The Impact of Music
Given the accessibility of music today with the help of technology, it may seem a cliché for John Dryden to go to such lengths to assert that music can move people emotionally. After all, music is everywhere today. Music provides the soundtrack of people’s lives. Virtually every experience today is heightened by music. This was not so much the case in 17th-century British culture. After all, there were no recordings, radio, Spotify, or massive concert events. Live music was available only in church and to the wealthy.
Thus, for Dryden, it was important to make the case for the importance of music and its ability to generate strong emotions, plural. The poem reads like a kind of Music’s Greatest Hits. Using the occasion of the celebration of the legacy of St. Cecilia, a celebration staged in the court of the Catholic king James II, Dryden shows how Alexander’s court musician, using only a simple harp and a flute, creates moods ranging from exuberant (and drunken) celebration to elegiac sorrow for the dead to rapturous moments of tender love.
To a culture where music was the privilege of the upper class, Dryden celebrates the tectonic impact of melody. A single talented musician working a single instrument and playing a single melody creates these marvels. Timotheus’ melodies generate happiness, joy, pride, poignant and somber sadness, profound pain, and gratitude for the gentle gift of another’s heart.
The soldiers respond to melody; little actually happens in the poem except the experience of hearing and listening to tunes. Each emotion is genuine, raw, and immediate. In the end, the troubadour’s melody incites the Greek soldiers to “toss their torches on high” and angrily raze the city of Persepolis. Dryden does not attempt to explain this impact. Rather, from stanza to stanza, the poem explores another complex emotional register that music can sustain.
The Humanization of Alexander the Great
At the dramatic heart of Dryden’s poem is his portrait of Alexander the Great. Dryden could have made his argument about the impact of music without drawing on any historical figure. The idea that music stirs inexplicable emotions that are as immediate as they are profound could have been made with invented characters or with characters from the myths of Antiquity or as a confessional in which Dryden testified to the impact of music or, most appropriately, with the heroic story of St. Cecilia herself.
But the poem uses a historical figure drawn from Antiquity, a figure that Dryden’s audience knew only from history books. Alexander the Great comes to Dryden’s time—and to a contemporary audience—as an august and imperial figure, the man-child who conquered the entire known world while still in his teens. Much as in Dryden’s era, Alexander the Great today is an abstract entity, a monumental figure in history books celebrated in epic literature and commemorated in art and statuary. For that reason, he is more of a legend than a person.
In the tradition of Pindaric odes, which often sought to humanize historic figures, Dryden endows Alexander the Great with a range of human emotions. In the opening stanza, the tune from Timotheus’s lyre causes Alexander to see himself as godlike and play to his vanity and ego. Throughout the poem, each new tune registers a new emotion in Alexander. He is more than—or perhaps less than—the conqueror of Persia. He is a man, at once given to tears, love, egotism, and rage. He is, in short, a person.
Alexander the Great, that larger-than-life two-dimensional figure from ancient history, reveals emotions that give him the feel of real-time humanity. Alexander steps...
(This entire section contains 357 words.)
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out of history and becomes one of us, prone to emotions, good and bad. Alexander swells with pride. He weeps for lost soldiers under his command. He hungers for the exotic beauty of his lover, Thais. He feels the outrage against the Persians and joins in the mob that torches the city. Dryden uses the convention of the Pindaric ode to humanize Alexander.
The Power of the Artist
With “flying fingers,” Timotheus merely touches his lyre, and the “trembling notes ascend the sky.” It is a moment of magic and, more central to Dryden’s unfolding argument, an expression of power. Given the grand distractions of both the towering figure of Alexander the Great and the dramatic lead-up to the burning of the Persian capital city of Persepolis, it is easy to miss the most significant figure in “Alexander’s Feast”: the court minstrel, Dryden’s artist-figure.
The drama in the poem is controlled, manipulated, and sustained by an artist, by Timotheus, a simple minstrel. It is Timotheus who generates the emotions in the soldiers and even in Alexander himself. In Stanza 2, Timotheus’ lofty melody even convinces Alexander that he is a god, an offspring of Zeus. “The monarch hears / Assumes the god / Affects to nod.”
Like some benevolent (or perhaps malevolent?) puppet master, Timotheus directs the soldiers to respond to different tunes that create different moods, first one, then another. He watches the reactions. He senses when the emotional response is counterproductive. A humble minstrel, confidently working a lyre and then a flute, thus commands the greatest army in the known world.
In his manipulation of the festival mood in the banquet hall, he is powerful and invincible. Indeed, there is a logic that would find Timotheus himself responsible for the catastrophic conflagration that the drunken Greek soldiers set that destroys the city of Persepolis. After lulling the soldiers into a sweet interlude with his gentle melody of love, Timotheus stirs the soldiers to anger and spikes them to revenge simply by switching his tune to a “louder, yet louder strain.”
Timotheus is not motivated by any particular grudge against the vanquished Persians. Indeed, none of his gorgeous mood-altering melodies reveals a logic or a reason. It is music, for music’s sake. As a poet, Dryden celebrates the artist’s consummate delight in creating moods with only his art to drive and inspire him.
