Sophocles

Sophocles (Colonus, near Athens, c. 496 BC – 406 BC) was one of the three great tragedians of classical Greece, and his name is linked to the musical life of fifth-century Athens. We know of his relationship with music chiefly through an anonymous biography, which describes him as a young man thoroughly trained in gymnastics and in mousikē, that is, in poetry accompanied by music, with the celebrated Lamprus as his teacher. According to the same source, at the age of sixteen he was chosen to lead the choral paean celebrating the victory over the Persians at Salamis in 480 BC.

His career in the theatre began in 468 BC, the year he defeated Aeschylus in the tragic competitions. Of his more than one hundred tragedies and satyr plays, only seven complete tragedies and a considerable part of one satyr play, The Trackers, survive. The surviving tragedies belong to the last thirty-five or forty years of his life. Around the time of the performance of Tyro, he played the kithara, and for this reason he was painted with that instrument in the Painted Stoa in Athens, completed around 460 BC. The weakness of his voice kept him from performing on stage as an actor. His manner of playing the kithara, which the biographer singles out, seems to have been unusual for the theatre of the day. A Byzantine treatise attributes to Sophocles the use of the Lydian and Phrygian modes in tragedy, although this claim should be treated with caution.

In his surviving works, musical references appear almost always in choral or lyric passages and carry less symbolic weight than in Aeschylus. They serve mainly to heighten the emotion of a scene and to accentuate the contrasts of the plot. Sophocles' legacy for music is broad: his three Theban plays, the only trilogy that survives complete, and especially Oedipus Rex and Antigone, have inspired operas and compositions from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, with notable examples by Orff, Honegger and Mendelssohn.