By Lily Bryant

In Greek mythology there is a story about a brutal musical contest between the satyr Marsyas and the god Apollo.

Marsyas happens upon a flute discarded by its inventor Athena, after nymphs had mocked her for the ugly face she made when she played it. Marsyas quickly realises his natural ability on the instrument, and in a moment of deep yet misguided self-belief challenges the god Apollo to that most ancient and decisive of battles: a play-off. Insulted, Apollo takes up his lyre, expecting to absolutely cream this arrogant creature -- but to his enormous surprise onlookers declare the first round a tie.

From here two versions of the story exist, but in both of them Apollo plays dirty: some accounts suggest he retaliated by turning his lyre upside-down and playing just as beautifully before; some suggest he began to sing while he played. Marsyas had no hope at recreating either of these impressive feats on his inferior instrument and the crowd awarded the win to Apollo in a landslide. Ever the gracious winner, Apollo celebrated his victory by tying Marsyas to a tree and flaying him alive.

The most prescient interpretation of this fable is as a warning against mortal hubris, or perhaps as a reminder of the power of the gods and the sanctity of their music.

I choose to take things a lot more personally: what have these guys got against the flute?

Even with the lofty title of the world’s oldest melodic instrument, the flute’s musical merit has not always been obvious to everyone. Mozart hated it; people who watched Anchorman don’t respect it. But there came a moment at the turn of the 20th century when the flute was suddenly tasked with creating the most emotional, orchestral richness imaginable.

As Greek antiquity returned to fashion, composers were drawn to the instrument due to its close association with the god Pan, a famous flautist (or panpipe-ist) himself, although admittedly a less than perfect ambassador. Taking the appearance of a faun, his divine portfolio concerns nature, shepherds and carnal desire, and his conduct towards nymphs is lecherous at best. Nonetheless, the gentle, pure sound of the flute becomes his musical embodiment across the orchestral canon, including in Ravel’s most ambitious work Daphnis and Chloé, which the Sydney Symphony will perform in July under acclaimed English conductor Edward Gardner, when Arabella Steinbacher performs Prokofiev.

The birth of Ravel’s largest-scale work was defined by its own embittered contest between members of its creative team (although thankfully, it didn’t end in a flaying). Commissioned by the great Russian choreographer Sergei Diaghilev for his star dancer Vaslav Nijinsky and the Ballets Russes, the project was to be an adaptation of Greek author Longus’ landmark pastoral romance. The work was plagued from the outset. Ravel’s extravagant vision was ‘to remain faithful to the Greece of [his] dreams,’ diametrically at odds with the fashionably archaistic and literal approach of the choreographer, Michel Fokine.

Known for his painstaking perfectionism, Ravel’s composition went slowly, and the push for time led designer Leon Bakst to repurpose historically accurate costumes and scenery from a recent production, which clashed with the sensuous music. Diaghilev, wanting to move on from the disastrous project as quickly as possible, sought to cancel the premiere, which he had already begun to neglect in favour of a much more glamorous upcoming project: Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, a sensual fresco of Pan and his nymphs similarly inspired by Greek artefacts, which eclipsed the premiere of Daphnis completely. Both pieces place the flute centre stage, literally and figuratively, with behemoth solos, written in similar musical language. It was undoubtedly a stressful time for Ravel and the Ballet Russes, but for flautists, this month of hampered premieres and HR chaos couldn’t have been more valuable.

The ballet’s libretto, also compiled by Fokine, takes liberties with Longus’ text, omitting much of the dramatic material and inserting more dance battles. The original story begins with the abandonment of Daphnis, who is found and adopted by a local goatherd. Later, in a neighbouring community, the same circumstances befall young Chloe, who is taken in by a family of shepherds. The two grow up together, and as adolescents begin to experience feelings of love and desire for one another, but in their naivety struggle to understand their new impulses. It is this eroticism and reckoning with youth sexuality that threads the entire narrative together, as the pair navigate kidnappings by pirates and spurned neighbours, and violent attacks from jealous onlookers.

The ballet is truncated into three choreography-friendly scenarios. In the first, Ravel’s score establishes the work’s soundworld, as the lower strings drone softly underneath the gentle plucking of a harp, soon joined by the flute and the horn – another instrument long associated with pastoral life. The wordless choir (who eschew text in favour of varied vowel sounds) contributes to the otherworldly effect, and in tandem with wind and brass instruments creates a sense of breath within the music. Free of rhythmic pulse and counterpoint, the music of the opening feels entirely non-angular, with no sharp corners on which anything could snag.

Sounds flow and melt together, ebbing to and from dynamic climaxes as naturally as the motion of water.

Ravel’s complex rhythms made the job of Fokine and his dancers much harder, but also allow his music to feel boundless and improvisatory, evoking the innate randomness of the sounds of the natural world.

