Euripides

(b ?Athens, c485 bce; d ?Aegae [now Vodena], Macedonia, c406 bce). Greek tragic poet and major exponent of the ‘new music’ of the 5th century bce. He first entered the dramatic competitions at Athens in 455 bce (Vita Euripidis, 32). Of his tragedies, approximately 80 titles are known; 18 have survived together with extensive portions of a satyr-play, the Cyclops.

1. Euripides and music.

2. Later treatments.

WORKS BASED ON EURIPIDES' TEXTS

WRITINGS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN (1), ROBERT ANDERSON (2)

Euripides

1. Euripides and music.

In the earliest extant play (if genuine), the Rhesus (?445–441 bce), Euripides introduced or used in a new way a number of musical terms (393, melōdos; 550, melopoios; 651, humnopoios; 923, melōdia). In the Alcestis (438 bce) praises of the heroine (424, paian may be a remarkably early use to denote the encomium of a mortal – see Paean) are to sound on the lyre and also ‘in lyreless [alyrois] hymns’ (the antithesis remains obscure; see Dale on 445–7). Apollo is described charming wild animals with his lyre and piping ‘shepherds’ wedding hymns’ (for the flocks) on his syrinx (570–87).

The nurse in the Medea (431 bce) dismisses as pointless the singing of traditional poetry at social gatherings (190–203); the playwright knew that such texts were no longer thought an essential part of paideia (‘culture’).

The Andromache (?426 bce) contains the first reference to collaboration between two poet-composers (476–8), as sure to produce discord; Aristophanes alleged that Euripides’ slave Cephisophon helped him to write his monodies (Frogs, 944, 1048, 1408, 1452–3). The Cyclops (?425 bce) contains predictable references to instruments associated with satyrs and Dionysiac worship – Barbitos, tympanum (see Tympanum), Crotala (40, 66, 205; also 443–4, the ‘Asiatic kithara’). Manuscripts of this play have a stage direction, ōdē endothen (‘singing within’, 487), comparable with the Aulos interlude required after 1263 of Aristophanes’ Frogs.

According to Adrastus in The Suppliant Women (?423 bce), creating songs should give pleasure to the humnopoios, otherwise there will be no pleasure for the hearer (180–83). This new approach to the creative mood constitutes one of the very few references to music to occur in dialogue rather than in monody or choral lyric. The Heracles (?420 bce) contains an extended choral passage (673–95) praising music and worship, and a description of Apollo as kitharode in which the Linus song is represented as being of good omen (348–51) (contrast Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 121, 159).

In The Trojan Women (415 bce) musical imagery intensifies the mood of mourning throughout. The Iphigenia in Tauris (?414 bce) contains one striking image among many that are conventional: the chorus tells Iphigenia that she will go home on an Argive ship with Pan as boatswain accompanying the rowers on his syrinx (1125–7). In the Electra (?c417–413 bce) ‘the aulos-loving dolphin’ is described leaping round the Greek ships (435–7); Aristophanes used these lines for his mocking cento of choral lyric tags from Euripides mixed with nonsense phrases (Frogs, 1317–18).

In Helen (412 bce) the title character imagines the Sirens as ‘winged maidens, holding a Libyan aulos [lōton, made of lotus-wood] or panpipes [suringas] or lyres [phormingas]’ and joining their tears to her cries of lamentation (ailinois; 167–73); such early evidence for Greek conceptions of the Sirens is rare. An entire choric sequence (1301–68) is devoted to an account of the rites of Dionysus and the Mother of the Gods: the crotala sound, the bullroarer (rhombos) whirls in circles, and Aphrodite plays the cymbals and tympana and takes up the aulos.

