People do harm to other people, nations inflict suffering on one another. Violence spawns more violence. Bombs beget more bombs. Retaliation, punishment, revenge and even annihilation to the point of self-extermination seem to be the natural reflex.
The protagonists at the start of the classical Oresteia story are already overshadowed by a trail of carnage stretching back generations. Aeschylus’ three-part Oresteia marks the beginning of European theatre history. It tells the backstory of Athenian democracy – the founding myth of ‘what happened before’ – at a time when this system seemed stable. The world of the theatre re-creates a mythical past in which clans of gods and humans rage uncontrollably and murder each other. There is no hope of containing the violence, either within or from outside. The world is a horrific killing field and neighbouring peoples are wiped out in decade-long wars. A daughter is sacrificed for personal gain in state and military affairs, a revenge-seeking mother kills her husband for murdering their daughter, this daughter’s now fatherless brother commits matricide. And naturally, this brother and son is also condemned to death. Aeschylus harks back to these events in order to depict their resolution all the more powerfully through the device of a ‘happy ending’. In his drama, the matricidal Orestes is allowed to live! Aeschylus legitimizes this through a democratic process of binding votes culminating in a divinely supervised verdict that cleverly integrates the losers into a new era of harmony and reconciliation. After years of bloody strife, there is a genuine hunger for peace. This is the watershed moment that ushers in alternative methods of conflict resolution and the tabooing of violence. Aeschylus tells of how the peace-fostering language of reason triumphs over calls for bloodshed, politics triumph over revenge, and the social force of the chorus triumphs over archaic laws. This is a story that appeals to us, one we enjoy hearing.
However, the newfound harmony is short-lived. In Sophocles, the rules and laws governing the world become abstruse, consensus withers and people are thrown back on themselves. With Euripides, another generation makes itself heard; a generation of modern sceptics and doubters. The optimism of Aeschylus is as alien to them as the stoicism of Sophocles. Fifty years separate Aeschylus and Euripides: fifty years of historical experience filled with war, plague, looting and famine. Under these circumstances, the necessary resolve to preserve democracy quickly dwindles. Euripides rewrites the Oresteia, especially its conclusion. His Orestes is a taboo-breaking, even scandalous text. The trial of Orestes, as portrayed by the younger Euripides, is full of demagoguery, lies, trickery, egomania and manipulation. Democracy, catharsis and even divine wisdom are now only present as a garish parody. The heavens are empty; all that remains are human savages. It is an act of recasting, a rewriting born of doubt, perhaps of contingency, but at any rate leaving no uplifting alternative recourse.
Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides each bring a different tonality to their accounts of humanity, violence and politics. At one point Menelaus says:
‘Freedom is the recognition of necessity.’ What does he mean by that? The recognition that violence is unavoidable because it is part of being human? Or the recognition that violence must be avoided as a matter of necessity? And if so, then how exactly?
Nicolas Stemann’s new interpretation of these classical dramas is situated within a present-day context in which democracy is increasingly being questioned and – like pacifism – perceived as an obsolete model. Following on from his famous Faust marathon (2011) and staging of Schiller’s Die Räuber (The Robbers, 2009), this is his third production at the Salzburg Festival.
Joachim Lux
Translation: Sebastian Smallshaw
