Based on her doctoral thesis, defended in 2018 at the University of Oxford, Stephanie Oade’s study belongs to the still scarcely charted interdisciplinary field of the musical reception of classical studies. The focus of the study is the reception of Catullus in four little-analysed twentieth-century musical works: the songs Catullus: On the Burial of His Brother (1947) by Ned Rorem and Alan Rawsthorne’s Lament for a Sparrow (1962), Carl Orff’s oratorio-type choral work Catulli Carmina: Ludi Scaenici (1943), and Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos (1912, revised 1916). This modern reception corpus, hitherto neglected, stands apart from the many works devoted to opera, particularly Romantic opera — e.g. S. Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity (2011). Departing from chronological order, O. bases her methodology on the progressive classification of musical genres, thereby presenting a cumulative study of lyrical characteristics, thematically organised.

Focusing her research on the nature of lyricism, a feature shared by both literary and musical corpora, O. aims to revive debates on Catullus’s lyricism and use his reception to reconsider the plasticity of the genre and the difficulties of categorising it. The author proposes an original analytical approach in which music and text, considered jointly and with equal attention, illuminate each other — drawing particularly on performance theory, reader-response theory and literary theory. O. innovates by developing methodologies already explored in this field, such as the comparative approach in M. Ewans, Opera from the Greek (2016). The interdisciplinary nature of the study, targeting both linguists and musicologists, nevertheless constitutes the main challenge identified by O. Translations, analysis of selected musical excerpts and a terminological appendix facilitate the reading, supplemented by a list of recommended recordings.

Part I, ‘Catullus as a Lyric Poet’, outlines O.’s approach, which treats generic categorisation, constructed by the reader, as an interpretative tool: heir to the ancient tradition, Catullan lyricism is also interpreted by twentieth-century composers and our contemporary lyrical frameworks. The author thus provides a historical and theoretical contextualisation of Catullus’s lyric voice (chs 2–3). O. identifies broad modern characteristics of Catullan lyricism reflected in the musical works: the poet’s subjectivity; address to an audience; a single setting and, as O. writes, lyric ‘now’; minimal context; potential for universality; shifting atmosphere (das Gleitende); and proximity to narrative and dramatic genres. Ch. 4 discusses musical lyricism and the shared features between poetry and music. After a survey of twentieth-century musical reappraisals of ancient texts, the author contextualises her four case studies. However, the chronological gap between the two corpora risks concealing the composers’ musical heritage and, above all, their borrowings from earlier Catullan representations and lyrical conceptions.

The following sections present the case studies, all of which open with a welcome contextualisation of the composers’ education and engagement with the classics, primarily Catullus. Owing to insufficient sources, however, this reconstruction sometimes appears tenuous. The scarcity of the composers’ own testimonies about their works or about Catullus remains regrettable. Part II, ‘Lyric and Song’, considers the settings of Catull. 101 by Rorem and Catull. 3 by Rawsthorne (chs 5–6). In Rorem, composer, translator and performer layer their dialogical subjectivity onto the Catullan text, complicating the idea of monologic lyricism expressing individual sentiment. The structural and vocal configuration analyses of Rawsthorne’s song highlight the concept of das Gleitende. The mediating layers and musical performances of the lyric ‘now’ reveal the coexistence of lyrical and dramatic genres in textual and musical works.

Part III, ‘Staging the Cycle’, analyses Orff’s work, which selects certain poems to construct an ‘autobiographical’ narrative plot about the love of Catullus and Lesbia as a musical drama. Ch. 7 deals with his Catullan cyclic reading: the reorganised polymetric and epigram poems function as a self-contained textual cycle, but the lyricism of the poems impedes linear narration. The musical and dramatic study (ch. 8) explores Orff’s dramaturgical devices, compensating for the absence of causal progression between the poems. The analysis of his work thus accounts for genre crossings and incompatibilities. Part IV, ‘Lyric and Drama’, offers the first systematic study of Strauss-Hofmannsthal’s work in relation to Catull. 64. The narrative epyllion and the dramatic opera display generic hybridity that leans toward lyricism. O. then examines their frame structures, ekphrasis and Spiel im Spiel form, as well as the figure of Ariadne (chs 9–10), before studying the potential for generic transformation afforded by Strauss’s musical narration, where motivic writing dramatises the lyrical libretto (ch. 11). The study highlights the aesthetic, ideological and generic similarities between poem and opera.

In ch. 12, O. concludes by underlining the exploratory character of her study. Through its different modes of lyrical transfer, musical reception sheds light on the Catullan text and lyric theory. The study demonstrates the importance of considering the transmedial and intergeneric flexibility of the lyric genre to grasp it more fully; this flexibility constitutes a key analytical basis for textual and musical understanding. With a broader reflection on lyricism across the arts, O. situates her work within research on Catullus, musicology and literary theory. Her innovative study thus opens up methodological perspectives toward other genres (such as epic, e.g. Virgil’s Aeneid) or other disciplines (such as cognitive sciences and performance theory, illuminating the audience’s reception of artistic remediations) and underscores the importance of musical reception in classical studies and of the evolving interaction of the arts over time.