In the Ion (c412 bce) Creusa, whom Apollo ravished, speaks of the god with his ‘seven-voiced kithara’ who plays on, disregarding her grief (881–4, 905–6). The play contains a remarkable description of sky and moon joining in the dance during the all-night festival of Dionysus (1077–80), which must not be mistaken for a cosmic philosophy of music. A chance remark in the dialogue (1177–8) shows that at banquets the aulos players did not perform until after the meal. A minor tragedy, The Phoenician Women (?410 bce), contains fine lines describing the walls of Thebes raised by the power of Amphion’s lyre (822–4); and the Orestes (408 bce) refers again to the Linus song, explaining its Asiatic origins in lines (1395–9) that read almost like a scholarly footnote.

Two posthumously produced plays, probably written in 407 bce, yield some details about instruments. The Iphigenia in Aulis contains the claim that Paris imitated ‘the Phrygian auloi of Olympus’ on the panpipe (576–8) – a highly unlikely sequence of development. The Bacchae gives two varying accounts of the origin and history of the tympanum (58–61, 124–34; see Dodds). In this play there are many references to the tympanum, like the aulos a characteristic instrument of the Bacchanalian revel, and also to song: tranquil maenads are described as ‘singing a Bacchic song against [anti-] one another’ (1057), in other words antiphonally.

Among the fragments of Euripides’ lost tragedies are references in the Hypsipyle to kithara music with vocal accompaniment and to elegies accompanied by the lyra (Bond, frags.I.iv.6–8 and I.iii.9). In better-known fragments from the Antiope Euripides made Amphion a symbol of culture, aptly represented by music (see Amphion (i)).

The many musical references in the extant plays are not haphazard. Euripides, like Sophocles, used them to define a mood and to heighten the emotional tension by intensification or, often, by a contrast between the music of past joy and that of present sorrow (see Haldane, 1965). He showed far more concern than Sophocles for immediate effect. In the tragedies of Sophocles, the chorus plays a central role, but Euripides in his tragedies reduced the importance of the chorus, as Aristotle noted (Poetics, 1456a25–32).

Aristophanes parodied Euripides’ lyrics in the Frogs, where he seized on certain features of Euripides’ compositions – his repetition of words and his habit of setting a syllable to a melisma rather than a single note (see Frogs, 1314; and Euripides, Electra, 437, where heilissomenos must be lengthened to match numphaias skopias in the antistrophe, 447; for examples of repeated words, see Frogs, 1338, 1354–5, and Orestes, 140, 149, 163, 174). Generally he criticized bizarre and even indecent sources from which Euripides allegedly drew his monodies and choral lyrics (see Frogs, 1297–1307).

Such charges reveal that Euripides had become deeply involved in the late 5th-century reforms of rhythmic and melodic conventions known to modern scholars as the ‘new music’ (see Timotheus, with whom Euripides was friendly). While Euripides’ many references to a variety of instruments do not prove that his plays had any other accompaniment than the customary single aulete, both Sextus Empiricus (Against the Musicians, 13) and the Byzantine treatise On Tragedy (see Browning) associate Euripides with the use of the kithara in tragedy. Tympana must have been used by the chorus of the Bacchae; moreover, the lost Antiope (Nauck, frag.182) contained a passage of hexameters sung to the lyre. Since the Antiope had as its central character the legendary kitharode Amphion, a lyre must have been used (Sophocles’ Thamyras provides a close parallel), although little more may have been involved than the pretence of regular performance on the lyre. In any case, the famous ‘tophlattothrattophlattothrat’ refrain of the Aristophanic Euripides (Frogs, 1286–95) does not alone constitute evidence for its normal use, nor do the immediately following references to ‘lyrion’ and ‘lyra’ (1304–5) by the Aristophanic Aeschylus.

Various tonoi and genera were used for tragic composition (see Greece, §I, 4). According to Pseudo-Plutarch (On Music, 1136a–37a), tragic authors used the Dorian, Lydian, Mixolydian and Ionian (Iastian). The Pseudo-Aristotelian Problems (xix.48) notes that the Hypodorian and Hypophrygian were reserved for the arias of solo actors; and the Byzantine treatise On Tragedy (Browning, 76) states that they were introduced by Agathon, a playwright contemporary with Euripides.

