Friday, July 12, 2024
The nation’s best-known classicist rediscovered classical music in her thirties, when exploring re‑workings of ancient myth
Iwent to quite a traditional academic school where we were introduced to some of the ‘greatest hits’ of classical music – Saint-Saëns and Handel and that kind of thing – in general music lessons. I learned the basics of music theory and gained an understanding of the nature of classical music which, although I didn’t realise it at the time, stood me in hugely good stead as I got older. Classical music can be quite frightening – there’s a way of talking about it which from the outside seems a bit exclusive – so I feel very grateful that that fear was taken away. During my late teens and twenties I wasn’t remotely interested in the art form, but I’d been equipped with a way of thinking that I could engage with it.
In my thirties I rediscovered an interest in classical music. I met my husband, who was much more interested in the genre than me, so there was a new domestic emphasis for me. That went in parallel with my professional life focusing on the classical past; I became increasingly interested in how myths and stories had been reappropriated, reworked and reinterpreted after antiquity. That was partly in literature, but if you are interested in that kind of reappropriation, you can’t avoid classical music. That’s where some of the most powerful and influential ways of reincorporating myth into modern culture can be found. I got dead interested in Handel’s classical operas and saw in them the living tradition of the classical world.
Ancient stories deal with central problems in human life. It would be an inaccurate cliché to say that they are timeless truths, but they raise timeless questions. For me, there is also the question of ‘Where are the women here?’. One of the things I’ve been very interested in throughout my career is finding what those women were writing, what they were thinking about. It’s not true that there aren’t any women, it’s just that we never noticed them.
I’m now getting my head around more female composers, largely thanks to Nardus Williams [Beard’s collaborator on her upcoming concert, ‘Women’s Stories from the Ancient World’, at Snape Maltings] and I now have the biggest soft spot for Francesca Caccini. She is so wonderfully knowing and manipulative of the tradition she’s working within, and she knows what it is to parody the male autocracy – it’s not full-blown outrage, it’s smart, it’s clever. I think it’s very interesting how women – whether they’re writers, composers or painters – take stereotypes and play with them so elegantly. In my own neck of the woods, for example, one can see in the poems of Sappho, the biggest classical female poet, how she’s exposing the very nature of ‘maleness’ in classical antiquity.
In our upcoming concert, we’re trying to bring to light some of these female voices – from the well-known like Sappho, to people like Caccini, and other Greek poets like Nossis – and look at how they are holding up a mirror to our own preconceptions. If you start putting the women back into the picture, the whole picture gets more interesting, and what we’ve found is that if you put the music together with some of the classical poetry, they really enlighten one another.
Although it’s not written by a woman, Handel’s Semele, is a great example of this. That idea of what it is to be destroyed by the desire for the divine is there in the classical myth, but the multi-sensory performance of Semele in the opera helps me feel that and feel what’s at stake. I never saw the power of the story of Semele (I thought it was a bit of a quaint byway of Greek mythology) until I saw it in the opera. It’s reinvigorated my understanding of that myth forever.
Ancient tragedy was partly set to music, although now we often think of it on the page or with awkward musical interludes (which quite often don’t work), but ancient music is elusive to historians. We know it was hugely important, and we can see people were constantly performing music, but the sound is always just out of our reach. However, I think if you let yourself get immersed in opera, you partly recapture a little of that original experience through the idea that this is not just a world of the spoken word. It gives you license to listen again and to wonder and rethink.
Women’s Stories from the Ancient World, is part of Summer at Snape, August 25
This article originally appeared in the August 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue of the world's leading classical music magazine – subscribe to Gramophone today
