Not "Tragedy," but "Tragoedia." Already with that subtle respelling, Harrison Birtwistle directs us toward musical landscape far removed from the nineteenth-century notion of tragic, glowing with the pathos of human subjectivity and heroism. Tragoedia takes us instead straight to the Greeks, and to the original meaning of this complex word: it means neither "sorrowful" nor "catastrophic," but literally "goat song" ("trag" + "oedia")—that is, the song of one who is to be sacrificed.

The Greek spelling also takes us back to antiquity in general, to the plays of Euripides and Aeschylus, and, in Birtwistle's case, especially to the dramatic theories of Aristotle. Like so many other artists affiliated with "modernism," Birtwistle creates in his seminal 1965 work Tragoedia a startling inversion of nineteenth-century concepts. With this piece for 10 players (wind quintet, string quartet, harp, and percussion), the composer commits a kind of emptying of the concept of tragedy. In Tragoedia we have a play of sorts, but with no characters, a form with no script. The lachrymose tone of the Shakespearean tragedy is dramatically evacuated, dried up, and de-furnished into a pristine, muscular body which adheres to the structural principles for tragedy Aristotle gives in his Poetics. Specifically, Aristotle lays out a sequence of events which Birtwistle follows quite literally: first a Prologue, then a Parodos and Episodion, a Stasimon, and so on, ending with an Exodos which repeats, in modified fashion, the opening Prologue.

But Birtwistle does not merely steal Greek terminology. Rather he reaches to antiquity for a kind of universality, a wholeness great enough to contain the details of the present. Tragoedia works as an abstract tragedy, in which the ensemble splits into a number of sounding bodies, each violent and supple, each forcefully playing into or against the others. In the process, two staples of Aristotelian tragedy reveal themselves, peripeteia or reversal, and anagnorisis, recognition; sudden moments of recognition, where the winds and strings cross-pollinate their emphatic material, are followed by reversals in the strength of the two groups—now one holds while the other struggles, now the opposite.

Tragoedia sounds different from much of Birtwistle's earlier work. Gone is the more abstract pointillism of Darmstadt-style serialism; instead, Birtwistle's indebtedness to Stravinsky is freed up to submit to the younger composer's demonic imagination. Birtwistle re-envisions that "unified fragmentation" so essential to Stravinsky's post-Firebird works; in the process he creates a tremendous tension, not unlike that of the voice as it cracks and breaks0 under the strain of intense expression. Steely unisons and crystalline chords puncture squirrel-like solo lines; those selfsame lines wrest back their dissonant continuity, and these struggles all fall within a pearly harmonic luminescence. This insistent, wordless theater would soon become full drama in Birtwistle's first opera, Punch and Judy.

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