C.P. Cavafy The poetics of history and the music of poetry

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1 UNDER THE AUSPICES OF H.E. THE PRESIDENT OF THE HELLENIC REPUBLIC MR PROKOPIOS PAVLOPOULOS Sounds of the Hellenic World II C.P. Cavafy The poetics of history and the music of poetry Thursday 11 January 2018 The Hellenic Centre Friday 12 January 2018 The Great Hall, Strand Campus, King s College London

2 WELCOME Under the auspices of H.E. the President of the Hellenic Republic Mr Prokopios Pavlopoulos On behalf of King s College London (Centre for Hellenic Studies and Department of Classics), the Athens Conservatoire and the Hellenic Centre we are delighted to welcome you to this two-day event. is the second in the series Sounds of the Hellenic World and the third collaboration between King s College London and the Athens Conservatoire. Sounds of the Hellenic World I was the first joint event between the two institutions to be held in London in We would like to extend our warmest thanks to all those who have supported and contributed to the planning, organising and running of the event: The Bank of Greece Eurosystem The Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation and the Cavafy Archive exclusive sponsors of the exhibition C. P. Cavafy: Historia Arcana A Hidden History. The Michael Marks Charitable Trust exclusive sponsor of the concert 10 Invenzioni on poems by C. P. Cavafy by Dimitri Mitropoulos Foundation Family G. Livanos

3 EVENT INFORMATION 3 VENUES Thursday 11 January 2018: The Hellenic Centre, Paddington Street, Marylebone, London W1U 5AS Friday 12 January 2018: King s College London, Strand Campus The Great Hall, King s Building, Strand, London WC2R 2LS ACADEMIC COMMITTEE Roderick Beaton FBA, Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature, King s College London Polina Tambakaki Niki Marangou Postdoctoral Fellow, King s College London Nikos Tsouchlos President of the Board of Directors of the Music and Drama Society of the Athens Conservatoire & Associate Professor, Ionian University, Corfu ORGANISING COMMITTEE Roderick Beaton Nada Geroulanou Communication Officer, Athens Conservatoire Agatha Kalispera Director, Hellenic Centre Polina Tambakaki EXHIBITION Stefanos Geroulanos Organiser and curator, Universities of Zurich & Ioannina ADMINISTRATIVE SUPPORT Vicky Bowman, Alex Creighton Arts & Humanities Research Institute, King s College London IMAGE CREDITS Front cover: portrait of C. P. Cavafy by Panagiotis Tetsis reproduced by permission Back cover: Silver tetradrachm of Orophernes, British Museum number: 1870, Trustees of the British Museum

4 4 PROGRAMME Thursday 11 January 2018 The Hellenic Centre: Paddington Street, Marylebone, London W1U 5AS WELCOME: Agatha Kalispera (Director, Hellenic Centre) INTERVAL INTRODUCTION: Bettany Hughes (Historian, author and broadcaster) SOUNDS OF THE HELLENIC WORLD: CAVAFY, TIME AND HISTORY Nikos Tsouchlos (Director, Athens Conservatoire; Ionian University, Corfu) Musical and poetic time Anastasios-Ioannis Metaxas (University of Athens & Académie Européenne Interdisciplinaire des Sciences, Paris) The exotic refuge in Cavafy s poetry Stefanos Geroulanos (Universities of Zurich & Ioannina) C. P. Cavafy: Historia Arcana A Hidden History Peter Mackridge (University of Oxford) The translation of Cavafy s poems by Evangelos Sachperoglou Angelica Cathariou (opera singer; University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki), I ve looked on beauty so much : Performing Dimitri Mitropoulos musical settings of poems by C. P. Cavafy CONCERT 10 Invenzioni on poems by C. P. Cavafy by Dimitri Mitropoulos Angelica Cathariou (mezzo-soprano) Thodoris Tzovanakis (piano) Opening of the exhibition C. P. Cavafy: Historia Arcana A Hidden History with ancient coins and artworks related to Cavafy s poems Under the auspices and with the sponsorship of the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation and the Cavafy Archive RECEPTION

5 5 Friday 12 January 2018 The Great Hall, King s Building, Strand, London WC2R 2LS Introduction: Roderick Beaton (King s College London) CAVAFY, MUSIC AND HISTORY Chair: Martin Stokes (Department of Music, King s College London) LUNCH BREAK Alexandros Charkiolakis (Director, Friends of Music Society, Athens) Other musical settings of Cavafy s poetry Panos Vlagopoulos (Ionian University, Corfu) Sprechgesang and the hybrid: Mitropoulos reading Cavafy Polina Tambakaki (King s College London), C. P. Cavafy ( ), music and history: the musical ear of an ultra-modern poet some suggestions CAVAFY, POETICS AND HISTORY Chair: Angelos Chaniotis (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) BREAK Afroditi Athanasopoulou (University of Cyprus) Observations on Cavafy s historical method Michalis Chryssanthopoulos (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) Cavafy s Ulysses, Julian and Hamlet: history or literature, a critical dilemma David Ricks (King s College London) From Charing Cross to Alexandria: Cavafy s Caesarion Roderick Beaton (King s College London) Cavafy s Greek world CAVAFY, HISTORY AND ART Chair: Stefanos Geroulanos (Universities of Zurich & Ioannina) BREAK Angelos Delivorrias (Benaki Museum, Athens & Academy of Athens) Cavafy and ancient Greek art Andrew Burnett (British Museum and UCL) Lasting monuments of historical facts : why collect coins? Angelos Chaniotis (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) Cavafy as a historian of the Hellenistic period THE SOUND OF POETRY Introduction: Dionysis Kapsalis (poet; Director, National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation) POEMS BY CAVAFY READ IN THE ORIGINAL GREEK AND IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION Dionysis Kapsalis (Greek) Jeremy Irons (English) Concluding remarks: John Kittmer (former UK Ambassador to Greece; King s College London)

