Aeneas in the Underworld

Aeneas in the Underworld

A chamber oratorio for guitarist/orator
with second guitar, string quartet, fixed media and video supertitles
2010-18
60 minutes

Aeneas in the Underworld

Act I: The Caves of Cumae

Scene 1: The Caves of Cumae
Scene 2: Aeneas’ Prayer
Scene 3: The Prophecy
Scene 4: The Golden Bough

Act II: The Underworld

Scene 1: Acheron
Scene 2: Rhadamantus et Tisiphone
Scene 3: Infelix Dido

Act III: Elysium

Scene 1: Songs Worthy of Phoebus
Scene 2: Anchises and the Parade of Heroes

Vergil (Publius Vergilius Maro) was born in 70 B.C., during the sunset of the Roman Republic. After completing the Eclogues (37 B.C.) and the Georgics (29 B.C.), he spent the last ten years of his life working on the Aeneid, which was published posthumously. He died at Brundisium in 19 B.C.

The Aeneid is an epic poem of roughly 10,000 lines written in dactylic hexameter. It tells the story of how the Trojan hero Aeneas leaves Troy after its capture by the Greeks and, after many trials, arrives in Italy to begin a settlement that is destined to develop into Rome. It borrows elements from both the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer. Book VI describes the katabasis, or descent into the underworld (cf. Odyssey XI), where, after traversing the darker regions of the world below with the Sibyl, Aeneas converses with the shade of his father Anchises in Elysium and is shown a pageant of the great Romans who in future days will establish the Roman Republic and the Empire.

Our musical setting of this Roman epic is an act of double fantasy. Neither the epic nor its subject can be grounded in musical reality, for there remains no evidence of Roman music (only musical instruments) and the music of the distant Trojan past can scarcely be imagined. Bridging this impossible distance is an amalgam of contemporary musical language with historical musical quotations that together envelop the sonic echoes of Roman reality projected by the recitation of the original Latin text. Fragments of the rich musical history inspired by Vergil’s Aeneid and other ancient stories of the katabasis, such as that of Orpheus, echo through the music, recast into creatively conceived just intonation tunings that hint at the tunings of the ancient Greeks.

The first act precedes Aeneas’s entry into the underworld. The Trojan flotilla has arrived on the stark, rocky shores of Cumae, a volcanic region in modern-day Italy. The caves of Cumae are home to the sibyl, the mystic prophetess who will foretell Aeneas’s founding of Latium and serve as his guide through the underworld. The first three scenes are a concatenation of the sibyl’s ecstatic possession ritual, in which the god Apollo speaks through her. The guitar is transformed into a percussion ensemble whose cyclic repetitions echo the incarnations of possession ritual music known around the world. In the midst of the increasingly wild and powerful ritual, Aeneas prays to know and be assured of his god-granted fate. Upon completion of the ritual, Aeneas asks but one more favor of the sibyl: to guide him through the underworld for a chance to see again his father Anchises, who had died earlier in their voyage. She accedes, requiring of Aeneas that he obtain the golden bough, a miraculous token which will yield only to him—like King Arthur’s sword and Lord Rama’s bow—and which will assure his safe passage across the river Styx.

In the fourth scene, Aeneas likens himself to Orpheus while the guitar sounds a fragment of Francesco Landini’s Si dolce non sono, one of the earliest extant musical references to Orpheus. Under the sibyl’s response is a quotation of Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo—a parallel scene in which Speranza (Monteverdi’s sibyl) repeats Dante’s admonition to those who enter the underworld: “Abandon all hope, you who enter.”

In Act II, our hero begins his voyage through the underworld, guided by the sibyl. In the first scene, Aeneas and the sibyl negotiate with the boatman Charon to cross the Acheron river and enter the underworld, offering the golden bough as a token of Aeneas’s virtue. In the second scene, Aeneas gazes in horror upon the torments meted out to the damned, as the performers similarly mete out torments upon their guitars with metal implements.

In the third scene, the hero’s journey reaches an emotional climax as he comes face to face with the ghost of his former lover, Dido, Queen of Carthage. The scene commences with distorted quotations from an aria from Francesco Cavalli’s 1641 opera Didone, in which Aeneas sweetly bids final farewell to sleeping Dido, unaware of her tragic self-immolation that was to come. His anguish rises as Dido’s spectral voice utters her final words from book IV, the famous Dulces Exuviae. This text enjoyed great popularity among Franco-Flemish composers in the sixteenth century. A daringly chromatic setting by Marbrianus de Orto, performed by the second guitar, transports her lament into this scene, for in book VI, her shade stonily refuses to acknowledge the presence of the hero as she passes by.

Departing from the strange distortions of tuning and timbre that depict the horrors of the underworld, the tone of the music in Act III shifts to a harmonious and rhythmic dance played by string quartet. Aeneas and the sibyl have entered Elysium, the land of perpetual spring and shady groves, where the shades of heroes reside before being reincarnated on earth. The music is a fragmented variation of a celebratory pastoral dance from the first act of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, music untroubled by the tragedy that unfolds thereafter. Even Orpheus himself is here, performing to entertain the shades.

Finally, Aeneas’s wish is fulfilled as he is reunited with the shade of his father Anchises, who proceeds to narrate the glorious Roman future that will rise in the land that Aeneas is destined to conquer. Here, as in Act I where Aeneas prayed while still on the firm ground of the earth’s surface, the music is rooted in regular metrical patterns and purely just-intoned harmonics, depicting the perfection of the hero and the certainty of his fate, but now also tinged with the melancholy of knowing the bloody battles that lie ahead.

The libretto of Aeneas in the Underworld represents about one quarter of the complete text of the sixth book of Vergil’s Aeneid, along with the Dulces Exuviae from the fourth book. For this performance, the libretto has been translated into modern English by Khang Le. In this performance, Colin McAllister has attempted to restore the educated pronunciation of Latin as it would have been spoken during the Golden Age of Roman literature (i.e. a period roughly spanning the last half of the first century BC and the first half of the first century AD; the time of prose writers Cicero, Julius Caesar, Livy, Varro and Sallust, and poets Vergil, Ovid and Horace). For this, he is indebted to W. Sidney Allen’s Vox Latina: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin.

We are grateful to all of those who have contributed to making Aeneas in the Underworld a reality. We thank especially Barbara Santos, who contributed the voice of Dido, and to Rodrigo Sigal and the Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras in Morelia, Mexico, where the electronic part to Infelix Dido was prepared. We thank the University of San Diego and the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs for financially supporting the premiere performances, San Diego New Music, the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library and MicroFest Los Angeles for hosting performances, and Derek Keller who performed on second guitar for the premiere of Act II.