Classical Mythology, 7th Edition - obinfonet: dia logou

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
Press, 1977.
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,
1983.
Solomon, Jon. The Ancient World in the Cinema. Rev. ed. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2001 [1978].
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 movement
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 comparisons,
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 emergence
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 regarded
as epitomizing American folk art. Classical composers sometimes use ele-