Cassandra, Op. 47 (1983)

Description:

The excerpt of Cassandra from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon (lines 1072-1329) was one of three excerpts from ancient Greek tragedy that, over the last twenty-five years, exerted an increasingly powerful attraction on me. The other two, the second stasimon from Euripides’s Iphigenia in Tauris and the second stasimon from Aeschylus’s Persians, I have already utilised in my works Stasimon B (1964) and Epiklesis (1968).

Cassandra posed additional challenges: firstly, the complex structure of the excerpt, with the continuous alternations between the heroine and the chorus, which makes it partake of both the episode and the pure stasimon. Then, the gradual psychological development of the characters, which, without any gap, allows Cassandra to describe her personal drama with naturalness, sincerity, and humanity, and the Chorus, initially almost mocking, to end in compassion and admiration from the moment it recognises in the Trojan royal slave a unique and universal symbol of female insight, patience, bravery, and virtue.

Certainly, my intention was not an attempt to revive a “period,” either by suggesting an atmosphere of the 5th century B.C. or by using ancient music-theoretical systems, timbral imitations of ancient musical instruments, etc., because I believe that Agamemnon belongs to all eras, including our own. However, the technical expressive means that Aeschylus employed for the structure of his poetic language could not leave me indifferent. Thus, my problem centred on the way of translating them into a technique of contemporary musical expression that, without straying from the structure of the original, could convey its message to the modern listener, if possible, immediately after the first hearing.

This text was written for the performance on 8th September 1986 by the Symphony Orchestra and Choir of the Bulgarian Radio.

-This is a near-verbatim translation of Sicilianos’s Greek text.