6 6 ABSTRACTS ANASTASIOS-IOANNIS METAXAS The exotic refuge in Cavafy s poetry The 20th century, as an intense aesthetic pursuit of liberty and openness, and at the same time a protest against the absence of these things, had already existed and developed within the 19th: in painting, music, and the arts. Questioning of entrenched Schools, social norms and conformities remains the prerogative of the Few. Wider society, the anonymous people, take little part in the beneficial adventures of maybe and of no. Among these Few are poets and artists who seek the vindication of their truth in other symbolic places and times. One of these is C. P. Cavafy. He seeks other refuges (hiding-places sometimes) as a stranger, in his own time and place, in order to be preserved. A spatiotemporal exoticism shelters Cavafy s heretical poetry from any religionisation of life. STEFANOS GEROULANOS C. P. Cavafy: Historia Arcana A Hidden History The title of this book on Cavafy is taken from the Latin translation of Anekdota or Apokryphe Historia by the Byzantine writer Procopius. Cavafy used parts of Procopius title in the title of one of his own (unfinished) poems, From the unpublished History [ Tes anekdotou Historias ]. The title C. P. Cavafy: Historia Arcana A Hidden History also reflects the concealed wish of the poet expressed in his (unpublished) poem Hidden Things : [ ] my most veiled writings; from these alone will I be understood. [ ]. For the first time Cavafy s historical poems are put in chronological order, aiming to reveal a secret plan by the Alexandrian poet, which unfortunately was left unfinished, as Cavafy himself said. For example, looking at the table of contents of the book, one can discern possible groups of seven poems for each period, from mythological times to the Fall of Constantinople. In addition, 139 of approximately 150 historical figures mentioned in Cavafy s poems are depicted on coins. In the book, next to each poem one can find coins with figures mentioned in the poem. One has the feeling that Cavafy has given them a voice. Cavafy s History is an Anti-history a history of antiheroes, whose voices resound through the centuries. Once again Cavafy surprises us. ALEXANDROS CHARKIOLAKIS Other musical settings of Cavafy s poetry Although Dimitri Mitropoulos 14 Inventions are probably the most famous pieces musical compositions to be based on Cavafy s poetry (maybe one might also add the cantata composed by Yiannis A. Papaioannou based on The Funeral of Sarpedon ), Greek composers do not seem to remain untouched by the elegant and majestic writings of the Alexandrian poet. In this paper, I will try and give an overview of the compositional output based on Cavafy s works and I will focus on diverse musical pieces by composers such as Maria Kalogridou, Yiannis Ioannidis, Argyris Kounadis and Antiochos Evangelatos, who represent different musical universes within the spectrum of Greek art music. Finally, I will make references to a long-lost work by Alekos Xenos. PANOS VLAGOPOULOS Sprechgesang and the hybrid: Mitropoulos reading Cavafy Hybridity in Cavafy is used to describe the politics of problematising the two poles of any given opposition (for example, European vs. Oriental, Greeks vs. Others ( Barbarians ), traditional vs. modern, masculine vs. feminine), aiming at the emergence of a new pole, a tertium quid. Mitropoulos choice to set fourteen of the canonical Cavafy poems to music might have had its motivation not merely in an unqualified perception of a shared modernism, but in his realisation of the importance of Cavafy s life and work project to his own as a young homosexual composer, as well as of the eminent role in it of hybridity. If this be so, nothing could better serve Mitropoulos task than the Sprechgesang technique, itself a hybrid between speaking and singing, that had recently been sanctioned by Schoenberg and Berg (his compositional heroes). Mitropoulos novel musical language was implicitly but consciously used against the ideals of the National Music School in Greece ideological, musical, moral, and sexual.