According to the Byzantine treatise (p.69), the older tragic poets had used either the pure enharmonic genus or a mixture of enharmonic and diatonic genera (see below, on the Orestes fragment), and none before Euripides had used the chromatic, specifically the soft chromatic genus. Both Euripides and Agathon (to whom the introduction of the chromatic was ascribed) may have contributed to the acceptance of this genus, which was suspect at that time and later (see Hibeh musical papyrus). The introduction of the Hypodorian and Hypophrygian may also have been due largely to Euripides’ advocacy.

Two fragments of papyrus, dating from the 3rd century bce, preserve passages of text from two of Euripides’ tragedies with accompanying musical notation: PLeid Inv.510 records text from Iphigenia in Aulis, including a section in which Iphigenia and the chorus alternate every few lines (1500–09) and a choral section (783–94); and PWien G2315 exhibits a few choral lines from Orestes (338–44; see illustration). Both fragments reveal rhythmic and metric anomalies, reduplicated vowels and short melismas on single syllables. A modulation from one tonos to another occurs in the Iphigenia papyrus, while the notation in the Orestes papyrus clearly indicates the chromatic or enharmonic Lydian tonos. In the absence of additional evidence, it is impossible to be certain whether the papyri preserve the music of Euripides, but they do accord with features of his style, as later parodied by Aristophanes and described by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in chapter xi of On Literary Composition. Quoting a passage from an earlier section of Orestes (140–42), Dionysius observes that Euripides regularly ignored the natural pitch accentuation and rhythm of the Greek text, characteristics markedly apparent in both of these musical fragments (see Pöhlmann; Richter, 1971; and Mathiesen, 1981).

Without doubt, Euripides was in the forefront of the ‘new music’, and this is substantiated by the identity of his associates, the comments and parodies of contemporaries and, above all, the libretto-like nature of many of his sung texts. His monodies demanded soloists with coloratura skills; his choral lyrics, too, would seem to have been musically demanding, and their vividness and range of emotion suggest a powerful use of rhythm and melody. In Euripides’ tragedies, as in the kitharoedic nomoi of his friend Timotheus, 5th-century Greek music reached the climax of its development.

Euripides

2. Later treatments.

11 plays, including the doubtful Rhesus, have provided opera material from the 17th century to the present day. The stories of Alcestis, Hippolytus, Iphigenia (in Aulis and Tauris) and Medea have proved particularly fruitful, and the terrors of The Bacchae have appealed to a number of modern composers. For many librettists, Euripides has been filtered through the art of such French dramatists as Corneille (Médée, 1634), Racine (Andromaque, 1667; Iphigénie en Aulide, 1674; Phèdre, based on the Hippolytus, 1677) and Voltaire (Oreste, 1750).

Euripides

WORKS BASED ON EURIPIDES' TEXTS

(selective list)

unless otherwise stated, dates are those of first performance

operas

incidental music, solo, choral, orchestral

Euripides

WRITINGS

A. Nauck, ed.: Tragicorum graecorum fragmenta (Leipzig, 1856, 2/1889/R with suppl. by B. Snell), 417–723

D.L. Page, ed. and trans.: Greek Literary Papyri, i (London and Cambridge, MA, 1941, 2/1942), 68ff, 86ff, 108–9

E.R. Dodds, ed.: Euripides: Bacchae, (Oxford, 1944, 2/1960/R)

A.M. Dale, ed.: Euripides: Alcestis (Oxford, 1954, 2/1961/R)

D. Grene and R. Lattimore, eds.: Euripides I–V (Chicago, 1955–9/R)

G.W. Bond, ed.: Euripides: Hypsipyle (Oxford, 1963)

