Alexander Goehr: Metamorphosis/Dance, Op. 36

An imaginary ballet from Homer's "Odyssey." Circe changes Odysseus's men to swine and back again.

"After they had drunk from the cup, she struck them with her wand; and straightaway hustled them to her sties, for they grew the heads and shapes and bristles of swine, with swine voices too. Only their reason remained steadfastly as before; so they grieved. . . They turned to me again as they had been before, but younger now, further and much taller to the eyes."

from Homer's "Odyssey," translated by T. E. Lawrence.

The painting of Circe returning Odysseus's men to their human form is by Giovanni Battista Trotti (1555-1612).

BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Oliver Knussen
The Proms, Royal Albert Hall, August 25, 2012

This piece was originally conceived in 1973 as the ballet sequence of an unfulfilled operatic project, and later commissioned as an independent work by the London Philharmonic Orchestra who gave the first performance on 17 November 1974 under Bernard Haitink. It is dedicated jointly to Marie Wilson and the LPO.

Its starting point was the Circe episode in the Odyssey where Homer tells us:

She struck them with her wand, and straightaway
hustled them to her sties, for they grew heads
and shapes and bristles of swine, with swine
voices too. Only their reason remained
steadfastly as before; so they grieved,
squealingly...

But Ulysses himself escapes the fate of his followers and after an amorous encounter with the enchantress he persuades her to transform them back, so that:

They turned to men again as they had been
before, but younger now, fresher and much
taller to the eye.

Goehr’s interest in this material was not so much its richly programmatic implications, however, as the purely musical structure that it suggested. Despite the wand-like tappings for slapstick at the beginning and some rather subdued contra bassoon grunts later on, his score is not a symphonic poem but a set of strict proportional variations.

The most famous example of this procedure is the variation finale of Beethoven’s last piano sonata, in which, despite an unchanging basic pulse, the music seems to progress from slow to fast and back again, owing to the increase and decrease in its rate of rhythmic and harmonic change. In Metamorphosis/Dance, however, this process is reversed; the music working from fast to slow (with a consequent increase in the length of successive variations) and then back to fast again. In addition, Goehr interrupts the progress of the variations at irregular intervals with a series of refrains.