This season’s excitement began over whether one could ever reach Athens in the first place, as there’s such a spate of street-repairing, avenue-widening and road-patching going on that many erstwhile pavements look like mysterious Mycenaean excavations in progress.
In this delicate moment of urban renewal, the British are mucking things up again for us. It seems that the Greater London Council has recently approved the return of an entire street to the Greek capital. How Elgin stole the statuary is all too well-known, but how he stole a quarter-mile street from Athens unrecorded must be one of the greatest cover-up scandals in the annals of archaeology.
Elgin Crescent, it’s said, is an elegant thoroughfare curling about Notting Hill. No doubt so, but where shall we ever put it? Curl it around Lycabettus, or straighten it out and lay it in Gazi or some other underprivileged area? An endless row of Orphee Beinoglou moving vans trying to maneuver Kifissias Avenue while carrying an entire London street is a thought to be dismissed just for sanity’s sake.
The Greek government periodically makes requests for the return of the Elgin Marbles which the British government routinely turns down and the GLC, though it has no jurisdiction over them, always assents to. According to the Times (3/9/84), the GLC has made a monumental bureaucratic blunder, mistaking Elgin Crescent for its more famous namesakes. Let’s hope so. If not, we assume that Melina will be firm about it: “Skip the street, darlings; the marbles will do.”
End of Season
The 1984 Athens Festival which came to a close last month was studded with some brilliant performances, but it was the festival’s penultimate production which was the ultimate as a paean to the festival’s home itself, the Odeon of Herod Atticus.
Since the festival began, there have been objections heard to the Odeon as a workable stage for theater and for music dramas of all kinds. The very same productions of ancient drama hailed at Epidaurus have been later brought to Herod Atticus looking pinched and squashed, a phenomenon noted by actors, directors and set designers as well as by audiences, perhaps because the atmosphere isn’t Greek at all but resolutely Roman. For anything by Shakespeare, or deriving from Shakespeare, it is monumentally inflexible. As for romantic opera, it is even more ill-at-ease here. This 35-meter-wide stage with a back wall whose uppermost arches reach nearly as high can not remotely be imagined as Valhalla by even the most dire Wagnerite, and as for verismo opera – Cio-Cio-San and an American naval lieutenant shacking up, say, under a Roman aquaduct – it is totally out of place and scornfully stared down upon by these tons of groaning masonry. Any rash attempt to disguise this mass is doomed to disaster and ridicule. The solution lies in lighting as a means of enhancing, not diminishing, this gigantic pile of stones.
It was in this way that the Zurich Opera, with all its other superb talents, was able in the production noted to reveal the Odeon in its true majesty. As the Overture began, a gargantuan projection of Poseidon – with the ruffled locks and aching mouth of the Pergam-um style – suddenly filled a third of the vast wall as if it had always belonged to it, and gradually faded, while a blue-white light appeared in the upper tier of arches, growing at length so bright that it was nearly impossible to look at it. And as that image faded, too, only then was it noted that a rosy-fingered warmth of color had already spread out, as if from the orchestra itself, across the stage, revealing all in white the recumbent figure of Ilia, Princess of Troy. Before a word had been sung, it was clear that the Odeon must have been built for Idomeneo and that Mozart had written Idomeneo for it – a marriage of two heroic, beautiful and humorless spirits.
Many spectators who have missed few productions of theater or opera at the Athens Festival since it began, believed it to be the best of all, and the numerous foreigners present thought that it could not have been quite so magnificent in any other theater in the world. Twenty minutes after the conclusion, the applause, which could still be heard halfway round the Acropolis, was paying tribute not only to a superb performance, but to one of Athens’ greatest monuments, the’ Odeon which has been host to a fine Festival now on the eve of its thirtieth year.
