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Semiramide riconosciuta (an archaeology)

from Ongoing Collected Works by Ben Zucker

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(For mezzo-soprano and electronics)

At some point in the past, there was an Assyrian woman, generally referred to as Sammu-Ramat, who held immense political power unlike any woman before her in recorded history, suceeding her husband upon his death, and acting as regent for her son. Of this much we can be fairly certain.

Beyond this, archaelogical, historical, and mythical knowledge blur together. Classical accounts from Herodotus, Diodorus, Ctesias, Strabo, Plutarch and others describe the momuments built in the name of Semiramis, while also attributing to her a semi-divine origin and idolation. Indeed, controversy remains as to what extent Sammu-Ramat and Semiramis are, in fact or to what degree, the same individual, woman or aspects of goddesses. In medieval antiquity and the Renaissance, she is praised as one of the Nine Worthies for her strong leadership, yet for her alleged lust appears in the second circle of Dante's hell. The politics of her rise and fall as queen become the basis for a popular libretto by Metastasio, then a play by Voltaire, which serves as the basis for Rossini's opera with the name Semiramide. In the 1850s, an anti-Catholic pamphlet The Two Babylons attempts to establish an ancient conspiracy of continued Babylonian religion begun by the Biblical king Nimrod and Semiramis, effectively denoting her the incestuous Whore Of Babylon in Revelations.

To say that history is written by the winners implies that there is only one set of winners, who repeatedly re-read and overwrite the past. In this case, as Reinhard Bernbeck states, "Semiramis is a stable symbol in a shifting discursive space, a symbol that invites the weaving of tales of women and their deeds." She is written about not so much as with fact as with the accumulations of ideas of the time about power and gender, politics and motherhood, are inscribed. Thus in the end, there are so many tangled threads of discourse that it is effectively impossible to truly have Semiramide riconosciuta, that is, Semiramide revealed, the title of the Metastasio libretto.

This piece, then, is not another, more "truthful" spin on this individual. To attempt so is firmly in line with the whole of history's imposition on her. Nevertheless, we (myself, poet Laura Roth, and Jackie Kerns, for whom this was collaboratively written) thought it was important to have this story out there, and known in all its complication. Laura adds another piece to the puzzle with her beautiful poem, in which, at last, she has the primary say (at least via creative, speculative rhetoric) in her own story. To this, I set the poem and alongside it the fragments of millenia of commentary, across time, from sources poetic, academic, historical, and polemical. To the extent that the singer is Sammu-Ramat/Semiramis/Semiramide, they are this personage with too many conflicting accounts, spilling over into multiple forms of expression aware of themselves and beyond (not, it must be emphatically stated, in the style of the operatic madwoman trope, which is in itself another site of suppressing normative ideals of female artistry, subjectivity, and sanity). They are a site and subject of an archaeology, that is, to study human activity through its artifacts. To self-archaeologize, however, may be seen as an act of reclamation, or empowerment, to take account of one's self against the accounts of others. If not in actuality, then it is at least us imagining the acts we aspire to see, and hope to encourage.

credits

from Ongoing Collected Works, released August 23, 2017
Jacqueline Kerns, voice

Text by Laura Roth

Addition text/citations:

Alighieri, Dante. “Divina Commedia/Inferno.” Wikisource, it.wikisource.org/wiki/Divina_Commedia/Inferno.

Asher-Greve, Julia. “FROM 'SEMIRAMIS OF BABYLON' TO 'SEMIRAMIS OF HAMMERSMITH'.” S.W. Holloway (ed.), Orientalism, Assyriology and the Bible, Hebrew Bible Monography 10 (Sheffield) (2006): pp. 323-373.

Birnbeck, Reinhard. “SEX/GENDER/POWER AND ŠAMMURAMAT:A VIEW FROM THE SYRIAN STEPPE.” Fundstellen: Gesammelte Schriften Zur Ärchäologie Und Geschichte Altvorderasiens ; Ad Honorem Hartmut Kühne, Harrassowitz, 2008, pp. 351–369.

Herodotus. “The History of Herodotus.” Translated by George Rawlinson,
The Internet Classics Archive, classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.1.i.html.

Hislop, Alexander. The Two Babylons: or, Papal Worship Proved to Be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife (1916). 3rd ed., James Wood, 1857.

Mark, Joshua J. "Sammu-Ramat and Semiramis: The Inspiration and the Myth." Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 16 Sep 2014. Web. 23 Mar 2019.

Moore, Janice. “Was Semiramis The Wife of Nimrod Mentioned In The Bible?” Seeker World, www.onthecheese.com/seekerworld/two-babylons/semiramis.html.

Smith, W. Robertson. “Ctesias and the Semiramis Legend.” The English Historical Review, vol. 2, no. 6, 1887, pp. 303–317. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/546480.

“The Syrian Goddess; Being a Translation of Lucian's De Dea Syria, with a Life of Lucian.” Edited by John Garstang. Translated by Hebert Strong, Internet Archive, London Constable, 1913, archive.org/details/syriangoddessbei00luciuoft/page/n8.

Thomas, marquis of Saluzzo (Saluces): le chevalier errant (Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, mss. Fr. 12559, fol. 125v; manuscript dated 1403-04).

Opening audio sung by Joan Sutherland, from 1971 performance of "Al Mio Pregar t'Arrendi" from Rossini's "Semiramide", with Chicago Lyric Opera Orchestra.

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