C. Austin, ed.: Nova fragmenta Euripidea in papyris reperta (Berlin, 1968)

Euripides

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Bethe: ‘Die griechische Tragödie und die Musik’, Neue Jahrbücher für das klassische Altertum, Geschichte und deutsche Literatur, Jg.x (1907), 81–95

T. Reinach: ‘Euripides und der Choreut’, Hermes, xlv (1910), 151–5

D.D. Feaver: ‘The Musical Setting of Euripides’ Orestes’, American Journal of Philology, lxxxi (1960), 1–15

G.A. Longman: ‘The Musical Papyrus: Euripides, Orestes 332–40’, Classical Quarterly, new ser., xii (1962), 61–6

E. Moutsopoulos: ‘Euripide et la philosophie de la musique’, Revue des études grecques, lxxv (1962), 396–452

R. Browning, ed.: ‘A Byzantine Treatise on Tragedy’, Geras: Studies Presented to George Thomson, ed. L. Varcl and R.F. Willetts (Prague, 1963), 67–81

J.A. Haldane: ‘Musical Themes and Imagery in Aeschylus’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, lxxxv (1965), 33–41 [on Euripides]

W.D. Anderson: Ethos and Education in Greek Music (Cambridge, MA, 1966), 58ff

L. Richter: ‘Zum Stilwandel der griechischen Musik im 5./4. Jahrhundert’, Forschungen und Fortschritte, xli (1967), 114–16

L. Richter: ‘Die neue Musik der griechischen Antike’, AMw, xxv (1968), 1–18, 134–47

E. Pöhlmann, ed.: Denkmäler altgriechischer Musik (Nuremberg, 1970), 78ff

L. Richter: ‘Das Musikfragment aus dem Euripideischen Orestes’, DJbM, xvi (1971), 111–49

L. Richter: ‘Musikalische Aspekte der attischen Tragödienchöre’, BMw, xiv (1972), 247–98

D. Jourdan-Hemmerdinger: ‘Un nouveau papyrus musical d’Euripide (présentation provisoire)’, Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres (1973), 292–302 [with comments by H.I. Marrou]

G. Marzi: ‘Il papiro musicale dell’ “Oreste” di Euripide (Pap. Vindob. G.2315)’, Scritti in onore di Luigi Ronga (Milan and Naples, 1973), 315–29

J. Solomon: ‘A Diphonal Diphthong in the Orestes Papyrus’, American Journal of Philology, xcvii (1976), 172–3

G. Comotti: ‘Words, Verse and Music in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis’, Museum philologum londiniense, ii (1977), 69–84

J. Solomon: ‘Orestes 344–45: Colometry and Music’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, xviii (1977), 71–83

D.D. Feaver: ‘A New Note, Omega, in the Orestes Papyrus?’, American Journal of Philology, xcix (1978), 38–40

M. Pintacuda: La musica nella tragedia greca (Cefalù, 1978), 157–216

D. Jourdan-Hemmerdinger: ‘Le nouveau papyrus d’Euripide: qu’apporte-t-il à la théorie et à l’histoire de la musique?’, Les sources en musicologie: Orléans 1979, 35–65

T.J. Mathiesen: ‘New Fragments of Ancient Greek Music’, AcM, liii (1981), 14–32

A. Barker, ed.: Greek Musical Writings, i: The Musician and his Art (Cambridge, 1984), 62–92 [translated excerpts referring to musical subjects]

T.J. Mathiesen: ‘Harmonia and Ethos in Ancient Greek Music’, JM, iii (1984), 264–79

T.J. Mathiesen: ‘Rhythm and Meter in Ancient Greek Music’, Music Theory Spectrum, vii (1985), 159–80

M.K. Černý: ‘Druhý zhudebněný fragment z Euripida’ [The second Euripides fragment with music], Listy filologické, cix (1986), 132–40

W.D. Anderson: Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 210–22

T.J. Mathiesen: Apollo's Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Lincoln, NE, 1999), 94–125