For me, the most astonishing thing about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is its barnstorming popularity. I found this cinematic epic for the ages visually bloodless, expressively monotonous and very, very long. Mind you, it is good to know that Nolan thinks that war is, on balance, you know, once you really think about it, probably a bad idea.
The music, too, was disappointing. If I were Nolan, I’d have asked Mica Levi to score The Odyssey. Ludwig Göransson could have surely done more to make a soundworld of genuine strangeness, but all he could manage is a falling tritone and then a descending fifth on the two reeds and pipes of a recreated aulos, which he uses as a melancholy leitmotif in all-too-conventional Hollywood fashion. (The aulos is beautifully played by Callum Armstrong on the soundtrack, at least.) The best sounds in the film come in the scene with Samantha Morton’s Circe, in which the crew’s gluttony is horrorshow ASMR: surround-sound mastication that threatens to devour the audience.
Millions of people around the world are sitting through three hours of this monumental mythoverse, without so much as an interval to break up the monotony. And this gives me hope for another artform that thrives on its hubris and excessive self-importance: opera!
There is no continuous sit in the entire operatic canon that’s as long or demanding as the three hours of The Odyssey (the most even Wagner asks in a single session is the two-and-a-half hours of Das Rheingold). I promise you, if you can make it through Robert Pattinson’s one-note scowl for 180 minutes, you are well-prepared for the demands, longueurs and joys of opera.
Opera, like film, has often turned to tales of ancient Greece for inspiration: here are a few highlights in which I guarantee the music’s better, the storytelling more compelling, and the emotional experience more involving than Nolan’s film. And when appropriate, there are intervals, too!
Richard Strauss’s savagely dramatic opera takes you by the throat from the start and doesn’t relent with its crimson orchestral dissonance and the bloodbath of the drama. Elektra embarks on a devastating journey of vengeance to appease her mother Klytämnestra’s murder of her father, Agamemnon, a journey that will consume everyone in the story – including herself, as she dances to oblivion before the curtain goes down.
Electra – as Mozart’s libretto spells her name – is another of the storm-tossed characters in his opera that broke all the conventions of so-called opera seria (“serious opera”, often based on mythological subjects) in the early 1780s. Mozart’s music releases magical tempests and unholy monsters to tell the story of Idomeneo’s sacrifice of his son, Idamante, as well as Electra’s jealousy of Idamante’s lover, Ilia. It’s arguably Mozart’s single most adventurous score – Greek myth turned into contemporary parable.
Virgil’s Aeneid was the source for Purcell’s one-act opera that tells the story of the Queen of Carthage and her faithless lover. Her lament at the end of the opera is one of music’s most moving mandalas of mourning, a piece that’s become so powerful that it’s turned into its own musical myth.
Berlioz’s magnum opus, again on the Aeneid, has all the variety and character Nolan’s Odyssey lacks. There’s one of opera’s most shatteringly empathic characters in his portrayal of Dido; there are standout moments of thrilling orchestral imagination; and throughout, there’s the feeling that this is a drama in which all the characters are caught in a web of their own desires, set against the whims of the gods, and the ineluctable wheel of human history, as Carthage falls and Rome rises.
Something else that The Odyssey only glimpses as a movie is the human connection at the heart of the supernatural phenomena of ancient Greek myths. Birtwistle makes his Minotaur the most fully dimensional creation on stage: his half-bull, half-human antihero is Asterios, the son of Pasiphaë and Poseidon, condemned to be caught between worlds, questioning his purpose as murderous labyrinthine horror – and as a character whose existential agonies are amplified by the callousness of the humans who visit him.
And that’s just the start: what of Gluck’s Telemaco or Handel’s Teseo or Charpentier’s Medée or Tippett’s King Priam or Jacquet de la Guerre’s Céphale et Procris or Tom Smail’s forthcoming, er, The Odyssey? And then there’s Orfeo, or Orpheus in the Underworld and The Mask of Orpheus … There are hundreds more Greek-inspired operas out there to start your operatic odyssey and whichever you choose, I guarantee you Nolan-levels of ambition, and better music, better characters, and more fulfilling experiences, especially in the flesh of live performance. No need to tie yourself to the mast – just get to the opera house, where myths come to life
This week Tom has been listening to: Stravinsky’s poker-inspired ballet Jeu de cartes. This was one of the first pieces of his I ever heard – my mum had an LP of Colin Davis conducting it. I loved its fun, its wit and its surreal drama. And then read how it was one of Stravinsky’s supposedly less successful pieces. Never trust the judgments of biographers who should know better: enjoy this piece for how it sends up everyone from Rossini to Beethoven and even Stravinsky himself. Listen on Spotify | Apple Classical
