Before starting to summarize the article “The fragmentary muse and the poetics of Refraction in Sappho, Sophocles, Offenbach” by Gregory Nagy, we would like to give some brief information about these people. Sappho was an ancient Greek lyric poet, Sophocles was an ancient Greek tragedian, and Jacques Offenbach was a French composer, who lived and created his pieces of music in the middle of XIX century.
The article under consideration starts with the information about where the idea of fragmentary Muse comes from – from the opera “The Tales of the Hoffman by Jacques Offenbach. The definition of fragmentary Muse in the article is as follows, the fragmentary Muse is “such a muse that embodies a complex metaphor” (Nagy), which can be summed up in one word – refraction. That metaphor “derives from the idea that the light ‘breaks’ through a prism or lens” (Nagy).
The summarized article represents the reader with the examples of the fragmentary Muse in the works of Sappho, Sophocles and Offenbach. The first example the author uses is taken from Sappho’s song, where the fragmentary Muse can be seen very clearly: the voice of the singer as if “breaks” when the musical and erotic climax of the song comes. The examples presented in the article are given in two languages: original and English.
Gregory Nagy gives a thorough examination of every example to give the reader an understanding of the usage of the fragmentary Muse in every piece of work he presents in his article.
After analyzing Sappho’s song from the point of view of language and music items, Gregory Nagy goes to the next example – Sophocles. The author focuses his attention on a fragment from Sophocles’ tragedy “Thamyras”.
In this example Gregory Nagy presents the reader with the extract where the “break” occurs. The author of the article makes a comparison between the same effects which we observed in Sappho’s song. The “break” in the fragment of Sophocles’ tragedy was a combination of dance, instrumental accompaniment and song. Gregory Nagy makes an emphasis on the first two lines in the presented fragment, where “The initial word ‘breaking’ occupies a position traditionally known as the Aeolic base” (Nagy).
Then the description in the article comes to the definition of Aeolic base. The further description of Sophocles’ tragedy is concentrated around the Aeolic base, without losing from the sight ‘breaking’, which is created as the part of fragmentary Muse.
The further description in the article presents the Athenaeus’ vision of Sophocles’s tragedy. He declares that Sophocles “played the lyre in the original production of his tragedy about Thamyras” (Nagy). The conclusion may be made that it was Sophocles who played the leading part of the master musician Thamyras.
After analyzing the Sophocles’ tragedy, Gregory Nagy comes to the conclusion that the ‘breaking’ in the tragedy is the part of the music. Then the author dwells upon the rhythmical structure of the Aeolic line, and takes the Sophocles’ tragedy as an example.
In the next issue for analyses the author chooses specific examples of discontinuity and gives several examples of this discontinuity. Within the frame of description of discontinuity, Gregory Nagy gives the definition of eco. He presents the idea that echo is “a ‘breaking’ or ‘refraction’ of sound, and its musical equivalent is the refrain, which is the breaking of a single initiating sound into a multiplicity of sounds that follows” (Nagy).
Before analyzing one of the works of Offenbach, Gregory Nagy gives the summary and makes some conclusions about the Sappho’s song and Sophocles’ tragedy. He underlines one more time the idea of fragmentary Muse and its appearance in the works of Greeks.
The next step in Gregory Nagy’s article is the analysis of Offenbach’s opera “Tales of Hoffmann” from the point of view of its fragmentary nature. The author gives us the background of creating this opera, its history. He tells about this opera as the founder of theoretical points of fragmentary Muse.
So, Gregory Nagy makes a conclusion that when “the ideal woman, the dive of opera, has been shattered in three different ways, refracted in three different ways. The three-way shattering is a three-way reflection”. And I also want to finish this summary with these words, just adding that the fragmentary Muse is practiced by the poetics of reflection.
Reference List
Nagy, G. “The fragmentary muse and the poetics of refraction in Sappho, Sophocles, Offenbach”. Web.