7 7 POLINA TAMBAKAKI C. P. Cavafy ( ), music and history: the musical ear of an ultra-modern poet some suggestions Cavafy s ear wasn t superb, Seferis wrote about the Alexandrian poet. This paper will touch on Cavafy s relationship to music and the poet s auditory imagination (Eliot s term), arguing that these questions can only be dealt with in tandem with questions of cultural politics and Cavafy s historical sense. Cavafy, famously (and anonymously), stated about himself: In my view Cavafy is an ultra-modern poet, a poet of future generations. My talk will examine the musical ear of this ultra-modern poet, also taking into account the way in which W. H. Auden and E. M. Forster (both writers with a special relationship to music themselves) spoke of Cavafy s poetics. AFRODITI ATHANASOPOULOU Observations on Cavafy s historical method In this paper I examine the evolution of Cavafy s method from early philosophical or allegorical poems into his mature historical poems. I discuss the various techniques that Cavafy attempted in order to achieve the historical method known to us as properly Cavafian. The paper focuses, in particular, on an intermediate technique that Dallas and Keeley had first observed: this technique refers to poems in which the past and the present are interconnected in the same poem, or to parallel poems that correlate ancient Alexandria with the poet s own time. In this context, I offer a critique of George Savidis distinction between the historical and the social Cavafy, arguing that these are two aspects of the same poetics. MICHALIS CHRYSSANTHOPOULOS Cavafy s Ulysses, Julian and Hamlet: history or literature, a critical dilemma Cavafy tackles very early in his career a critical question, that of historical or literary revisionism. This paper discusses three unpublished poems written during the 19th century, when Cavafy was in his thirties: Second Odyssey (1894), Julian at the Mysteries (1896) and King Claudius (1899). In all three poems the central characters are put into context by a complicated system of intertextual references: Ulysses second voyage is preceded by references to Dante and Tennyson; Julian is accompanied by a cohort of pagans of romantic provenance, who put forward their views when he visits the mysteries in Eleusis; Hamlet s story is mediated by his close friend, Horatio, whose aim is for Fortinbras to ascend the throne. Cavafy s poetic endeavours re-interpret the events and place them in a different context. DAVID RICKS From Charing Cross to Alexandria: Cavafy s Caesarion Cavafy s poem Caesarion is perhaps his most influential exploration of the individual reader s engagement with history. But, while anchored firmly in Plutarch s Life of Antony, it can also be read through and against a celebrated poem about an event in the London of 1649 and its perpetuation through art. This paper essays a reading of Cavafy s much-interpreted poem through a poem which can be posited as a precursor: Lionel Johnson s By the Statue of King Charles at Charing Cross (1895).

8 8 ABSTRACTS RODERICK BEATON Cavafy s Greek world This paper proposes to read Cavafy against the grain of his present-day global reception and re-situate him in relation to the historical construction of a self-consciously Greek world based on a particular reading of (aspects of) ancient and medieval history. According to this reading, Cavafy s historical construction of a greater Greece whose centre of gravity is his own city of Alexandria, rather than any of the prime sites of ancient, Byzantine, or modern Greece, is a calculated, daring alternative to the master-narratives of Greek history. ANGELOS DELIVORRIAS Cavafy and ancient Greek art The poetic engagement of C. P. Cavafy with history, or rather history as the main source of his poetic inspiration, used clearly in a paradigmatic fashion, has been painstakingly discussed and studied. However, the poet s engagement with art in general and with ancient art in particular has so far been much less scrutinised in Cavafy scholarship. Although in 1993 G. P. Savidis approached matters pertaining to the natureart bipole, taking Artificial Flowers as his departure point, I have not come across a more general study on the subject. This paper attempts to address it delving into Cavafy s canonical, unpublished and repudiated poems as well as other texts that the poet wrote. ANGELOS CHANIOTIS Cavafy as a historian of the Hellenistic period When Cavafy was composing poems inspired by episodes of the Hellenistic period, the academic study of the Hellenistic world was underdeveloped. Cavafy approached this period well-informed about the main literary sources (especially Plutarch s Lives), inscriptions, coins, and literary papyri, but without being influenced by contemporary trends in historical studies. For this reason, subject matter and perspective in his poems are original and idiosyncratic. Cavafy s treatment of Hellenistic history accurately reflects and in part reproduces the sentiment that one finds in contemporary Hellenistic sources, especially in tragic historiography. Exactly as Hellenistic historians sought to arouse empathy among their audiences by making the readers into eye-witnesses of the incidents that they narrate (enargeia) and by focusing on sudden changes (peripeteia), unexpected turns of fate (paradoxon, tyche), passions, and emotions, Cavafy s poems are characterised by similar traits. More importantly, with his interest in subjects such as the theatrical behaviour of monarchs, multi-cultural communities, the unclear borders between religions, the importance of emotions in historical processes, and the dynamic shaping of identities, he foreshadows developments that emerged in historical research only two generations after his death. ANDREW BURNETT Lasting monuments of historical facts : why collect coins? Collecting coins was an enthusiasm since the earliest times of the Renaissance of many princes, scholars and gentlemen even the occasional woman. What was so interesting about them, and why did they collect them? Their number includes some poets, from Petrarch onwards, but few have had such fervour as is evident in Cavafy and his poems, not least the very rare coin of Orophernes King of Cappadocia whose handsome face upon the silver coin recalled some grace of his in juvenescent days, some gleam of his poetic loveliness.

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12 DESIGN: Day 1, Approved by January 2018 OROPHERNES He who appears upon the tetradrachm with a hint of a smile on his face, his beautiful, delicate face, he is Orophernes, son of Ariarathes. [ ] From C. P. Cavafy, The Collected Poems (Oxford University Press), translated by Evangelos Sachperoglou