Tom Service finds Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey to be an epic bore—visually bloodless, expressively monotonous, and very long. He notes its popularity but criticizes the music by Ludwig Göransson as disappointingly conventional, with only a few effective moments such as the ASMR mastication scene with Samantha Morton's Circe.
Service suggests that if audiences can endure three hours of Nolan's film without an interval, they are well-prepared for the demands and joys of opera. He highlights several operas inspired by ancient Greek stories that he considers superior.
Strauss: Elektra
Richard Strauss's savagely dramatic opera grips from the start with crimson orchestral dissonance and a bloodbath of vengeance. Elektra's journey to avenge her father's murder consumes everyone, including herself, as she dances to oblivion.
Mozart: Idomeneo
Mozart's opera breaks conventions of opera seria with magical tempests and monsters, telling the story of Idomeneo's sacrifice of his son and Electra's jealousy. It is arguably Mozart's most adventurous score, turning Greek myth into contemporary parable.
Purcell: Dido and Aeneas
Purcell's one-act opera from Virgil's Aeneid tells of the Queen of Carthage and her faithless lover. Dido's lament at the end is one of music's most moving mandalas of mourning, a piece that has become its own musical myth.
Berlioz: The Trojans
Berlioz's magnum opus, also on the Aeneid, offers variety and empathic characters such as Dido, thrilling orchestral imagination, and a sense of characters caught in a web of desires against the whims of gods and history.
Birtwistle: The Minotaur
Harrison Birtwistle's opera makes the Minotaur a fully dimensional character—Asterios, half-bull, half-human, questioning his purpose as a murderous labyrinthine horror, with his existential agonies amplified by human callousness.
Service lists many more Greek-inspired operas, including Gluck's Telemaco, Handel's Teseo, Charpentier's Medée, Tippett's King Priam, Jacquet de la Guerre's Céphale et Procris, and Tom Smail's forthcoming The Odyssey. He also mentions Orfeo, Orpheus in the Underworld, and The Mask of Orpheus.
He concludes that opera offers Nolan-levels of ambition with better music, better characters, and more fulfilling experiences, especially in live performance. This week, Service has been listening to Stravinsky's poker-inspired ballet Jeu de cartes, which he loves for its fun, wit, and surreal drama, despite it being considered one of Stravinsky's less successful pieces.
