Ancient Drama in Music for the Modern Stage

Peter Brown and Suzana Ograjen%Ssek have put together a fine collection of essays on opera and Greek drama; some will appeal to a specialized readership; others have a very broad cultural interest.

• 1. Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts: the Institutions of Greco-Roman Theatre and the Development of European Opera ; 2. Greek Tragedy and Opera: Notes on a Marriage Manque ; 3. Incidental Music and the Revival of Greek Tragedy from the Italian Renaissance to German Romanticism ; 4. Phaedra's Handmaiden: Tragedy as Comedy and Spectacle in Seventeenth-Century Opera ; 5. Dance in Lully's Alceste ; 6. The Ghost of Alcestis ; 7. The Rise and Fall of Andromache on the Operatic Stage, 1660s-1820s ; 8. Opera Librettos and Greek Tragedy in Eighteenth-Century Venice: The Case of Agostino Piovene ; 9. Ancient Tragedy in Opera, and the Operatic Debut of Oedipus the King (Munich, 1729) ; 10. Establishing a text, securing a reputation: Metastasio's Use of Aristotle ; 11. The Gods out of the Machine ... and their Comeback ; 12. Who Killed Gluck? ; 13. The Metamorphosis of a Greek Comedy and its Protagonist: Some Musical Versions of Aristophanes' Lysistrata ; 14. Taneyev's Oresteia ; 15. Crossings of Experimental Music and Greek Tragedy ; 16. The Action Drama and the Still Life: Enescu, Stravinsky, and Oedipus ; 17. Sing Evohe! Three Twentieth-Century Operatic Versions of Euripides' Bacchae ; 18. Re-staging the Welttheater: A Critical View of Carl Orff's Antigonae and Oedipus der Tyrann ; 19. 'Batter the Doom Drum': The Music for Peter Hall's Oresteia and other Productions of Greek Tragedy by Harrison Birtwistle and Judith Weir