In 8 AD, the poet Ovid discovered himself in a nasty place. Fairly actually. Exiled by Emperor Augustus, he was destined to reside out his closing years within the Black Sea port of Tomis the place, on the fringes of the Roman world, few individuals spoke his language.
Had Ovid – or, to present him his full identify, Publius Ovidius Naso – lived in our social media age, he would have probably leapt straight onto Twitter; because it was, he poured out his emotions of woe in two units of verse, the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto.
In his personal phrases, it was ‘carmen et error’ – a poem and a mistake – that had bought him banished. The ‘carmen’ was in all probability his Ars Amatoria, his educational information to creating love, written on the very time that Augustus was selling healthful residing and household values. The ‘error’ might properly have been one thing he had unwittingly seen or heard in imperial circles – severe sufficient to make Augustus need him as far out of the best way as attainable.
This sorry state was a far cry from the self-confidence with which Ovid rounded off his Metamorphoses, his magnum opus accomplished earlier that very same 12 months.
‘My identify shall by no means be forgotten,’ he proclaimed within the work’s epilogue. ‘All through all ages… I shall reside in my fame.’
He was not incorrect. Round 1,500 years after his loss of life, these held in thrall by his craftsmanship would come with Titian, whose Ovid-inspired work embrace the deeply disturbing Diana and Callisto and The Rape of Europa, and Shakespeare – the Bard even mentions Ovid by identify in Love’s Labour’s Misplaced.
At across the similar time, composer Jacopo Peri was introducing his Dafne and Euridice to the Florentine stage. Usually regarded at this time as the primary operas ever written, each works drew on figures from the Metamorphoses for his or her title characters (and Monteverdi’s Orfeo would observe quickly after). From the artwork kind’s outset, Peri had set a development.
The Metamorphoses is as distinctive in its development as it’s masterful in its elaborate scene-painting (‘ekphrasis’, to make use of the technical time period) and punchy story-telling.
Over the course of 15 books and 12,000 strains of hexameter verse, Ovid takes us from the creation of the Earth to the deification of Julius Caesar, relating round 250 myths alongside the best way. The metamorphoses of the title confer with the varied transformations that lots of the characters bear, typically into animals and birds, typically into inanimate objects. Love, lust, heroism and horror – plus all method of devious deific interferences – are all a part of the combo.
Most composers impressed by the Metamorphoses have tended to focus their attentions on only one or two tales, however a pair have had grander visions. In 1783, the Austrian Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf set about writing a set of 15 symphonies, one for every guide of the Metamorphoses. Sadly, he solely bought so far as E-book 12, and of these solely six survive at this time.
These six, nevertheless, are packed stuffed with character, not least Sinfonia No. 2, which depicts the sorry finish of Phaeton – having requested his dad, the Solar, if he can take his chariot out for a spin, he’s despatched headlong into the River Eridanus by a thunderbolt from Jupiter. The horn fanfares that introduce Sinfonia No. 3, in the meantime, inform us that we’re about to share the misadventures of Actaeon, who, whereas out searching, possibilities upon the goddess Diana whereas she is having a shower. Within the second motion, Dittersdorf charms us with a pleasant woodland idyll earlier than the goddess’s temper turns ugly.
Britten was one other composer to forged his web broadly over the Metamorphoses. Premiered on the Aldeburgh Pageant in 1951, his Six Metamorphoses after Ovid is scored for simply the one instrument – a solo oboe – and begins with the god Pan enjoying the pipes produced from reeds into which the naiad Syrinx has lately been turned in a bid to flee his advances. Thereafter, the temper fluctuates between raucous and reflective as we observe the varied fates and frolics of Phaeton, Niobe, Bacchus, Narcissus (extra of him later) and Arethusa.
