Theodorakis’s Classical Trilogy: Opera for the People?

Theodorakis believes that contemporary Greeks have a special relation with the tragic (1995b). It can be argued that their history has given them reason for it, or that Greeks are temperamentally suited to appreciate the extreme literary expression of pain. Whatever the case, Theodorakis himself has always identified with the tragic figures of ancient Greek literature, and particularly with the three heroines who stand alone and fearless at the center of what he terms his “lyric dramas”: Medea, Electra  and Antigone. The problem for the composer was how to translate this particular affinity for tragedy into musical form.  For Theodorakis, the solution was, as it has always been, to rely on the poetic word to provide him with melodic inspiration. Most operas are in fact, as he noted, (Wagner, 1995) melodic suites, something he was well qualified to write. But by translating Euripides’ Medea  himself and setting every line of it to music, he ended up with a melodic suite that lasted for  five and a half hours not counting the recitatives (eventually the opera was cut back to less than three hours). The melodies, some of them familiar to the Greek ear from earlier compositions, are transformed, in their new context,  by more complex harmonies, rhythms and instrumentation. 

The single departure Theodorakis made from Euripides’ text was to introduce, beside the female chorus, a male chorus made up of “followers, soldiers, citizens, etc, so as to have at my disposal a four-part mixed choir....From then on I tried to exhaust as much musical talent as I have at my disposal in an effort to follow Euripides into the labyrinths of this unprecedented analysis he makes of the depths of the human soul.” (1991a). For Theodorakis felt that Euripides led him “closer to the human being and to human society than Aeschylus, who sees man more “as an instrument of divine will.” 

For twentieth century man, I think that the authentication of ‘Human Hardship’ is  dominated by Sartre’s idea that ‘Hell is other people.’ In other words the problem is  created exclusively by man, and by extension the society which he forms and which  forms him. 
Under this prism, the characters/symbols such as Medea, Jason, Electra, Clytemnestra, Orestes, can be generalized. That is they can be sought and found, if only as ghosts in all people, to the point that one goes to the roots of human character, to the furthest depths of human consciousness. (1991a)

This barbarian woman, uprooted, crazed by loved and shamed by her husband;  the  mother who worships her children and cannot accept the shame of exile, the woman  who is led to such an extreme of suffering that she kills her own offspring is  something beyond the tragedy of an individual... did Euripides, perhaps, with this  play want to ‘lash’ his ‘civilized’ fellow-Athenians, as they as they entered their  final downhill slide? (1991b, 2)

Theodorakis’s concentration on melody as the chief expressive vehicle of his composition means that each melodic line, sometimes even small melodic fragments, carry a heavy symbolic weight. Take the opening scene of the opera. It begins with a melody for solo cello constructed from the first tetrachord of the minor scale plus a flattened fifth. To those familiar with his music, this theme,  supported by a pulsing pattern of triplets, recalls the music Theodorakis composed for the score of Michael Cacoyiannis’s film Electra.. It creates a sinister, brooding mood that will be recalled at climactic points of the opera, and indeed of all three of his “lyric tragedies.” Such fragments of familiar melodic and rhythmic material, sometimes echoing his own compositions, at others,  a Greek folk dance or song, not only serve as acoustic sign-points for the audience; they establish a continuity between ancient and modern Greece, underlining the fact that this drama occurs in a geographical space still inhabited by Greeks. Not all the acoustic clues may be unraveled by the non-Greek audience, but anyone familiar with western music will catch the references to non western scales and rhythms. The symbolic connotations of the nurse’s lament for her mistress’s plight, for example,  are particularly obvious to a Greek audience, but I suspect also available to a sensitive western audience. Like the nurse’s speech itself, especially as she outlines her fears to the tutor, the music prepares us for an oriental, or rather, an Asia Minor Medea. 

