For nearly half a century Claude Calame has been recognized as a leading expert on choral dance in ancient Greece, a subject which has recently experienced a revival of academic interest. This latest publication is a fine translation, by Vanessa Casato, of his monograph La tragédie chorale: poésie grecque et ritual musical (Paris, 2017). It is a valuable contribution to the discussion revolving around the function of the chorus in Greek tragedy. Against a tendency to ‘drain Greek tragedy of its poetic and musical reality’ (xxvii) in the literature on Attic drama since Aristotle, Calame aims to ‘restor[e] this reality’ to it and ‘establish the choral dimension’ of Greek tragedy (xxviii). Tragedy, he argues, should be viewed ‘as ritual and musical performance’ (66).

The book is divided into seven chapters, preceded by a foreword by Simon Goldhill, a preface to the English edition and a ‘Methodological Prelude’. While the first three chapters establish a theoretical frame, the remainder of the book presents close readings of the choral odes in Aeschylus’ Persians, Euripides’ Hippolytus and Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus as well as a concluding chapter on the role of citharodic nomos in the development of tragedy. For reasons of clarity, I shall focus my observations on the theoretical part which aims to establish analytical categories applicable to all tragedies.

Calame first offers a history of attempts to define an ‘ideal essence’ of tragedy, traceable from the Weimarer Klassik to modern times. This approach to interpreting tragedy is, as he rightly points out, influenced by Aristotle’s conception of tragedy in the Poetics (6.1449b24–28). While already ‘in Aristotle the chorus has no more than a subordinate role’ (24), it becomes entirely neglected in the Romantic and modern definitions of ‘the Tragic’ which focus solely ‘on the action of the lone (male) hero’ (8). Calame does not linger on Aristotle’s reasons for describing tragedy the way he did: might his definition be an indication of how classical tragedies were received in his time, rather than a misconception? He then rejects this approach, and suggests resorting to ‘emic categories’ (8, cf. xxv) in order to understand tragedy, as far as is possible, from within Greek culture or, in other words, from the reality of tragic performance.

Against this background, in Chapter 1 an analysis of the relevant terminology used around tragic performances yields the conclusion that ‘in its emic definition Attic tragedy is fundamentally choral’ (19). In Chapter 2, Calame takes a closer look at tragedy’s connection to ritual (understood as ‘a regulated performance at once vocal and gestural’, 30): on the one hand, ritual songs are performed in tragedy, accomplishing a mediation between the dramatic action and the here-and-now of the performance (36, cf. 66); on the other, the performance of tragedy is also ritual in itself, although not confined to the cult of Dionysus. In Chapter 3, Calame develops his main analytical categories. Based on the observation that tragic choruses have complex collective identities and never simply ‘represent the audience’ (69, cf. 71), he suggests distinguishing between three ‘semantic voices’: the performative voice, by which the chorus is a collective agent in the dramatic action; the affective voice, by which it reacts emotionally to it; and the hermeneutic voice, by which it interprets and foresees (parts of) the action. The simultaneous presence of all three voices creates what Calame calls the ‘semantic polyphony’ of the chorus (74–75). Furthermore, this polyphony of sung contents roughly corresponds to an ‘enunciative polyphony’ of the ideal and empirical speakers standing behind the choral first person: the actors of the play (performative voice), the virtual and historical audience (affective voice), the virtual and biographical author (hermeneutic voice) (77). In this last part, it is unclear to me why Calame does not distinguish between ‘actors’ (the people performing here and now) and ‘characters’ (the agents in the enacted drama). This would correspond to the chorus’ ‘double identity’ pointed out before (67, cf. 88). Why are there five enunciative roles rather than six (77)? Perhaps the ‘virtual author’ is better termed an ‘implicit narrator’.

Some readers might wonder whether Calame neglects the tragic action and hero in his interpretation. At the very least, regarding the original performance context of tragedies, however, his strong emphasis on the role of the chorus is certainly convincing. The close readings in the second part of the book, and especially the fascinating analysis of the gender identities and roles of the two choruses in the Hippolytus (Chapter 5), demonstrate to great effect that the hypothesis of a ‘choral polyphony’ is a helpful instrument to disentangle the complexity of choral odes. In addition, it is a persuasive attempt to explain why and how Greek tragedies, still today, engage us both mentally and emotionally through the mediation of the chorus.