Examining the debate which developed in Italy during the early years of the twentieth century around the concept of romanticism is a useful and effective way of charting the relationship of intellectual and critical ideas to the realities of the national operatic tradition. The common ground of the discussion was to locate the idea of the romantic tradition in a synthesis of various historical, aesthetic and ethical characteristics, and to identify it with the period of the melodramma, a genre which brought with it notions of humanity and moral character, of stylistic features (sentimentalism, expression of the passions, primacy of melody), and of formal and linguistic conventions, which, taken together, go to make up the received view of Italian musicality. From the varied pronouncements and points of view expressed within this complex of ideas and characteristics, an ideological divide seems clear between those musicians who remained loyal to the melodramatic tradition (essentially, those born around 1860 and who first came to prominence around 1890, such as Francesco Cilea, Umberto Giordano, Ruggero Leoncavallo, Pietro Mascagni and Giacomo Puccini) and those who, being more sharply critical of this tradition, inclined towards a radical re-evaluation both of dramaturgical categories and also of the musical language itself within a modernist perspective (those musicians who were born around 1880 and came to prominence around 1910, such as Alfredo Casella, Gian Francesco Malipiero and Ildebrando Pizzetti).

Subject-matter in twentieth-century opera has been shaped by influences as divergent as psychoanalysis, the cinema and television, the preference of many composers for chamber opera, the abandonment of verse or rhymed texts as the standard libretto, and an ironic scrutiny of the form of opera itself. ‘Can I find [an ending] that is not trivial?’, the Countess asks at the close of Strauss's last opera, Capriccio (1942). The problem of triviality confronted many composers after Wagner, whose music-dramas appeared as the pinnacle of operatic development. In the new century it was questionable whether opera as a viable art-form had not been consumed alongside Tristan and Isolde in the passion of the ‘Liebestod’, or the Teutonic gods in the fiery collapse of Der Ring des Nibelungen.

One solution was to make triviality itself into an operatic subject, as Křenek so successfully did with his Zeitoper, Jonny spielt auf (1927), which closes with the image of the black jazz violinist Jonny fiddling astride the globe. Another was to absorb Wagner's musical techniques and dramatic ideals into nationally inflected works: Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) owes much to Wagner, but its speech-melody closely resembles the contours of spoken French. A letter Debussy wrote to Ernest Chausson on 2 October 1893 shows how concerned he was to discover a Wagnerian element ‘appearing in the corner of a bar’ (Lesure and Nichols 1987, 54).

To attempt to site the stage works of the Second Viennese School in relation to more encompassing artistic tendencies within opera since 1900 is to come face to face with a number of apparent incongruities. For example, of the six scores which reached a definitive form, only two or three of them – Alban Berg's Wozzeck and Lulu, and perhaps Arnold Schoenberg's Moses und Aron – could be said to have achieved a secure place in the international repertory. Furthermore, if totalitarian censorship, much less perceived considerations of linguistic complexity, has failed to exert any lastingly adverse affect on the canonical status of these compositions, then the further critical veneration of Schoenberg's Erwartung, reverently anticipated by Anton von Webern over a decade before the work's delayed first performance in 1924 (see Webern 1912), does not alter the fact that they remain the legacy of Schoenberg and Berg only. While Berg's 1929 lecture on Wozzeck identified the work as the first full-scale opera to have emerged from ‘the movement that people quite wrongly called atonality’ (Jarman 1989a, 154), it could hardly have been expected to predict two further historical outcomes: that of the two major stage works of the 1930s, one (Moses) would remain a two-act fragment, while the other (Lulu), requiring partial completion of just 87 bars, would have to wait more that four decades for its intended three-act performance.

The idea that so aesthetically rarefied a work as Pelléas might have been the occasion of a request (in wartime, too) for a quick autograph from Debussy by a local tradesman's wife with a passionate interest in music reminds us just how widely known and well loved the opera had become in France after the polemics of the work's initial reception had died down. It further helps us to understand why nearly 30 years later, after a fairly dismal decade for the opera during the 1930s, the wartime performances given in 1942 at the Opéra-Comique under Roger Désormière were to be such an important manifestation of national identity and ‘cultural resistance’ during the Nazi Occupation, and also how they managed to exert such a powerful fascination at the collective psychological level, as well as bringing about a certain reinvigoration of the work itself as a musical and dramatic entity (Nichols and Langham Smith 1989, 156–9).

This in turn provides a context – to an extent backward looking and more than a little nostalgic, yet honest and deeply felt – for the renewed passion with which the piece now came to be viewed, both in itself and as an embodiment of French taste and identity; and also for the sense of shock that greeted the groundbreaking, in every sense iconoclastic postwar production by Valentine Hugo, also given at the ‘temple’ of the Opéra-Comique, in 1947.

