Classical Mythology

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

758 THE SURVIVAL OF CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY


Terry, Walter. Isadora Duncan, Her Life, Her Art, Her Legacy. New York: Dodd, Mead &
Co., 1963.

FILM
Evans, Arthur B. Jean Cocteau and His Films of Orphic Identity. Philadelphia: Art Alliance
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Mackinnon, Kenneth. Greek Tragedy into Film. London: Croom Helm, 1986.
Martin, Mick, and Marsha Porter. Video Movie Guide 2001. New York: Ballantine Books.
McDonald, Marianne. Euripides in Cinema: The Heart Made Visible. Philadelphia: Centrum,
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Solomon, Jon. The Ancient World in the Cinema. Rev. ed. New Haven: Yale University
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Winkler, Martin, ed. Classics and Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001 [1991].

NOTES


  1. For a survey, see M. L. West, Ancient Greek Music (New York: Oxford University Press,
    1992).

  2. For the history of the musical treatment of Vergilian themes and characters, see
    A. E. F. Dickinson, "Music for the Aeneid," Greece & Rome 6 (1959), pp. 129-147; and
    James S. Constantine, "Vergil in Opera," Classical Outlook 46 (1969), pp. 49 ff. Cavalli
    wrote La Didone in 1641. A libretto by Metastasio, Didone Abbandonata, was first set
    to music by D. A. Sarro (1724); subsequently many other composers set this same
    poem to music, among them Luigi Cherubini (1786).

  3. Liszt and more recently Owen Jander (a musicologist) connect the brief second move-
    ment of Beethoven's lovely Concerto No. 4 in G (for piano and orchestra) to the
    Orpheus myth: the pianist represents Orpheus and the orchestra represents the Furies,
    whom an ever more assured soloist gradually tames in their alternating utterances.

  4. A pioneer in setting the poems of Goethe and Schiller (among others) to music was
    Johann Friedrich Reichhart (1752-1814), for example, "Prometheus" (Goethe) and
    "Aeneas zu Dido" (Vergil/Schiller). It is a rewarding pleasure to make musical com-
    parisons, e.g., the setting of Goethe's "Prometheus" by Reichhart, Schubert, and Wolf.

  5. See Michael Ewans, Wagner and Aeschylus: The Ring and the Oresteia (London: Faber
    & Faber, 1982). Of historical interest is a mammoth work inspired by Wagner's Ring,
    a cycle of operas entitled Homerische Welt by August Bungert (1845-1915), which failed
    to win favor.

  6. Inspired by the Trojan Cycle is an opera in one act by Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957),
    Penthesilea (1925, after Kleist), which may be compared, not unfavorably, to Strauss'
    Elektra for dramatic impact and musical idiom.

  7. Quoted, without specific reference, by Ned Rorem, "In Search of American Opera,"
    Opera News 56, 1 (July 1991), p. 9.

  8. Quoted in David Ewen, American Composers, A Biographical Dictionary (New York:
    G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1982), p. 65.

  9. An indigenous development, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was the emer-
    gence of jazz in New Orleans, a new musical genre created by black musicians who
    blended tribal African music with European and American styles. This along with
    the creation of blues and ragtime (of whom Scott Joplin was the king) came to be re-
    garded as epitomizing American folk art. Classical composers sometimes use ele-

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