As the first scenario develops, antagonists such as Dorcon (Daphnis’ rival) and the pirates (Chloe’s abductors) are introduced, with changes in character marked by the addition of percussion and a sense of rhythmic impulse that drives the tension and action. Conversely, in moments of heightened mystery or eroticism - likewhen Daphnis meets his seductive admirer Lyceion, or Chloe is forced to dance for her freedom – Ravel experiments with melodies that meander and swell, and with harmonies that feel unsettled, landing somewhere between beautiful and uncomfortable. Ever the orchestrator, he luxuriates in the interesting timbre created by two of the same instrument playing melodies in unison, one higher and one lower, so that the sound becomes richer.

In the daybreak scene that marks the beginning of the third scenario, Ravel deftly uses the winds to create one of the most moving and evocative aural renderings of a sunrise in the Western canon. He does this as an impressionist painter might create an expansive image out of details that are incoherent up close; flutes and clarinets alternate in a fiendish flurry of notes at minute volume, finicky and stressful when printed on the page, but sounding in the concert hall as a gentle murmur that hums with increasing intensity, adding layer upon complex layer, to reach an exultant climax.

When the famed flute solo appears, it’s rather unusually as diegetic music – that is, music that is created and heard within the fictional world of the dancers, rather than a soundtrack added for the dramatic benefit of the audience. To celebrate their reunion, Daphnis and Chloe perform a pantomime for each other in which Daphnis assumes the role of the lustful Pan, playing the pipes for Chloe, acting as the coquettish nymph Syrinx, who dances erotically in response.

The entire solo carries with it a languidness that encapsulates the text’s eroticism, and the strange combination of lust, violence and grief that the story of Pan and Syrinx demands. Grounded by the gentle and unyielding plinks from the lower strings, the flute begins with a scale that ascends high above the orchestra, a gust of warm summer wind across rolling green pastures, shimmering at the top before descending back to earth. Just as Debussy does in his Prélude, Ravel centres much of this solo around the note C sharp, which has a particularly open, unfocused and flexible sound on the flute, reminiscent of the panpipes.

As the flute’s sound builds and articulation begins to quicken, Ravel thickens the texture ever so slightly with the introduction of the horns and flourishes from the harp, perhaps evoking Pan’s anguished cry at his futile attempts to catch Syrinx, who has turned herself into reeds, exhausted from the pursuit. The emotional climax, however, occurs at the flute’s softest moment, when the orchestra arrives at a notably melancholic chord: a ‘minor ninth’ chord for any theory buffs, or the second chord in Every Breath You Take by the Police for any 80s pop-rock buffs. This comparison is strangely fitting, as at this moment Pan blows his first mournful melody on his new pipes, a symbol of his eternal, tragic ownership of the nymph. After one last futile swell of the music it dissolves into trills, leading into what eventually becomes the joyous (and euphemistic) bacchanale in which the townsfolk celebrate the union of Daphnis and Chloe as they passionately embrace.

A flautist’s relationship with this music is typically formed many years before they make it to a concert hall stage, often in a stuffy, windowless practice room around the age of 14, aided by an ever-encouraging teacher, exhausted by the thankless task of creating a new generation of orchestral flute players. Here is where we learn the story of Pan and his fatal pursuit of the nymph Syrinx, out of whose transformed body the god would fashion his eponymous pipe. We agonise for hours over the best tone colours to implement, where the vibrato starts and stops, or how to indicate to an audition panel that you’re aware of where the horns join, or where tempo fractionally slows. But to finally sew your individual thread into the symphonic tapestry is a different experience altogether. In Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, the hollow, silvery sound of the flute starts the piece from nothing, inviting the orchestra to follow in its wake. But in Daphnis et Chloé you can’t wait until you’re ready to play, or worry about whether nymphs might be laughing at the sight of your distorted face; once the basses and celli begin their gentle pizzicato heartbeat, you have to count to three and go. Regardless of the preparation or the anxieties, the music only exists as you’re creating it, just as Syrinx’s memory is only resurrected when Pan breathes its life into his pipes.

The modern flautist faces some similar considerations to those of Greek myth. If the camera catches you at the wrong time, your ungainly flute-playing face may be immortalised just as Athena’s was. If you miss your entry or play a wrong note, you might face feedback from the conductor painful enough to liken to a flaying. But we can also take wisdom from the likes of Athena, Marsyas and Pan, because these legendary figures played for the love of it, to connect with the world around them, to reckon with their pain. To be enveloped by Ravel’s sonic sunrise from the A Reserve seat that is the Principal Flute’s chair is not an experience one can ever take lightly. It’s a humbling reminder to those of us privileged to sit in the centre of the orchestra, watching the conductor’s downbeats, inhaling deep into the abdomen and exhaling meticulously down a glorified piece of tubing, that we have an opportunity and an obligation to play, like Marsyas did, as if our lives depend on it.