Medea is a refugee in from Iolchus, on the Black Sea. Frequently melodic lines of Theodorakis’s opera suggest the ‘oriental’ music that the refugees brought with them to Greece in 1922, modal music that transformed popular mainland Greek music. Euripides asks our understanding of Medea’s terrible position as a dishonored exile through the device of the nurse who appeals to the audience directly for sympathy. Theodorakis mirrors the plea for understanding by his use of a musical language that marks Medea not as a complete stranger, but as a refugee from Asia Minor. “I feel a pain in my heart, and I came to tell the sufferings of my mistress to the earth and sky, to lighten myself!” the nurse tells us (bars 47-58) in an aria that might be re-orchestrated as a classic rebetiko song. [iii]  The chromatic mode, characterized by the interval of an augmented 2nd, is one of the most common heptatonic modes of the Greek folk repertoire, as is it is of the rebetika. 

Instead of sympathy, Medea encounters, among the Corinthians, the same chauvinism that greeted many of the 1922 refugees. [iv]  When Jason trumpets that she should be grateful that she now lives in Greece, the male chorus echo him: “You live in Greece. The Greeks praised you, ” we wince with her at their chauvinism. The female chorus of sopranos and altos remind us that these are empty words, words addressed too late to an opponent more powerful than himself. At such a point we see the virtue of Theodorakis’s inclusion of a male chorus. The division of the chorus allows him to stress the difference between a male and female perspective in judging Medea’s behavior. While the men fear and condemn her, the women, at least initially, are on her side. 

Unlike the heroines of his later operas -- Electra and Antigone--, constant in their mourning and unswerving in their purpose, Medea is a volatile heroine, torn between her desire for revenge and her love for her children. She has the capacity to move not only us, her audience, but even her enemies. Musically, her moods reveal themselves in rapid shifts of melodic line, tempo and rhythm. From her entry in scene two, where she addresses the women of Corinth, she is like a force of nature, a volcano waiting to erupt. By turns proud, self-pitying and supplicating,  her adagio “Oh, wretched woman,  who has a mind and soul, and yet am nothing” is not merely a lament, but a plea to the Corinthian women for understanding. “I am alone,” she sings in a high pianissimo on the three descending tones of the minor third. Again, to an audience familiar with Theodorakis’s work, this small figure echoes a dozen such passages in his songs, passages invariably associated with the most wrenching moments of his music. 

Having appealed to their mercy, Medea is about to ask the women a favor, and not a small one. The tempo changes, and accompanied by rapid chromatic passages from the orchestra, Medea announces her desire for revenge asks for their support. Creon’s entrance is underscored by agitated triplets, a rhythmic device that will signal heightened tension not only in this opera, but throughout the trilogy. In Creon’s music we find another device Theodorakis will  employ throughout his trilogy: the use of brass instruments to symbolize worldly power. A figure of authority who is nevertheless nervous of his opponent, Creon gives his orders in rapid bursts of notes that Medea, in her agitation, echoes until her strategy fails and she changes tactics and (literally) tune. “You tell me you fear, me, Creon,”  she says, as the tempo slows and her E major melody is marked dolce, “but I have no reason to do harm to princes....unless you, perhaps,  did me wrong?” The pressure is mounting here, and she ends  on a savage fortissimo : “You married your daughter to the one you chose.....I hate my husband!” 

