Boulez Ensemble XV

Myths Ancient and Modern

On the Boulez Ensemble’s Greek Program

Harry Haskell

Throughout history, the Greeks have appealed to their ancient gods and heroes for insights into the predicaments endemic to the human condition. Greece’s recent economic and social travails are no exception. As the English journalist and historian Julius Marozzi wittily observes, “Are you puzzled by Promethean parallels? Surprised by Sisyphean allusions? Perhaps you’re exhausted by Xerxes? No explanation of the Greek crisis these days is complete without a reference or two to Greek mythology, which appears to be an even more popular way of explaining the hellishly complex calamity than dipping into real history for illumination. Just as Athens is peppered with ancient ruins, from the peerless Acropolis to the classical Agora, so comment pieces are littered with vignettes about the capricious Greek gods, longsuffering heroes, sacrificial victims and half-human monsters bent on human destruction.”

The popular faith in the enduring power of ancient myth—or, in the case of Xerxes, history—to help guide us through the contemporary labyrinth of systemic financial collapse is not as paradoxical as it may sound, especially given that the very vocabulary we use to describe the current situation—“economy,” “crisis,” even the word “Europe” itself—is rooted in ancient Greek language and modes of thought. In laying the groundwork for modern Western democracy, the early Greeks used stories of potent yet alltoo-human immortals to make sense of a chaotic, capricious, often senselessly violent world—a world in some ways much like our own. In the words of the eminent classicist Paul Cartledge, Greek myths have timeless relevance because they address “the most difficult questions that don’t admit of an easy answer.” The same can be said of the eight works on tonight’s program, variously indebted as they are to the rich legacy of Hellenic culture.

Medea and Prometheus No two mythological figures have had more fruitful afterlives than Medea, the vengeful sorceress who punishes her bigamous husband, Jason, by slaying their two children and his new wife; and Prometheus, the Titan whom Zeus condemns to eternal torment for the crime of bestowing fire on mankind. Toshio Hosokawa’s Medea Fragments for mixed chamber ensemble was written in 1996 as an overture to a planned opera based on the character. The meditative, Zen-like spirituality that suffuses the Japanese composer’s music, and his emphasis on silence as sound’s equal partner, might seem ill suited to depict a woman in the grip of violent rage. Yet Hosokawa has never shied away from suffering and brutality—witness Stilles Meer (“Still Ocean”), an elegy to victims of Japan’s devastating tsunami that the Hamburg State Opera premiered in 2016. The haunting sonic landscape of Medea Fragments, with its breathy susurrations, eerie multiphonics, and twangy “snap” pizzicatos, tracks one scholar’s description of the sorceress as “a dream and a nightmare, the romance heroine who becomes the murderous mother.”

Prometheus held special fascination for 19th-century writers, artists, and musicians. A long line of Romantic composers, from Beethoven at the dawn of the century (in his ballet The Creatures of Prometheus) to Fauré at its close (in his opera Prométhée), explored the myth’s themes of heroic individualism, technological progress, and rejection of secular and religious authority. As Graham Johnson points out, Prometheus had deeply personal associations for Schubert, both as a son rebelling against his domineering father and as a free-spirited, possibly homosexual artist in the highly repressed, and repressive, society of Metternich’s Vienna. No trace remains of the Prometheus cantata that Schubert drafted in 1816, but three years later he cast the ill-fated hero as the narrator of a dramatic solo lied. In Schubert’s setting, the Titan’s impassioned rant against the gods becomes at once a cry of freedom and a paean to artistic creation.

Like Schubert, Wolf based his Prometheus—one of the 51 Goethe Songs published in 1889—on a fragmentary verse drama that Goethe had started and abandoned in 1773.

Yet the two lieder could hardly be more different. Although Goethe’s text is spoken by the hero in his workshop, well before his altercation with Zeus, Wolf depicts Prometheus not as humanity’s enlightened benefactor but as an anguished loner who apparently foresees that he will be chained to a rock and tortured for his hubris. Echoing Schubert, Wolf opens his setting with “storm music” characterized by a vigorous motif in dotted rhythm. But the apocalyptic atmos - phere of his extended piano introduction, with its melodramatic tremolos and trills, is a far cry from Schubert’s brief chordal exordium. In place of Schubert’s flexible melodic line, Wolf ’s protagonist cries out in urgently declamatory monotones, a solitary hero railing against fate.

Greek Modernist Although Nikos Skalkottas is best known for his 36 Greek Dances for orchestra, their accessible folkloristic idiom is only distantly related to the atonal and serial works on which his reputation rests as one of Schoenberg’s outstanding protégés. Like Dmitri Mitropoulos, his fellow pupil at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik in the 1920s, Skalkottas found Weimar Germany more hospitable to his music than his native Greece. In 1929, two years after enrolling in Schoenberg’s class at the Academy of the Arts, he made a splash with well-received student performances of three early chamber works. But an attempt to replicate his success in Athens a year later failed abysmally. Devastated by the vitriolic reviews, the composer retreated to Berlin, where he subsisted on the largess of a wealthy Greek expatriate named Manolis Benakis.

