If Brian heard the 1956 broadcast of Vellacott’s translation of Agamemnon, he did not use it for his opera. He turned instead to the 1850 translation by John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895), no doubt because it was out of copyright, and added some elements of his own, mainly in the passages for the chorus. Brian had shown himself to be more than capable as a librettist in his satirical anti-war opera The Tigers (1917-29), so it is perhaps regrettable that he did not make his own version of the libretto for Agamemnon. Blackie’s translation, flowery and contorted as it is, feels at odds with the compressed fury of Brian’s music. It does at least preserve some of the formality of the original text and is often vivid, drawing from Brian some powerfully imaginative music in the last vocal composition he was ever to write.

The plot of Agamemnon is brutally simple: Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, returns in victory from Troy, having sacrificed his own daughter Iphigenia to the gods to ensure favourable winds for his fleet and success in battle. He brings with him as concubine the prophetess Cassandra, who foretells the downfall of the royal dynasty. Agamemnon’s queen, Clytemnestra, first greets him with due deference, encouraging him to tread hubristically on luxurious purple tapestries as he enters the palace, before murdering him with an axe while he takes his bath. She justifies her actions to the citizens of Argos as revenge for his murder of her daughter. She presents her lover Aegisthus as the new king, but the people reject him and demand that Clytemnestra’s son Orestes avenge his father.

Brian thought of his opera as a curtain-raiser to Strauss’s Elektra, a work he hugely admired. Wildly impractical as that notion may be, Agamemnon certainly contextualizes the events of Strauss’s opera. Consciously or not, it even offers a musical link, its thunderous D major final chord connecting to the opening D minor chord of the Strauss. Otherwise, as in all Brian’s operas, the music often seems to pursue its own symphonic narrative, sometimes supporting, but often detached from, the stage action. There are no leitmotif-like themes as such, but there are certain recurrences, such as the opening oboe theme, which reappears at the start of the chorus’s ‘Whence these shapes of fear that haunt me?’, and again in the very last bars on blazing trumpets.

In adapting Aeschylus’s tragedy to this compact opera, Brian significantly changed the function of the chorus from active participants in the drama, frequently setting the scene and providing contextual detail, to a reactive body whose role is simply to respond emotionally to the events as they unfold and to provide musical punctuation. The long narration that Aeschylus gives to the chorus near the opening of the drama, recounting Iphigenia’s death at the hands of her father, is therefore entirely omitted by Brian, so that, until Clytemnestra justifies her actions after Agamemnon’s murder, no mention is made of her motivation—Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia. This shifts the dramatic focus of the original tragedy, which had problematized the sacrifice of a child (legal, because it is commanded by the gods) against the murder of Agamemnon (illegal, because it is an act of regicide). The chorus’s defiant dismissal of Clytemnestra at the very end leaves no room for doubt as to the opera’s moral position. Brian does at least make room for Clytemnestra to refer to the filicide of her daughter; in Elektra, Strauss and his librettist Hofmannsthal erase Iphigenia’s memory entirely.

Of the six solo roles, the parts of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra are respectively assigned to a heroic tenor and a dramatic soprano, both of whom must contend with some uncompromisingly massive orchestral textures, especially during their central stichomythia (alternation of lines). By contrast, the part of Cassandra is written for a low alto and is more transparently scored. Her poignant foretelling of her own end and that of the house of Atreus is a dramatic highpoint of the opera, leading directly to the (unseen) cries of the dying Agamemnon, the revelation of Clytemnestra standing with an axe over the bloodied corpses of her husband and Cassandra, and, in a brilliantly original touch, the horrified reaction of the chorus—singing pianissimo to a swirling orchestral accompaniment.

Agamemnon was premiered in a concert performance in January 1971 by the mainly amateur forces of Kensington Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leslie Head. The first broadcast was given in March 1973, by the BBC Northern Singers and Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Richard Armstrong, with Milla Andrew as Clytemnestra, Ann Howard as Cassandra and William MacAlpine as Agamemnon.

from notes by John Pickard © 2025