Ancient Drama in Music for the Modern Stage

Peter Brown is a Lecturer in Classics at Oxford University, a Fellow of Trinity College, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama. He has published extensively on Greek and Roman drama (mainly comedy), and his translation of the Comedies of Terence appeared in the Oxford World's Classics series in January, 2008.Suzana Ograjensekis a Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Unversity of Cambridge, and a former Research Assistant at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama in Oxford. She is a specialist in baroque opera and has worked extensively in Handel studies.

Review from previous edition Peter Brown and Suzana Ograjensek 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