Nikos Skalkottas’s (1904–1949) first ballet score, The Maiden and Death, was written in about 1938. It is one of his most important tonal works,its plot being derived from a well-known folk-poem that is included in Nikolaos Politis’s collection entitled Eklogai apo ta tragoudia tou ellinikou laou (Selection from the Greek folk’s songs). Antiochos Evangelatos’s (1903–1981) homonymous symphonic ballad, written three years later, uses verses from the same folk-poem. While Evangelatos’s work is faithful to the texture of the text and his music can, consequently, be heard as an elaborated structure of Greek demotic song, Skalkottas uses the first part of the verse (up to the maiden’s death) as an introduction, to be followed by a freer version of the plot in which love and death find their exuberant manifestation through music in the very romantic sense of the words.
The juxtaposition of a maiden (representing youth and the upsurge of life) with death (representing man’s unavoidable destiny) is an idea of central importance in both works under examination.
The death of a beautiful woman, according to Edgar Alan Poe (1809–1849), is the most poetic subject in the world.
An overview of the aesthetics of death and, more specifically, of a youth’s juxtaposition with death, from ancient Greece onwards, would include important stories as is the case of Iphigenia’s sacrifice, a virgin who sacrifices herself in order to bring victory to the Greeks who were fighting against the Troyens, of Antigone’s self-denial who ignored the royal command of King Kreon by buring the dead body of her brother Polynikis in accordance with divine law, and of Persephone’s death for the sake of nature’s rebirth
In European art tradition, romanticism’s aesthetics focus on the notion of “death” as an expression of sublime ideas.
The poet Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772–1801) identifies the first experience of love with death. The first kiss is always a kiss of death and death is a more powerful union of two lovers. For the romantics, sexual differences and the reproduction of a dualistic nature (man-woman) are considered not only as a primal source of life but also as a passage to death.
The notion of the “aestheticization of death” is very important for manyLieder of Schubert as, for example, for An den Tod (1817), Der Jünglingund der Tod (1817), Der Tod und das Mädchen (1817), Todesmusik (1822), Todtenopfer (1814), Winterreise (1827), and so forth. The subjects of two of those Lieder – Der Jüngling und der Tod (poetry by Josef von Spaun, 1817) and Der Tod und das Mädchen (poetry by Matthias Claudius, 1817) – are based onthe juxtaposition between a maiden and death. In Der Tod und das Mädchen, in particular, death is treated as a welcomed refuge away from the turmoils and torments of life. The juxtaposition is an extreme one since the maiden representsthe peak of life while death the unavoidable fate of human existence. Through their symbolic juxtaposition death is revealed as an inviting to eternal rest. Both these Lieder, articulate the youth’s Weltschmerz through an idealization of femininity (“fair” and tender) and a friendly appearance of death.
Another characteristic example of a similar symbolism as above, in romantic music, is Brunnhilde’s sacrifice, or to put it differently, the “spirit” of her sacrifice, in Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (1874); this “spirit” can be interpreted as acting as a healer for decadence (which iscaused by the thirst for power of the owner of the ring). Death, as the sublime union of two souls (male and female) in one whole, finds its most romantic manifestation in Isolde’s death, in Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1959). At the end of the scene, the orchestra replaces Isolde’s voice in order to repeat the culminating point of the two lovers’ duet (second Act)articulating the wholeness of time (the real “present”, which according to Wagner and Hegel is pure memory); Isolde overcomes this notion through her death. The overcoming of time, death, in its very Hegelian essence, ismanifested musically and coincides with the eternal union of Tristan and Isolde in one “whole”. The idea of “death” is also articulated in narrations of epic tradition,that is, of narrations of heroic actions which acquire their meaning within apeople’s community. An individual’s death, in stories of heroic deeds, validates the idea of “collectivity”, or “nation”; moreover, the hero’s coming to termswith death articulates, at a deaper level, the idea of nation’s diachronicity
Music Performed by ICELANDIC SYMPHONY ORCHSTRA
Article by ANASTASIA SIOPSI
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