What do Amazons sound like? In the 19th century, composers would have drawn on a palette of instrumental colours that could depict the unfamiliar with no difficulty, albeit perhaps somewhat clichéd. Italian and French Baroque music were only beginning to show the first signs of such onomatopoeia. For example, what Marin Marais, gambist and composer at the court of Louis XIV, notated in the work L’Ameriquaine from his Suite d’un goût étranger, sounds neither American nor otherwise foreign.
But back to the Amazons. To this day, it is still not clear whether these female warriors, about whom Homer, Herodotus and others wrote, actually existed. Further research is necessary before this question can be answered conclusively. Research was also required to unearth the Amazon operas from which arias and instrumental works will be heard this afternoon. The Amazons, like strong women on Baroque opera stages in general, are complex figures whose character consists of attributes that are considered typically female and typically male till today. The ambivalence of their gender is the decisive factor in many opera plots and provides an inexhaustible source of dramatic and musical inspiration for great lyrical scenes, laments, war songs, rage arias, tender melodies and instrumental pieces.
That is precisely why we find a female character like Marthésie, the first queen of the Amazons, in André Cardinal Destouches’s opera. In the closing scene, during the aria “Quel coup”, she stands at the edge of an abyss, sees her dead lover there and descends into the shadows to him – with more dignity than Orpheus. Giuseppe de Bottis presents another Amazon queen, Mitilene, in his opera of the same title – a woman who wants to be free from the bonds of love and yet suffers because of her unhappy love. The Amazons, then as now – more relevant than ever.