Athena Sings: Wagner and the Greeks.(book by M. Owen Lee)(Book Review)

by M. Owen Lee University of Toronto Press, 100 pp. $12.95 paperback, $30 cloth

"I am a retired professor of Greek," Father Lee owns up at the end of this modest, potent little volume, "privileged for almost forty years to teach Homer, Aeschylus and Sophocles in both Greek and English, and on several academic levels, and I sometimes wondered, in holy fear, if I'd ever be blessed with a little Wagner in my class." The young Richard Wagner, he reminds us, was a desultory student of subjects that didn't interest him but an early enthusiast for the Greek authors.

This book, based on a lecture first given in 1984, opens with a vivid attempt to imagine the experience of witnessing a trilogy by Aeschylus as presented in Greece during the fifth century B.C. Aeschylus was a man of the theater who "composed his own texts and music, did his own directing, staging and choreography.... He was the complete dramatist, and his art was the prototype of what Wagner was later to call the Gesamtkunstwerk--the 'complete work of art' that combined the separate arts of poetry, drama, dance, music and painting in a communal exploration of ethical, political and religious ideas." Wagner himself aspired to nothing less, but, notes Lee, "It is not that Wagner wanted to revert to Greek drama, or to recreate it. He wanted to go beyond it." It took him a long journey to get there. ...