Thesis (doctoral), Bayerische Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [262]-284) and index.

Thesis (doctoral), Bayerische Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [262]-284) and index.

Thesis (doctoral)--Rijksuniversiteit te Groningen, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references.

This study sets out to reveal the groundbreaking use of monody in the late plays of Euripides: in his hands, it is shaped into a potent and flexible instrument for representing emotion and establishing new narrative and thematic structures. Engaging with the current scholarly debate on music, affect, and characterization in Greek tragedy, I examine the role that monody plays in the musical design of four plays of Euripides, all produced in the last decade of his career: Ion, Iphigenia in Tauris, Phoenician Women, and Orestes. These plays are marked by the increased presence of actors’ song in proportion to choral song. The lyric voice of the individual takes on an unprecedented prominence with far-reaching implications for the structure and impact of each play. The monodies of Euripides are a true dramatic innovation: in addition to creating an effect of heightened emotion, monody is used to develop character and shape plot. In Ion, Iphigenia in Tauris, Phoenician Women, and Orestes, Euripides uncouples monody’s traditional and exclusive connection with lament. In contrast to the work of Aeschylus and Sophocles, where actors’ song is always connected with grief and pain, in these four plays monody conveys varied moods and states of mind. Monody expresses joy, hope, anxiety, bewilderment, accusation, and deliberation. Often, and simultaneously, it moves forward narrative exposition. The scope and dramatic function of monody grows and changes: passages of actors’ lyric become longer, more metrically complex, more detached from the other characters onstage, and more intensely focused on the internal experience of the singer. In the four plays under discussion we see a steadily increasing refinement and expansion of the form, a development that rests upon the changes in the style and function of contemporary music in the late fifth century. By 415 B.C., many formal features of tragedy had become highly conventionalized, and determined a set of expectations in the contemporary audience. Reacting against this tradition, Euripides successively redefines monody: each song takes over a traditional Bauform of tragedy, and builds upon it. The playwright uses the paired monodies of Ion to pose a conflict of ideas that might otherwise be conveyed through an agon. In Iphigenia in Tauris the heroine’s crisis and its resolution are presented in lyrics, rather than as a deliberative rhesis. In Phoenician Women, Antigone, Jocasta, and Oedipus replace the Chorus in lamenting the fall of the royal house. Finally, the Phrygian slave in Orestes sings a monody explicitly marked as a messenger speech that inverts the conventions of the form to raise questions about objectivity and truth in a disordered world. In examining these four plays, I hope to show some of the various potentials of this new Euripidean music as a major structural element in tragic drama, insofar as it can heighten emphasis, allow for the development of emotional states both subtle and extreme, reveal and deepen character, and mirror thematic movements. Euripides establishes monody as a dramatic form of considerable versatility and power. The poetry is charged with increased affect and expressivity; at the same time it articulates a new self-consciousness about the reciprocal capacities of form and content to shape one another. Here we may discern the shift of sensibility in Euripides’ late work, which proceeds pari passu with an apparent loosening of structural demands, or what one with equal justice might recognize as an increase in degrees of freedom. As the playwright repeatedly reconfigures the relationship between form and content, the range of what can happen onstage, of what can be said and sung, expands.

Habilitation - Universität, Zürich, 2004/05. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 380-412) and indexes.

The musical analysis of Greek tragedy has traditionally been limited to studies of meter and metatheatrical language. This dissertation seeks to establish a new approach to ancient dramatic song by demonstrating that the linguistic pitch accents of tragic lyrics often trace the melodic contours of their lost musical settings. In the papyri and inscriptions that preserve music notation alongside Greek lyrics, intonation and melody are often coordinated according to set principles, which are well established by previous scholarship. Through the creation of software that applies these historical principles to tragic texts, I demonstrate that stanzas sung to the same melody are significantly more similar in their accentual contours than control groups that do not share a melody. In many instances, the accents of these paired texts consistently trace the same pitch contours, allowing us to reconstruct the shape of the original melody with a high degree of confidence.After a general introduction, the dissertation’s first two chapters address the historical basis for this approach. Chapter 1 reviews the evidence for the musical structure of tragic song, confirming the widely held view that paired stanzas were generally set to the same melody. Chapter 2 turns to the evidence for the role of pitch accents in ancient Greek song, including the ancient testimony and musical documents, and a computational study of accent patterns across all the lyrics of Aeschylus’ surviving tragedies. The methodology developed in these first two chapters is applied in two case studies, in which I reconstruct and interpret the accentual melodies of select tragic lyrics. Chapter 3 analyzes the musical design of the chorus’ entrance song in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, along with sections of the Kommos from Choephori. In both cases, I argue, melody would play an integral role in highlighting the themes of repetition and reversal within the Oresteia. Chapter 4 turns to the music of Euripides’ Medea, a play that has been central to previous discussions of accent in tragic music. Reading the lyrics and accentual melodies within the framework of musical history as understood in the fifth century bce, I argue that Euripides uses a contrast between ‘old’ and ‘new’ melodic styles to position his chorus at a turning point within literary history. In the dissertation’s final chapter, I address the reception of Medea’s music in a fragmentary comedy, the so-called Alphabet Tragedy of Callias. Together, these interpretive chapters provide a template for future work applying methods of musical analysis to the accentual melodies of ancient Greek song.

