The Metamorphosis of a Greek Comedy and its Protagonist: Some Musical Versions of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata

In the first years of a millennium that may seem to set a greater and greater distance between us and the classics, there is a Greek comedy that continues to be rewritten and performed in new forms all over the Western world. This comedy is Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, and these performances are not just more or less modernized stagings of a very old play: they are independent and, in a certain way, original works, that look quite similar because they are like daughters born of the same mother, the Aristophanic heroine who persuaded her Athenian and Spartan friends to keep their men away in order to force Athens and Sparta into peace. What all these theatrical pieces have in common is, apart from the heart of the original comedy (its comic fulcrum, that is to say the sex-strike), one basic feature: music. Whether musicals like Beaus & Eros (written by Matty Selman and Galt MacDermot, 2002) or rock-operas like Lysistrata’s war (the outcome of the cooperation of two college teachers, David Hamilton and Mark D. Williams, 2004), or more conventional operas like Lysistrata (composed by the famous Greek musician Mikis Theodorakis, 2002), these musical versions are the most recent of a long sequence of similar variants – a series that includes other musical genres such as Singspiel, opéra-comique, operetta, commedia musicale, and even ballet. Why has this comedy been so successful in the last centuries, and why is this success still lasting? What reasons (social, political, historical, artistic) have persuaded so many playwrights to put new words into the mouth of this remarkable heroine? And what reasons have induced so many musicians to set those words to music? This chapter will trace a short history of these English, French, German, Italian, American, Greek, as well as Romanian and Hungarian sisters of Lysistrata, all much younger than the Aristophanic original but, in one way or another, similar to their old relative.