MILAN – From the Greek choros, song accompanied by dance, the choir, in Attic tragedy, designates:
- The group of people who dance and sing, and who often give the title to the tragedy;
- The physical place of the theater where dance and song are performed;
- The song text and the music, both composed by the tragic poet.
To the voice of the choir the tragedian (the one who writes or composes the tragedy) entrusted the parodo, parodos, entrance song of the choir on the theatrical scene, generally composed in anapestic meters which, with their rhythm, followed the march movement, and exodus, exodos, exit, choir singing at the end of the play as the characters left the stage. But above all the stasimi were entrusted to the choir, the solemn choral songs composed with a great variety of meters and rhythms according to the model of the Stesicorean triad, in the classical metric large and solemn metric period fixed in its structure by Stesicoro, then taken up by Pindar and by Bacchilides until reaching its most complete expression in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.
The function of the choir varies in the single authors and in the single works. Aeschylus entrusts him with his moral reflections and sometimes gives him the importance of a real character in the tragedy by making him participate in the action (for example, in the “Supplici” and “Eumenidi”). In Sophocles, on the other hand, the chorus accompanies the action with its comments which often reflect the mentality and culture of the average spectator. In Euripides, especially in later tragedies, the choir begins to lose importance, and its function becomes predominantly lyrical.
In modern times it was Alessandro Manzoni, an important exponent of Italian literature, who reintroduced the choir in the tragedy after a centuries-old abandonment (in “Il conte di Carmagnola” and “Adelchi”) perhaps with the rather clear purpose of reserving if a “lyrical corner” in which he could develop, in a civil or religious key, his personal reading of the dramatic action.
Often it is the “inner voice of the poet” which is reflected in the choir. His point of view, his ideas, his ideals find in the choir the most intense and engaging way to manifest themselves and to give substance to his most felt and most participatory artistic inspiration. Sometimes in the chorus, the poet also projects his “imaginative double” in the sense that he conveys all his quivering, its pulsing, its feeling, its perception into it. In the choir the poet concluded and enclosed his truest, most intense, often revolutionary and almost visionary message regarding a still distant and uncertain future and a present that never understands its own historical moment and what its lightning clarity entails. veiled or overt.Francesca Rita Rombola