It’s on the opera stage, although, that Metamorphoses has had its best impression, and whereas the poem’s common godly interferences and catalogue of dismal fates lend themselves most naturally to tragedy, not all Ovid-inspired operas finish bleakly – he has his jollier moments too. And sometimes, the poem itself gives simply the place to begin for a plot. As lots of the tales within the Metamorphoses are coated in only a few strains, composers and their librettists have had scope to elaborate, both by including materials from different classical sources or inventing their very own.
Take Cadmus et Hermione, the work with which Jean-Baptiste Lully and his librettist Philippe Quinault launched themselves to the Parisian opera world in 1673. In Ovid’s unique textual content, Concord (Hermione) enters the scene solely after Cadmus has killed Mars’s dragon; in Quinault’s remodeling, our hero has to slay the beast to avoid wasting her from its clutches. Lully and Quinault would revisit Ovid a number of occasions, in Atys, Isis, Proserpine, Persée and Phaëthon.
It was the destiny of Cadmus’s grandson, the bathtime-disturbing Actaeon, that captured the eye of Lully’s compatriot Charpentier. His 1683 Actéon stays comparatively near Ovid, culminating within the second of horror when the eponymous hero is was a stag by the aggrieved Diana and ripped aside by his personal hounds. The identical goddess’s wrath was as soon as once more skilled by French opera-goers in Desmarets’s 1697 Venus et Adonis and the Gallic Ovidian love affair was carried on properly into the 18th century with Rameau’s Pigmalion (1748) and Leclair’s Scylla et Glaucis (1746).
Ovid-infused opera was proving simply as common elsewhere in Europe. In 1744, the Covent Backyard viewers in London welcomed the primary efficiency of Handel’s Semele (his 1718 oratorio Acis and Galatea can also be based mostly on the Metamorphoses), and Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, premiered in Vienna in 1762, stays his finest recognized opera at this time.
Strive additionally Gluck’s one-act Philemon e Baucis, written seven years later. In Ovid’s telling, this aged couple have their lifetime of kindness and devotion rewarded by Jupiter and Mercury who, visiting them as unknown company, flip them into bushes in order that they’ll reside collectively ceaselessly – a very touching second. Gluck’s tackle the topic, which as an alternative portrays the pair as younger lovers, was adopted 4 years later by Haydn’s marionette opera Philemon und Baucis. By this stage, Salzburg had been alerted to the skills of 1 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose first opera Apollo et Hyacinthus, written in 1767 when he was 11 years previous, attracts on materials from E-book 10 of the Metamorphoses.
Although Ovid begins to turn out to be a much less common customer to the opera stage from the nineteenth century, Gounod paid homage in his Philémon et Baucis, premiered in Paris in 1860, shortly after Offenbach had cocked a snook along with his irreverent Orphée aux enfers. The ultimate moments of Richard Strauss’s 1938 opera Daphne, through which the title character is was a laurel tree, reveals the German composer in lushly evocative kind, whereas Harrison Birtwistle’s fascination with classical fable finds maybe its best realisation in 1986’s The Masks of Orpheus.
Away from opera, composers’ creativeness appears to have been fired by one Metamorphoses character particularly: Narcissus, the youth who falls in love along with his personal reflection in a pond, ignoring the charms of the forlorn Echo. That is the scene depicted with luxurious orchestration and haunting wordless refrain in Nikolay Tcherepnin’s 1911 ballet Narcisse et Echo – consider Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé right here – and by solo violin and piano in ‘Narcisse’, a part of 1915’s Mythes by Szymanowski (whose personal copy of the Metamorphoses may be considered in Warsaw College library).
More moderen admirers have included Thea Musgrave, in 1987’s Narcissus for solo flute with digital delay system, and Ryan Wigglesworth, whose 2014 cantata Echo and Narcissus units phrases from the interpretation of the Metamorphoses by poet Ted Hughes.
All these works are, after all, only a fraction of an ongoing musical story. As Ovid himself observes in E-book 15 of the Metamorphoses, ‘Omnia mutantur, nihil interit’: every part modifications, nothing perishes. As a supply of inspiration for composers, his personal depiction of change stays common to at the present time.