Creon’s bluster is gone. He has glimpsed the sharp claws beneath the soft words and he orders her to leave the city as the orchestra accents his abrupt orders, the stormy triplets broken into dotted rhythms and chromatic sweeps. The tension rises to unbearable fortissimo, but Medea is not finished with Creon yet. Her request for a day’s grace on behalf of her children is both disingenuous and tender. As if to underline their fate, Theodorakis has her deliver the lines “They’re children...they’re not animals” in two pianissimo fragments interrupted by five bars while the orchestra supports her in the gentle triple meter that will be associated with Medea’s tenderest moments. It is Creon who has the last word. Having granted Medea her stay,  he immediately regrets his decision,  addressing a prayer to the Chthonic gods, asking them for protection. Into his prayer Theodorakis has inserted the brooding opening theme of the opera. The scene ends with the male chorus joining Creon, sharing his forebodings. As the men leave the stage the women begin the next scene with a unison chorus, a device that allows their words of support to be clearly audible. A throbbing pulse of semitones, grouped in sixes,  becomes wilder as Medea plans her revenge. The women of the chorus denounce not only Jason but the lot of women, becoming angrier and bolder as they sing, until the mood is suddenly broken by an instrumental interlude that introduces the leader of the chorus. Her song is a addressed to Medea and reminds the audience of what this foreign princess sacrificed, leaving her paternal home and traveling in Jason’s small craft to Greece. The aria is in a gently rocking rhythm that mimics the movement of the boat but it reaches a dramatic climax where the full chorus join their leader in an attack on Greek morality which cannot fail to impress a modern Greek audience: “Oh Greece! Glorious Greece! Who respects oaths and honor today? Flown to the skies, and shame has disappeared! 

It is at such moments in all three of Theodorakis’s  “lyric tragedies” that the ancient text becomes a vehicle for addressing the problems of modern Greece. As Gonda Van Steen (2000) has argued,  performances of ancient comedy in modern Greece have frequently been produced in ways that drew deliberate parallels between present and past Athenian life, but tragedy, too,  has been played for its political effect.[v] However universal the language of Theodorakis’s music or of the ancient texts on which they are based, there is an added dimension to the operas when they are performed in front of a Greek audience. How, for example,  can a non Greek audience appreciate the irony of Jason’s entry as he and his chorus of male followers sing in ancient Greek instead of modern? In a country where katharevousa  (the purist Greek purged of foreign words that was invented in the 19th century as an attempt to bring modern Greek closer to ancient)  has historically been associated with conservative politics, notoriously with the military dictatorship of 1967-74, Jason and his guard are immediately identified with a hated regime. Jason’s language also distances him from his foreign wife. Home in his own country, he is a man who knows which side his bread is buttered on, and has consequently become more Greek than the Greeks. 

In the lengthy exchange between Jason and Medea, she proudly reminds her husband that it is she who made him a hero, betraying and murdering her own kin to do so.  Jason has switched to modern Greek to counter Medea’s blistering attack. The musical accompaniment to his aria, with its rolling arpeggios, reminds us this is a sailor talking, one aware of the “storm her words have raised.”  But his argument, by turns chauvinist (Aphrodite made her fall for him and anyway the Greeks have conferred fame on Medea that she could never have enjoyed in the wilds of Iolchus) and smugly pragmatic ( by his alliance with the Corinthian princess he will benefit the whole family) can only transform the storm to a hurricane. The rising tension between husband and wife is highlighted by rapid chromatic figures and clusters of repeated notes, with Medea’s last curse descending in the familiar Asia Minor modal cadence. 

Aegeus’s entry, like all the male entries in the opera is grand, its heraldic quality accentuated by a grand dotted rhythm in contrast to the agitated triplets that mirror Medea’s frenzied state. New melodic material is introduced at the end of act 1 as Medea persuades Aegeus to swear before Zeus, Hades and Helios that he will offer Medea his protection. The majestic melody, taken up by the chorus, is one of the moments that recur in all three tragedies when worldly action is interrupted, and the sacred nature of prayer is reinforced by music that has an obvious liturgical character. For whatever else these tragedies are, Theodorakis reminds us they are also sacred dramas. The prayer over, the male chorus surround Aegeus, wishing him a safe journey in a rollicking aria that combines duple and triple meter, compressing the rhythm at times for dramatic effect.[vi] 

The prayer at the end of Act 1 is picked up by the female chorus at the beginning of Act 2, as they call on Hermes to guide Aegeus safely home. Medea also calls on Zeus and Helios briefly before she outlines her horrendous plan to the women and they express, finally, their horror. From now on Medea is in charge, but her triumph is more bitter than any victory. In the long scene leading to Medea’s killing of the children, Theodorakis emphasizes her wavering emotions in dramatic musical shifts. By turns lyrical and stormy, her poignant Act 12 aria addressed to the children as they enter, oblivious, with the tutor is a heart-stopping descending theme. 

