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“Naomi Weiss offers a refreshing departure from traditional scholarship on Greek tragedy. Her close consideration of the place of music in Euripides’ later tragedies makes this an important and original book.”
Armand D’Angour, Associate Professor of Classics, Oxford University, and author of The Greeks and the New: Novelty in Ancient Greek Imagination and Experience
“This is a valuable work of scholarship that makes an important contribution to the study of Euripides and to broader questions about the development of Greek poetry. It should have a wide readership among the many scholars who are interested in these questions and will significantly advance ongoing discussions about Euripides’ distinctive use of the chorus and about the scope and significance of the 'New Music.’"
Sheila Murnaghan, Allen Memorial Professor of Greek, University of Pennsylvania
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Note on Editions and Translations
Introduction: In Search of Tragedy’s Music
1. Words, Music, and Dance in Archaic Lyric and Classical Tragedy
Before Tragedy: Imaginative Suggestion in Archaic Choral Lyric
Metamusical Play in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Early Euripides
2. Chorus, Character, and Plot in Electra
Electra and the Chorus
Performed Ecphrasis
Choral Anticipation and Enactment
3. Musical Absence in Trojan Women
The Paradox of Absent Choreia
New Songs and Past Performances
Performing the Fall of Troy
4. Protean Singers and the Shaping of Narrative in Helen
Birdsong and Lament
New Music
Travel and Epiphany
5. From Choreia to Monody in Iphigenia in Aulis
Spectatorship, Enactment, and Desire
Past and Present Mousike
Choreia and Monody
Conclusion: Euripides’ Musical Innovations
Works Cited
General Index
Index Locorum
About the author
Naomi A. Weiss is Assistant Professor of Classics at Harvard University. She has published widely on ancient Greek poetry and performance culture, especially tragedy.
Summary
The Music of Tragedy offers a new approach to the study of classical Greek theater by examining the use of musical language, imagery, and performance in the late work of Euripides. Naomi Weiss demonstrates that Euripides’ allusions to music-making are not just metatheatrical flourishes or gestures towards musical and religious practices external to the drama but closely interwoven with the dramatic plot. Situating Euripides’ experimentation with the dramaturgical effects of mousike within a broader cultural context, she shows how much of his novelty lies in his reinvention of traditional lyric styles and motifs for the tragic stage. If we wish to understand better the trajectories of this most important ancient art form, The Music of Tragedy argues, we must pay closer attention to the role played by both music and text.
Additional text
"As Weiss fills the silence of music lost with a symphony of images and sounds, Greek mousike emerges as a cognitively demanding and complex synaesthetic practice."
