Nausicaa (Greek: Ναυσικά, ) is an opera in three acts by the Australian composer and music critic Peggy Glanville-Hicks. Most of the work's libretto was sourced from Robert Graves' 1955 novel Homer's Daughter, and it was written by Graves and the librettist Alastair Reid; the soloists' words were set in English and the choruses in Greek. In terms of rhythm, form and melody, the opera's music echoes the Greek musical tradition.
The opera's story is an adaptation of the myth of Nausicaa and Odysseus. In the libretto, Odysseus is replaced by "Aethon", a shipwrecked nobleman from Crete, who, upon reaching a shore after the shipwreck, gets to meet Nausicaa, a princess romantically besieged by a set of suitors taking advantage of her father's absence. Aethon enters the palace disguised as a beggar and, following goddess Athena's instructions, eventually manages to exterminate the suitors and marry Nausicaa. Following Graves' work, the opera's fable concludes with the depiction of Nausicaa as the author of a different version of The Odyssey.
The opera was composed from 1958 to 1960 for the Athens Festival, at which it was premiered on 1961, with soprano Teresa Stratas embodying the title role at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus. More than 150 contributors collaborated for a total of three performances at the festival, after which the opera became one of the two best known works by the composer, the other being The Transposed Heads. Despite its success, the opera has not yet been produced since 1961.
Conception and libretto
The initial idea
According to Glanville-Hicks, the study of the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók's archives of the traditional music of the peoples of Central Europe further lead her to the traditional music of Greece; it was thus that she decided to create an opera based on a Greek theme. Initially, she chose Thornton Wilder's novel The Woman of Andros, but the writer denied her the permission to adapt the book for an opera.
The composer had expressed her interest in the literary work of the Hellenist writer Robert Graves long before the conceptualisation of Nausicaa. This particular idea emerged after she read Grave's Homer's Daughter, a novel based on the theory that The Odyssey was written by a female writer. In Glanville-Hicks' own words:
To her, Graves' tale was a "perfectly good story" and one that was "perfectly good for opera". Consequently, Glanville-Hicks came in contact with the writer, asking him to adapt his work for the opera she was planning to create.
The libretto
Graves accepted the composer's proposal, and they worked together from 1956 to 1958 on the opera's libretto, the text that would then be set in music by the composer. During this time, Glanville-Hicks asked for the aid of her friend, librettist Alastair Reid and then moved to the island of Mallorca, where Graves had settled a decade before, in 1946. Most importantly, the two Guggenheim Fellowships she received for the years 1956-1957 and 1957-1958, allowed her to work on the opera's libretto undisrupted by other job assignments.
The composer chose the English language for the main scenic action (i.e. the soloists' musical interlocutions and monologues), reserving the Greek language for the choruses, a decision she herself described as "very helpful to those in the audience speaking only Greek", for the chorus typically comments on the soloists' actions.
Music
Beginning in 1958, Glanville-Hicks finished the opera's composition on 30 April 1960. Her settling in Athens in 1959 coincided with her rising interest in further studying the Greek traditional music, the composition's foundational theme. As she put it, Greek traditional music "has the old sound", with "the rhythm built within the melody"; during a previous stage of her career, the composer had attempted to create music by constructing the melody over the rhythm but, in her own words, such a feat required "a lot of percussion instruments", whose percussionists were sparse, making all the related projects "very expensive" and causing many objections. Thus, she aimed at achieving the desired rhythm with fewer instruments utilised "in a more organic way".
In search of a music that had the rhythm built within it, she went on to visit more than 30 Greek islands, recording their local music on tape. Furthermore, she researched the archives of the Academy of Athens looking for useful ideas and then incorporated musical elements from the traditions of Epirus, the Peloponnese, Crete and the Dodecanese in her composition.