The messenger’s description of the agonizing death of Creon and his daughter is told, for the most part, over an accompaniment of surging triplets now associated with moments of high drama. The full chorus join in the messenger’s description of the princess’s death ending with a slow drawn-out pianissimo monotone...“Everything ended now.” After Creon’s death is described in similar musical language, Medea, remorseless and terrible, prepares to kill her children. The scene the follows begins with the ominous music we heard at the beginning of the opera, but it is followed by an astonishing aria. The melody is based on the 1969 song “The Oracle,” a setting of a poem by Manos Eleftheriou and composed when Theodorakis had been removed from Athens and placed under house arrest in the remote mountain village of Zatouna. Like most of the music Theodorakis composed in Zatouna it is characterized by a lyrical melancholy, and in this new context it transforms the woman who has just gloated over the most odious of murders and is about to kill her own children, into a tender mother. It is the high point of the opera, not only because the aria itself is intrinsically beautiful, but because it is so arresting in this context. This is one of many moments in the opera when the composer’s approach to the ancient text seems quintessentially Greek. In Theodorakis’s music, as in many of the folk and popular songs of Greece,  one is often struck by such apparent contradictions in mood between the text and music.[vii]

It is hard to find a figure in English literature with whom we can compare Medea, but to those familiar with modern Greek literature the protagonist of Papadiamantis’s 1903 novel I Fonissa  (The Murderess ) Frangoyannou, who murders little girls to save them the inevitable pain of growing up female in a poor Greek village, must surely come to mind. Like Medea, the old village woman is depicted with an understanding, surprising for its time, of the invidious position of women in a male-dominated society.  Both heroines hover on the border of madness, but both are so possessed by their sense of tragic destiny that they never entirely lose our sympathy. 

One mark of tragedy, as Theodorakis has remarked (1995) is that all the characters have right on their side. Even Jason is given his redeeming moment. A despairing melody, it is derived from the repeated descending notes of the minor third that begin the evening hymn for Palm Sunday. Moreover it is familiar to most Greeks from its use in the poignant setting of a poem by Theodorakis’s brother Yiannis, from the cycle The Deserters :  “Hathika mesa stous dromous pou m’edesan yia panta...I lost myself in the streets that bound me forever...”. It is the lament of a man broken by despair and its appearance here signals a sudden reversal of Medea and Jason’s roles. Pain has given Jason new dignity while Medea is literally transformed, no helpless exile now but a triumphant alien swept aloft in a chariot drawn by dragons. 

As Marianne McDonald (1994, 1997: 320) remarks, Theodorakis’s orchestration in this penultimate scene of the drama effectively echoes this reversal of Medea and Jason’s roles. The use of brass instruments, that have signaled male authority,  now accompany Medea. In the final moments of the opera, Medea’s brief aria, declaring her intention to bury her children far from Corinth and praying to Helios to bathe them in light, is another sacred moment when all action stops. It grants Medea yet a final redemptive moment while Jason is left to rail against the gods, as his aria returns to the falling notes of his earlier lament. 

It is not only Theodorakis’s belief that all tragic characters have right on their side which colors his musical treatment of Medea and Jason. Jason becomes a figure of tragic dimensions only in the extreme of his helplessness and loss. If there is unmitigated evil in the operas, it lies not in a particular character but in worldly power and its inevitable abuses. In his choice of ancient texts, it is significant that Theodorakis has chosen heroines rather than heroes, and that all three stand alone against the authority of the state. References