Over the course of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the story of Achilles in Scyros was represented many times on operatic stages across Europe. Given the nature of the young genre, it is not hard to see why this motif was popular. To illustrate the principle, contrast the Elizabethan theater, where the custom of boy actors playing the parts of women lent a certain piquancy to plots in which a female character dressed as a man: thus a boy played a woman playing a man. In Baroque opera, the situation was reversed. The primary roles were almost invariably scored for high voices, which could only be sung by a woman or a man whose secondary sexual characteristics had not developed. In most cases the choice between a female singer and a castrato seems to have been determined by the local availability of singers rather than the pursuit of naturalism. It was not impossible to see the role of Mark Antony interpreted by a woman while opposite her Cleopatra was played by a male castrato. Except in the public theaters of the Papal States, where women were often prohibited from appearing on stage and thus castrati were the rule, heroic male roles were commonly interpreted by female singers. Thus in the Naples production of Achille in Sciro discussed below (p 38), the two leading ladies, Vittoria Tesi and Anna Peruzzi, are reported to have quarreled over who should play Achilles and who Deidamia.

TheAchilleid is a coherent and polished piece of work, but these virtues have often been overlooked on account of its unfinished state. The usual presumption, which is almost certainly correct, is that Statius' death interrupted his work on it. Because the poem as we have it is in a curtailed state, it will be necessary to consider the circumstances of its composition before we turn to questions of its form and genre. The Achilleid is often referred to as a “fragment,” but this is a misleading label. This term, as it is used when speaking of ancient literature, usually describes a piece of writing that has become seriously mutilated in the course of its transmission to us.

If the preceding chapter seemed to suggest that the Achilleid is more about Thetis than Achilles, that conclusion would not be far wrong. It has been claimed that the poem that we have could more accurately be called a Thetideid than an Achilleid. Thetis has more than twice as many lines of direct speech as the next most voluble character in Book 1. Despite his sometimes passive role, this is nevertheless a story about Achilles, and it is to the early origins of the hero that we now turn. What distinguishes him most in Statius' characterization is that his position in the world is liminal, still uncertain. The clearest example of this is his shifting gender identity, which we will look at more closely in the chapters subsequent to this one; there are also other ways, however, in which Achilles has one foot in one world and another in another. We will begin first with the question of Achilles' unachieved immortality, and then we will look at the other side of the coin: Achilles' sometimes subhuman upbringing with Chiron. Each of these questions requires an explanation of a particular background myth lurking at the margins of Homer's Iliad: the cosmic power of Thetis on the one hand and the early childhood of Achilles on the other. Finally, we will look at two ways in which the competing conceptions of Achilles' family background come into conflict in the Achilleid.

As we saw in the preceding chapter, Statius in the Achilleid revises the Ovidian account of Achilles' rape of Deidamia. For Ovid, that incident represents the collision of gender as artifice and sex as reality, and the way Achilles yields to his desire illustrates the irreducible imperative of biology in his own destiny. In the Achilleid, however, even though Achilles explicitly announces his intention that his phallic intervention should restore him to his gender, the rape is a failure. The child Neoptolemus is thereby conceived, so the sexual act is not a failure in the ordinary sense, but rather in the symbolic sense, in that it fails to have the corrective effect upon himself that Achilles intended, as he continues thereafter to live as a girl. This is not an isolated incident: the Achilleid is a poem of failure, most generally in that it tells the story of Thetis' epic failure to divert the impending epic destiny of the Iliad; but as we have seen this broader failure is mirrored in many particular incidents which show Thetis to be not quite up to the task she has in mind.

We may turn now to the centerpiece of the action of the Achilleid: the episode on Scyros, and the question of how this odd interlude became a part of Achilles' mythical biography. Statius may have been drawn to the story of Achilles' transvestism at least in part because it had not, to our knowledge, been told at great length by any poet since Euripides, nor ever in the epic genre; as he says at the outset, “more incidents [from the life of Achilles] are still available.” As we shall now see, Statius was quite right to claim that the Scyros episode was completely foreign to epic before the Achilleid. We would like to know how Statius differed in his treatment from earlier versions of the episode in literature and art, but, unfortunately, very few of the materials necessary for such an investigation have survived. Among Roman authors, the account of the Scyros episode in Ovid's Ars amatoria occupies a special place, even though it is very brief, since Statius seems to have been responding to it in some important ways; we will therefore defer it for a detailed discussion in the next chapter. Apart from Ovid and the odd casual reference (e.g. Prop. 2.9.16, Hor. Carm. 1.8.13–16) there is no extended treatment of the Scyros myth in Latin verse before Statius.

If we trace the Scyros myth backward in time from Statius, we come first to the Hellenistic age, where we find a small scrap of an epithalamium for Achilles and Deidamia, which was once ascribed to Bion.