By 1931, Benakis was threatening to cut off his support and the two men’s relationship was rapidly deteriorating. The Octet for Winds and String Quartet had its premiere in June 1931 on a concert devoted to music by Schoenberg’s students. Hoping to win back Benakis’s favor, Skalkottas reported that the performance had been a succès d’estime: “The moral result = the best to date. The practical result = 000000!!!!!” When Benakis ignored the hint, the composer took up a project closer to his patron’s heart, the Greek Dances. In flirting with musical nationalism, however, he warned that he was not prepared to sacrifice his credentials as a cosmopolitan modernist. After all, he wrote, “neither you nor I wore Greek kilts when we came to Berlin… We all wore city clothes like the Europeans.”

Somewhat disingenuously, Skalkottas described the thoroughly up-to-date Octet to Benakis as “not at all modern.” Yet despite his idiosyncratic use of atonal and twelve-tone techniques, the work wears its Schoenbergian clothes lightly. In the outer fast movements, Skalkottas treats the winds and strings as more or less separate four-voice choirs; the music’s sharply etched, neoclassical textures, sprightly rhythms, conversational repartee, and slightly loopy lyricism conjure a lighthearted mood that belies the composer’s incipient descent into depression and inactivity. Even the central Andante cantabile, though darker and decidedly less divertimento- like than the fast movements, reflects a surprisingly good-natured equanimity.

Dancers and Sirens

An ecstatic, Dionysian impulse links the last four works on the program. The gracefully arching phrases of Danseuses de Delphes (“Dancers of Delphi”)—from the first book of Debussy’s piano Préludes, published in 1910—mirror the poses of the ancient Greek Bacchantes that he observed in a plaster reproduction at the Louvre. Three years later Gabriel Mourey invited Debussy to compose incidental music for his play Psyché, about the beautiful princess who bewitches the love god Eros. Mourey described Syrinx, the flute solo that the dying Pan plays offstage in the third act, as “a real jewel of restrained emotion, of sadness, of plastic beauty, of discreet tenderness and poetry.” Debussy’s rhapsodic vignette consists of a simple melodic line, deliberately shorn, in his words, of “any intervention of color.” As ever, the goal of the highly sexed mountain god is seduction—in the play, a nymph listening to his rapturous melody likens its intoxicating allure to that of sweet, fragrant wine—but Debussy’s languorous roulades convey more than mere physical passion, for their sensuousness is tinged with the melancholy anticipation of Pan’s impending death.

The Sonata for Solo Violin that Skalkottas composed in 1925 predates his midlife awakening to his national identity. No less than Debussy’s Syrinx, however, this exuberant and highly virtuosic work ultimately traces its ancestry back to ancient Greek monody. Like many other composers in the interwar period, Skalkottas drew further inspiration from 18th-century musical forms and procedures. The Sonata is essentially a quirky, modernist take on the Baroque dance suite. The first movement, fast and furious, is characterized

by chains of motoric patterns in alternating duple and triple rhythms. The second is a relaxed, slightly woozy minuet, the third a blistering bourée, while the intricately contrapuntal finale is sandwiched between slow, ruminative recitatives. The music’s bravura character reflects Skalkottas’s on-andoff career as a professional violinist in Berlin and Athens.

The final port of call on our mythological odyssey is the Isle of the Sirens, where Odysseus and his shipmates narrowly elude the legendary temptresses’ fatal attraction. Composed in 1997 for violinist Isabelle Faust and the Munich Chamber Orchestra, Jörg Widmann’s Insel der Sirenen is the first panel of a Greek-themed triptych that also includes works inspired by Icarus and Tiresias. The expressive marking “gloomy, sinister” reflects the composer’s vision of the sirens as “messengers of the world of the dead.” The solo violin enters belatedly, emitting a high, shrill, sustained note after the orchestral strings have dropped out, their “stratospheric song” suspended over the void. “The silence of the sirens,” Widmann writes, “is ultimately even more menacing than the actual song.” Insel der Sirenen, like many of his other works, offers a sonic environment in which the boundaries between music and noise, motion and stillness, are blurred or dissolved. With its subtle timbral effects and extended instrumental techniques, the music runs the gamut of expression from dreamy rumination to apocalyptic frenzy.

Harry Haskell is a former music editor for Yale University Press and a program annotator for New York’s Carnegie Hall, the Edinburgh Festival, and other venues. His books include The Early Music Revival: A History and Maiden Flight, a novel about his grandfather’s marriage to Katharine Wright, sister of Wilbur and Orville.