This study explores how in central plays of Euripides – namely, Alcestis, Hippolytus, Helen, and Bacchae – bodies, landscapes, and objects (both seen on stage and described in speeches, dialogues, and choral odes) serve as media for assessing affective states, materializing the characters’ feelings and sensations and hence enabling the audience to vividly perceive them. My focus is grounded in the ancient conceptions of bodies and the senses in material from the Pre-Socratic and the Hippocratic writings, including theories about how the surrounding environment influences bodily types. It is also underpinned by theoretical perspectives that have come to prominence in recent research in ancient literature and culture. First, it draws on insights from phenomenology, aesthetics, and affective theory that in ancient drama highlight embodiment, synaesthesia, and the circulation of affects among characters and spectators. Second, it engages with works inspired by the new materialisms, which have produced a new attention to the mutual and symbiotic relationship between humans and nonhuman entities. Finally, it is based on the “enactive” approach to cognition, which makes a compelling case for visualization (e.g., spectators’ imagination of the things sung, spoken, or narrated) as grounded in the active, embodied structure of experience. Building on such theories, I posit that Euripides’ plays illustrate how the characters’ feelings and emotions combine with sensory indicators (sight, taste, smell, and touch), so that they operate as visible marks of states usually conceived of as inner. These states are, I suggest, exteriorized not only on bodies but also in their surroundings, such that landscapes as mapped onto the dramatic stage and objects with which the characters interact function as supplements to embodied affective manifestations. In addition to onstage action, I focus on how Euripides’ language triggers a strong resonance in the spectators’ imagination. In this regard, my argument takes up the insights of ancient critics such as Longinus, who has praised Euripides’ ability to generate “emotion” (τὸ παθητικόν) and “excitement” (τὸ συγκεκινημένον) in the audience through “visualization” (φαντασία) and “vividness” (ἐνάργεια). Thus, I examine how references to onstage performance and visualizing language interact, giving the spectators a full picture of the dramatic action. In Alcestis, I explore how embodiment, sensorial phenomena, and physical interactions put the characters’ feelings of pain and grief on prominent display, eliciting the audience’s sensory reaction. In Hippolytus, I examine how the characters’ emotions blend into the surroundings, such that forms, colors, and textures of landscape and objects allow the spectators to perceive inner states more forcefully. In Helen, I investigate how material and nonhuman things, such as rivers, plants, costumes, weapons, statues, ships connect to the characters as parts of an affective entanglement that heightens the experiential appeal of the characters’ feelings and sensations. In the Bacchae, I regard Dionysus’ action as an affective force that spreads throughout the world of the play, cracks, and mutates things, including human and animal bodies, natural elements, and objects. This action creates an enmeshment between things, which is embodied by the thyrsus topped with Pentheus’ head (mask) that gives the spectators a keen sense of the multiple, productive, and transformative nature of Dionysus’ power. In conclusion, this study argues that bodies, landscapes, and objects represent the privileged sites for exploring the affective exchange between the characters and the audience, refining our understanding of the intensity, impact, and reception of the Euripidean theater.

A parallel can be drawn in intellectual development between ancient Greece and late eighteenth century Europe concerning the secularization of the religious myth. This parallel is illustrated in a literary mode in Greece and in a philosophical mode in Europe. In both historical situations the intellectual development of a society was posited in a delicate balance of religious mythical interpretation of human existence and in a growing assertiveness of the self-consciousness of the individual. A significant point of analogy is the similarity of the Greek tragedians’ attempt to define man in relation to the gods and Hegel’s formulation of a philosophy which suspended in a delicate semantic balance the religious terminology of his Christian heritage and the intellectual developments of the preceding century. It is my thesis that a significant point of analogy is the similarity of the Greek tragedians’ attempt to define man in relation to the gods, and Hegel’s formulation of a philosophy which suspended in a delicate semantic balance the religious terminology of his Christian heritage and the intellectual developments of the preceding century.

Thesis (doctoral)--Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität, Greifswald, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [255]-281) and indexes.

Thesis (doctoral)--Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität, Greifswald, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [255]-281) and indexes.