For a long time, Maxim Shalygin, in the Netherlands since 2010, thought he would never write an opera. But there is one now: Amandante. Free after Plato’s Symposium – but with a lighter, ironic touch.
Plato’s Symposium does not seem to be born for the stage. In a series of monologues on the place of love in life, no kiss is provided, no sigh breathed, no uncontrollable yearning led to an ecstatic climax. Love is the theme of reflection for the guests at the banquet of the newly awarded playwright Agathon. Phaidros celebrates her as a divine force, source of good. Pausianas sees the heavenly love of a boy for a grown man as the path to virtue. For Eryximachos, spiritual love is about self-control and balance, connecting opposites. The comedy writer Aristophanes describes man’s fate as a search for his other half since Zeus split the originally four-legged and two-headed man in two; love is the attempt to reunite that completeness. For Agathon, love is eternal youth, for Socrates, who is believed to be in dialogue with Diotima, the path to beauty.
There is music in Symposium. Eryximachos talks about it. Somewhere a flute player appears but is sent away. The physical loveliness ferments between the lines. Hidden in the monologue of the inebriated Alkibiades is a tragicomic one-acter. He tells how he tried to seduce Socrates unsuccessfully. After they spent the night side by side, they never laid a finger on each other. The Diotima quoted by Socrates is a woman, and dialogue can become a duet. However, real-life living women remain out of Plato’s picture, and there is no merit in the grandiloquence of reckless men.
Composers in the crosshairs of our attention