Music’s most dramatic Greek mythological heroines

Greek mythology is a man’s world… but women hold some cards, too

If the glut of reviews and £196m opening weekend of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey this summer has shown anything, it’s that the great Greek myths still hold an enormous power over the public imagination. Homer’s epic is a tale of a war hero – and over the centuries it is often the men of Greek myth who have enjoyed all the glory, while the women are portrayed, reductively, as monsters, villains, seductresses or victims. But as classicist Natalie Haynes argues in her 2020 Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths, ‘Female characters were often central figures in ancient versions of these stories.’ How they have been portrayed over the centuries since reflects, she suggests, ‘both the teller and the reader, as much as the characters of the myth’.

Not only the teller and the reader, but the listener too. Classical composers have been as much part of the retelling of Greek myths as artists, sculptors, playwrights and filmmakers. Among the surely thousands of pieces taking inspiration in general from ancient mythology, there is music that centres these women, giving voice to them, telling familiar stories from a less familiar point of view, probing their psychological motivations. And, yes, how the women of Greek myth are depicted in music often tells us, too, something about the world in which the composer is working. 

Greek mythological heroines in music… a vast topic

It is, of course, a vast subject. We could begin with the very first surviving opera – Jacopo Peri’s Euridice of 1600 – and travel right up to the present day. In May 2026, Iain Bell’s opera Medusa, for La Monnaie in Brussels, took on the myth of the snake-haired Gorgon. Whole books could be written about the composers – Peri, Monteverdi, Gluck, Liszt, Schubert, Glass, Birtwistle, Mazzoli – who have explored the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice alone – though not many have told it from Eurydice’s point of view. When composer Matthew Aucoin and playwright Sarah Ruhl made her ‘the opera’s beating heart’ in his Eurydice (2021), they explored new territory. 

Some figures have received less attention than others, but there are pieces featuring almost any woman from Greek myth you care to name, from the alluring Sirens (heard in Debussy’s Nocturnes) to the monstrous Gorgons (try Christopher Rouse’s intense Gorgon), from Medea (Cherubini’s Medea) to Iphigenia (Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride). And there are some women from Greek myth whom multiple composers have been drawn to, inspiring some of their richest music… 

Greek mythological heroines: Phaedra

Twisted family dynamics? Check. Complex psychological motivations? Check. There’s plenty for composers to dig into when it comes to Phaedra, the Cretan princess married to Theseus who falls in love with her stepson, Hippolytus. When he rejects her, she kills herself – but leaves a note accusing him of rape, which leads to his death. Questions swirl around her… Was she cursed? Did she make a choice? Is she simply a villain, or as Haynes writes, ‘one half of a tragedy, which is not the same thing’.

Rameau…

The question of her guilt and remorse come to the forefront in Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie, whose protagonists are, in fact, Phaedra and Theseus. Embarking on his first opera at the age of 50, the French composer turned to Racine’s play Phèdre, which reverses the order of Euripides’s myth. Hippolytus dies first, then Phaedra laments his death in ‘Quelle plainte en ces lieux m’appelle’, a remarkable outpouring of emotion, in which she imagines an earthquake, both a punishment for her crime and a reflection of her inner turmoil.

Britten, Tavener and Henze…

For, Britten it was Phaedra’s final, agonised thoughts that were a catalyst for one of his masterpieces. He wrote his psychologically acute, emotionally unsettling cantata Phaedra in 1975, during his final creative outpouring after a heart operation and stroke. Accompanied by string orchestra, percussion and harpsichords, the mezzo-soprano soloist traces Phaedra’s mental disintegration from her wedding day to her dark fate, when she sips poison and ‘my eyes at last give up their light and see the day they’ve soiled resume purity’. ‘The intensity of her final line has to be one of the most powerful moments in music,’ says violinist Zoë Beyers, who performs Phaedra with the Britten Sinfonia this autumn (see box, p49). ‘He was dying himself as he wrote it, and it’s very hard not to look at Phaedra as Britten at his most personal.’

And after Phaedra’s death? John Tavener imagined Ariadne singing a single Greek word, ‘Eros’, for her sister in his short Lament for Phaedra. Hans Werner Henze, meanwhile, grants her an afterlife in his 2007 opera Phaedra, written after his own return from a two-month coma. ‘Desire, shame, love for her stepson and self-loathing,’ drive Phaedra, according to Henze, who transforms her, in his opera’s second act, into a ‘bird-being’ and seductress trying to lure Hippolytus into the Underworld. Once again, she is rejected. 

Greek mythological heroines: Ariadne 

Handel and Monteverdi…

Ariadne had her own troubled history with Theseus, who later became her sister Phaedra’s husband. It hadn’t ended well. After Ariadne helped him to escape the Minotaur, he abandoned her on the island of Naxos. While Handel opts to cover her happier days with Theseus in Arianna in Creta (1734), most other composers head straight for the emotional jugular. Monteverdi’s Lamento d’Arianna, one of the few surviving parts of his opera L’Arianna, taps into her anguish, punctuated by a repeated plea to ‘let me die’.

