Response: Ovid, Haydn, and the Symbiosis of Music and Metamorphosis

Abstract

Music and metamorphosis are symbiotic. It is in part for this reason that the presence of Ovid’s stories from his Metamorphoses have been visited and revisited in music from the Renaissance to the present time. In the eighteenth century, we witness the emergence of a new sensibility that values change, transformation, and ultimately revolution, as part of nature and history, as a manifestation—to summon Lucretius—of the way things are. The penchant for transformation over stasis is typical of a modern forwardlooking attitude, conceptualized by Karol Berger as a preference for the arrow over the circle, which emerged gradually during the eighteenth century. In the second half of the century, Ovid’s works were no longer a goldmine for the extraction of useful myths for opera plots. In fact, as a plot-mine, after a long time of intensive exploitation, Ovid almost dried up. Yet, the Roman poet continued to be present in works, events, and activities that are not necessarily casting Ovid’s heroes and heroines as characters. The practice of reading The Metamorphoses was still widespread in the eighteenth century, motivated by a curiosity not only and not so much for the stories told, but also and especially for the way Ovid tells his stories. Ovid demands from his readers (or listeners) to be imaginative, creative, able and willing to visualize the transformation of matter in their heads. He does so in a way that is akin to the practices of music composition, performance, and listening. Ovid tells stories of metamorphosis in the present tense, with a formidable sense of rhythm and pace, describing bodies in the most economical terms by reducing bodily shapes to elemental forms and qualities of matter (long, short, rough, smooth, whole, fragmented, empty, filled, and so on), moving in space like melodic lines or sonic events (up, down, fading, melting, shrinking, growing, and so on). Ovid’s invention is functional to transformation and development, and the new forms always relate to the original ones before the metamorphosis.