Shakespeare’s public. (They paid one penny.) However to our surprise we were greeted with House Full posters and asked to wait for returns. While we were waiting a well dressed and well spoken woman came to the head of the queue offering two standing tickets. Someone in front of us took one and as we wanted two we passed her back to the person behind us who took the second ticket for five pounds. We continued to wait while a couple came up having a huge public row about whether to go the show or not (something about the last train, but not wanting to waste 40 pounds). Then the man who had just bought the standing ticket came back out of the theatre, furious. He had been sold a ticket for last night’s Romeo and Juliet, but in the transaction had not looked closely at the ticket. I immediately began to have suspicions abut the piece of street theatre we had just witnessed. Was this a scam too? Then a member of the box office team came up with two standing tickets and we got in just in time. Who would have thought that a) a Greek Tragedy would be sold out and b) that a rogue would pull a stunt like that outside the Globe? It was full of pickpockets, rascals and coney-catchers in Shakespeare’s time too apparently.

pronuntiatio restituta

Pronuntiatio restituta 4th August 2009

How we should pronounce Latin today? From day to day when Latin is used or referred to, we hear many varieties of pronunciation in the broadcast media. The restored pronunciation, which most professional classicists use, has not settled the matter, nor has it solved the problem. I am put in mind of this because of a TV programme about Roman food. The BBC has made a series called The Supersizers Eat in which two presenters eat the food of a particular era for a week to see how they get on.


Unsurprisingly one episode was set in Rome, where the two supersizers ate Roman food cooked according to Apicius and others with a fairly convincing recreation of the whole pig roasted at Trimalchio’s dinner party in Petronius. More perhaps about the food later, but first language. I shan’t repeat the gossip I heard from a former pupil of mine who was acting as researcher on this programme, but I should like to take issue with the pronunciation of Latin by Giles Coren. There was a brief passage of Latin conversation between him and the other presenter Sue Perkins (with subtitles) which as far as I could tell was not too bad, apart from the use of a soft ‘c’ throughout. The Roman dinner cena was referred to thereafter as “saynah”. My former pupil apparently did her best to persuade Giles that it should be cena “kayna” but without success. This was what he had been taught and he (as many do) insisted that this was correct. I come across this regularly, usually from parents, who are convinced that the pronunciation we use in class is eccentric if not plain wrong, but who of course cannot agree on what should be a suitable way of speaking Latin. What can we as professionals do about this? I suppose we must go on doing what we already do and try to be as consistent as possible, even between ourselves in our different countries and traditions and perhaps in a century or two there may be some sort of consensus. For the moment, however, it seems that the old pronunciation of Latin in English, which was supposedly reformed out of the classroom at the beginning of the twentieth century, is still hanging around in the dusty corners of some English private schools. We shall never be able to change Julius Caesar (“Jeewlius Seizer”) nor would it be right to, and a Caesar salad will keep its soft ‘c’. (As this dish, invented in Las Vegas at Caesars Palace (no apostrophe) is usually spelt Ceasar salad, I suggest we should keep this spelling for the salad to indicate its pronunciation and origins.) However, it would be best for Latin in an ancient context to be spoken in an authentic way. So please, television presenters everywhere, repeat after me one hundred times: cena with a ‘k’ sound.

Phèdre 2nd July 2009


Euroclassicist went to the London National Theatre last week – in Brussels. Thanks to the technology of NT Live, a performance of Racine’s Phèdre was broadcast direct to cinemas all around the UK and to other countries too. The leader in this technology has been the New York Metropolitan Opera which after being broadcast for many years on live radio across the USA and then to other countries has moved recently to the live relay of opera performance to cinemas. We saw Lucia di Lamermoor (Donizetti) recently in Brussels and it was almost like seeing a live performance. Would live theatre work as well?

Phèdre is Racine’s take on Euripides’ Hippolytus: serious French tragedy in strict alexandrines often thought to be encased in a rigid style of French classical acting. Was this the wisest choice to begin this season of live relays? The advantages are the presence of Helen Mirren in the cast as Phèdre. Dame Helen is a popular actor, well-known to the British public for her role as The Queen and in many film and television appearances (Prime Suspect, Calendar Girls). I first saw her play Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra when she was still a drama student. Her intensity, concentration and commitment to the role were ideally suited to the unrelenting pace of Racine’s drama. This was the second advantage to the choice of Phèdre. The two hours traffic of the drama (without a break) kept the audience pinned to the back of their seats as the tragedy unfolded. The rapport of the actors with audience was evident on the expression of their faces, which we could see in all the detail of HD vision in close up. This is something you cannot duplicate in the theatre: in the front row you see the actors close up but not the whole stage, further back you have a view of everything but not the close expressions.

The set was also well suited to the live transmission: a brilliant Greek blue sky, the suggestion of a Greek coast line or island. The cameras could occasionally catch the actors isolated against this blue background, which we knew was just a cyclorama at the back of the stage but which became for us a real outdoor sky with the Greek sunlight burning down on the characters intensifying the emotions they were feeling. The costumes were indeterminate, not the clichés of ancient Greek tragedy, not identifiably modern. This tragedy was neither French nor English, ancient nor modern, and though clearly Greek it served for a lot more.

The actors were well-served by crystal clear sound which made understanding easy, though without subtitles for the non-native speaker audience. Subtitles in English (like the surtitles at the opera) may be a possibility worth considering in the future. The English version was by Ted Hughes who is well-known as an English poet and who was in fact Poet Laureate until his death in 1998. Described as muscular free verse his version does not attempt to reproduce Racine’s alexandrines but concentrates on projecting the raw emotions of the characters in direct but heightened language. We have tickets for a live performance of the play later and will be able then to make a direct comparison between the two experiences. I shall try revisit Racine in French and Euripides in Greek before then to make a valid comparison.

Classicists in Europe may not have too many similar chances to see a play like this on a Greek theme, but when such things do occur it is well worth making an effort to go along and to encourage students to experience live acting and productions of this quality in an entirely new way. The relays of the New York Metropolitan Opera may well have productions of classically themed operas in the coming seasons.