Foley, Helene. 2000. Unpublished talk on Sophocles’ Electra  at New York’s Donnell  Library, June 8th.
Hirschon, Renee.  1989.  Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor  Refugees in Piraeus. Oxford: Clarendon Press
Holst, Gail. 1975. Road to Rembetika:: Music of a Greek Sub-culture. Athens: Denise  Harvey.
________________1980. Theodorakis: Myth and Politics in Modern Greek Music. Amsterdam:  Adolf Hakkert.
Holst-Warhaft, Gail. 1992. Dangerous Voices: Women’s Lament and Greek Literature.  London: Routledge.
Koutoulas, Asteris. 1998. O Mousikos Theodorakis: Keimena-Ergografia-Ktritikes. 1937-1996)   (Theodorakis the Musician: Articles, Working Notes, Criticism ). Athens: Nea  Synora.
McDonald, Marianne.1994. “Katharsis into Modern Opera.” The Journal of Modern Greek Arts, (Spring, 1994: 37-44).
________________1997.  “Medea as Politican and Diva: Riding the Dragon into the  Future.” In Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy and the  Arts, eds., James J. Clauss and Sarah Iles Johnton. Princeton: Princeton  University Press, pp.297-323.
Rosenberg, Harold. 1977   “The Art World.” New Yorker,  22 August, 83-4.
Seremetakis, C. Nadia.  1991. The Last Word: Women, Death and Divination in Inner Mani. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Theodorakis, Mikis. 1959.  “ I mousiki stin arhaia Elliniki traghodia.” (“Music in Ancient  Greek Tragedy”). Originally published in Kritiki, 2, 1959, p 78. Reproduced in  Theodorakis, 1961, 65-71
________________1960.  “To provlima tis mousikis stin arhaia traghodia” (“The problem  of Music in Ancient Tragedy”). Originally published in Avyi, 12/4/1960.  Reproduced in Theodorakis, 1961, 72-76.
________________1961. Yia tin Elliniki mousiki. (On Greek Music ).  Athens: Pleias
________________1966.  “To klima pou gennai ta gnisia traghoudhia.” (“The Climate  that Produces Genuine Songs”). Interview in Nea Yenia., Jan. 15th.
________________1972. Mousiki yia tis mazes (Music for the masses).  Athens: Olkos.
________________1974.  To Chreos  (The Debt ) (Two volumes.) Athens: Pleias.
________________1991a  Unpublished notes on Medea.
________________1991b  Unpublished notes on Medea.
________________1995.   Author’s interview with Theodorakis, Meiningen, May 5th.
________________1995b  Unpublished notes on Electra.
________________1997. Melopoimeni Piisi, Tomos A’ Traghoudia  (Poetry Set to Music: Vol.1,  Songs) .  Athens: Ypsilon.
________________1998. Melopoimeni Piisi, Tomos B’ Symphonica-Metasymphonica-Oratoria (Poetry Set to Music: Vol.2, Symphonic, Metasymphonic, Oratorios.  Athens:Ypsilon.
________________1999  Program notes for the premiere of Antigone  (October 7th).
Van Steen,  Gonda.  2000. Venom in Verse: Aristophanes in Modern Greece. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Wagner, Guy.           1995.  “Mikis Theodorakis: Myth and Opera.” Tageblatt /Zeitung fir Letzebuerg,  26th April.

Notes

[iii] The urban Greek songs known as rebetika  or rembetika  (sing. rebetiko) flourished in the aftermath of an influx of Asia Minor refugees into mainland Greece after the Turko-Greek war of 1920-22. For a brief introduction to the music and its social context, see Gail Holst, Road to Rembetika, 1975.
[iv] There are mant sources for the prejudice encountered by the refugees. See, for example, Renee Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus, 1978.
[v] The 1974 performance of Prometheus Bound  at Epidaurus, the last year of the military dictatorship, caused a near riot as the hero delivered his lines of defiance to an oppressive Olympian regime.
[vi] This is a technique hat anyone familiar with Theodorakis will recognise. For references to such passages in other Theodorakis works, see Gail Holst, Theodorakis: Myth and Politics in Modern Greek Music, 1980, especially pp.107-109).
[vii] On this quality in Theodorakis’s work, see Holst, 1980, p.114.

© Gail Holst 2000

continued: ELECTRA