Haydn and Strauss…

Die she does in Benda’s Ariadne auf Naxos (1775), a two-handed melodrama in which both the characters (Ariadne and Theseus) speak rather than sing, with the drama illustrated by the orchestra. Mozart was a particular fan of this ‘really excellent’ rarity, but it was another of the Viennese classicists, Haydn, who came up with his own musical setting of the Ariadne legend. His Arianna a Naxos (1789) is a solo cantata with keyboard accompaniment, that begins with the moment she wakes up, alone. ‘The little soundbites coalesce, like when your consciousness is just starting to come alive after being asleep,’ says Beyers. But gradually the reality of her situation dawns. ‘She journeys from not being 100 per cent sure Theseus is a baddie to thinking he’s a monster.’

The best way to get over heartbreak? Move on to the next man. That’s the advice of the flirtatious Zerbinetta to the loyal Ariadne in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. In this improbable mash-up of genres, offering an opera-within-an-opera, a band of serious musicians and a comedy troupe unexpectedly have to share the stage as they present a performance of, confusingly, Ariadne auf Naxos to a wealthy patron. Ariadne isn’t initially convinced, but eventually she succumbs to Bacchus, and the final glorious stretches find Strauss at his rapturous finest. ‘The stars will die out before you die in my arms,’ sings Bacchus to Ariadne.

Greek mythological heroines: Clytemnestra

Strauss…

With his remarkable gift for writing for female voices, it’s perhaps no surprise that Strauss was inspired by other women from Greek myth. His modernist drama Elektra scandalised its audiences in 1909. It’s in this lurid one-acter that we meet Clytemnestra, best known for murdering her husband Agamemnon in revenge for his sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia.

‘She is the ultimate bad wife,’ writes Haynes in Pandora’s Jar, although Clytemnestra’s motivations remain complex. ‘Was she craven with lust, driven by revenge, determined to wield power in the polis – city – as well as in the home…? Whichever version of Clytemnestra’s story men read, or saw, or heard, they came across the same troubling phenomenon: a woman who did not know her place.’ 

Liza Lim, John Eaton and Rhian Samuel…

In Strauss’s Elektra, no one comes out well, but Clytemnestra is the tormented villain of the piece, plagued by trauma, guilt and nightmares, which surface from her repression of them in a thoroughly Freudian manner. Matters become even more unhinged in Liza Lim’s Oresteia (1993), a piece of ‘memory theatre’ in which Clytemnestra’s ghost is one of the characters reliving her murderous impulses. ‘Voices are stretched to extremes. They spasm from slushing whispers through delirious glossolalia to throbbing death rasps,’ wrote The Quietus.

Others have sought to humanise Clytemnestra rather than focus on the horror. ‘A grieving, indignant mother, a betrayed, angry wife, and a sensual woman,’ was how John Eaton presented her in his 1980 opera The Cry of Clytaemnestra, at least according to The New Yorker’s critic. And in Rhian Samuel’s 1994 powerful, gripping monodrama, revived in recent years by soprano Ruby Hughes, a mother’s grief is at its emotional core, although the horrific nature of her crimes is never minimised. ‘Agamemnon’s return leads attaca into “The Deed”, which to me suggests that the murder is quite a spontaneous thing,’ Hughes said in an interview with Presto Classical. In the ‘Confession’, she adds, ‘we get a clear sense that she still loves him despite what she’s done.’

Greek mythological heroines: Penelope

‘Clytemnestra acts (in narrative terms) as a dark reflection of the archetypically good wife, Penelope,’ write Haynes. The wife of Odysseus, Penelope waits for him to return from war for 20 years, hoping he is alive long after others believe him to be dead. As suitors queue up for her hand, she staves off their advances, saying she will only remarry after she has finished weaving a shroud. Each night, she laboriously unpicks the day’s work. ‘In literature and art, Penelope has been idealised for millennia for her patience, endurance and loyalty during the 20-year period while her husband is away,’ says Haynes.

Fauré…

On the surface, Penelope’s virtues might not make for the most compelling opera character, while her endless waiting could be a recipe for static drama. Certainly, those are the problems that Fauré contended with in his only opera, telling the story of Ulysses’s return (treading the same ground as Monteverdi in his Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria). Pénélope has been neglected ever since, even if, as cellist and Fauré fan Steven Isserlis believes, the story’s noble aesthetic makes it a ‘perfect subject for Fauré’. Perhaps, though, in the early-20th century, she was the wrong sort of heroine. Just a few weeks after Fauré’s Pénélope was first heard in Paris in 1913, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring premiered. A French late Romantic opera about a loyal wife was out; a shocking modernist ballet about the pagan sacrifice of a girl was most definitely in.

Sarah Kirkland Snider…

Nearly a century later, Sarah Kirkland Snider’s haunting song-cycle from 2009 has been a far greater popular success, topping many end-of-year ‘best of’ lists. Penelope gives us an updated female perspective on the Odyssey, based on an earlier music-theatre work, and musing on the themes of ‘memory, identity and what it means to come home’. Fusing classical art song and indie-pop, the cycle begins with questioning strings as ‘the stranger with the face of a man I loved’ arrives at Penelope’s door. ‘A veteran of an unnamed war, he doesn’t know who he is and she doesn’t know who he’s become,’ writes Snider. Reading Homer’s epic becomes therapy, a way to reclaim his traumatic memories of war. 

This song-cycle reflects the trend in literature, too, for retellings of the Greek myths focused on women, from Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad to Madeline Miller’s Circe. In her final song in Snider’s cycle, Penelope reflects on the nature of story itself: ‘It moves like a live thing in his hands… The pages turn and tell themselves/Backwards and forwards.’ These stories may be ancient, but they are living creatures too. Both they, and the women within them, will surely have many more retellings in music yet to come.