T. N. São Carlos, 20 a 22 de Dezembro de 2006.
Direcção musical Donato Renzetti
Orquestra Sinfónica Portuguesa
Coro do Teatro Nacional de São Carlos
maestro titular Giovanni Andreoli
Ópera-oratória em dois actos.
Libreto de Jean Cocteau segundo Sófocles.
versão de concerto
Voz recitante
Fanny Ardant
Oedipus
Will Hartmann
Creonte/Mensageiro
Keel Watson
Jocasta
Mariana Pentcheva
Pastor
Pedro Chaves
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[wikipedia]
Oedipus rex is an "Opera-oratorio" by Igor Stravinsky scored for orchestra, soloists, and male chorus. The libretto was written by Jean Cocteau in French and then translated by Abbe Jean Daniélou into Latin (the narration, however, is performed in the language of the audience). The work is sometimes performed in the concert hall as an oratorio, as it was in its original performance in the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris on May 30, 1927, and its American premiere the following year given by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Harvard Glee Club; it has also been presented onstage as an opera, the first such performance being at the Vienna State Opera on February 23, 1928. It was subsequently presented three times by the Santa Fe Opera in 1960, 1961, and 1962 with the composer in attendance.
Stravinsky's music is an example of neo-classicism. He had considered setting the opera in Ancient Greek, but decided ultimately on Latin, in his words "a medium not dead but turned to stone."
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Plot synopsis
Act I
The Narrator greets the audience, explaining the nature of the drama they are about to see, and setting the scene: Thebes is suffering from a plague, and the men of the city lament it loudly. Oedipus, king of Thebes and conqueror of the Sphinx promises to save the city. Creon, brother-in-law to Oedipus, returns from the oracle at Delphi and declaims the words of the gods: Thebes is harboring the murderer of Laius, the previous king. It is the murderer who has brought the plague upon the city. Oedipus promises to discover the murderer and cast him out. He questions Tiresias, the soothsayer, who at first refuses to speak. Angered at this silence, Oedipus accuses him of being the murderer himself. Provoked, Tiresias speaks at last, stating that the murderer of the king is a king. Terrified, Oedipus then accuses Tiresias of being in league with Creon, who he believes covets the throne. With a flourish from the chorus, Jocasta appears.
Act II
Jocasta calms the dispute by telling all the oracles always lie. An oracle had predicted that Laius would die at his son's hand, when in fact he was murdered by bandits at the crossing of three roads. This frightens Oedipus further: he recalls killing an old man at a crossroads before coming to Thebes. A messenger arrives: King Polybus of Corinth, who Oedipus believes to be his father, has died. However, it is now revealed that Polybus was only the foster-father of Oedipus, who had been, in fact, a foundling. An ancient shepherd arrives: It was he who had found the child Oedipus in the mountains. Jocasta, realizing the truth, flees. At last, the messenger and shepherd state the truth openly: Oedipus is the child of Laius and Jocasta, killer of his father, husband of his mother. Shattered, Oedipus leaves. The messenger then reports the death of Jocasta: she has hanged herself in her chambers. Oedipus broke into her room and put out his eyes with her pin. Oedipus departs Thebes forever as the chorus at first vents their anger and then mourns the loss of a king they loved.
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[by Robert Craft, about Naxos recording]
Stravinsky conducted the first performance of Oedipus Rex (1925-1927) in the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, Paris, on 30th May, 1927, in a double bill with Firebird, in which George Balanchine danced the rôle of Kastchei. Composers—Ravel, Poulenc, and Roger Sessions among them—were the first to recognize it as Stravinsky’s most powerful dramatic work and one of his greatest creations. After hearing Ernest Ansermet conduct it in London, February 12, 1936, the young Benjamin Britten noted in his diary:
‘One of the peaks of Stravinsky’s output, this work shows his wonderful sense of style and power of drawing inspiration from every age of music, and leaving the whole a perfect shape, satisfying every aesthetic demand … the established idea of originality dies so hard.’
Leonard Bernstein may have been the first to identify the principal influence on the music:
‘I remembered where those four opening notes of Oedipus come from… And the whole metaphor of pity and power became clear; the pitiful Thebans supplicating before their powerful king, imploring deliverance from the plague … an Ethiopian slave girl at the feet of her mistress, Princess of Egypt … Amneris has just wormed out of Aida her dread secret … Verdi, who was so unfashionable at the time Oedipus was written, someone for musical intellectuals of the mid-’20s to sneer at; and Aida, of all things, that cheap, low, sentimental melodrama. [At the climax of Oedipus’ “Invidia” aria] the orchestra plays a diminished-seventh chord … that favorite ambiguous tool [i.e., tool for suggesting ambiguity] of surprise and despair in every romantic opera … Aida! … Was Stravinsky having a secret romance with Verdi’s music in those super-sophisticated mid-’20s? It seems he was.’ [Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1973]
Bernstein might also have mentioned the debt to Verdi in Jocasta’s aria and her duet with Oedipus. A photograph of Verdi occupied a prominent position on the wall of Stravinsky’s Paris studio in the 1920s, and on his concert tours he would go out of his way to hear Verdi operas, to the extent of changing the dates of his own concerts, as he did in Hanover in December 1931 for a performance of Macbeth. In the early 1930s he wrote to one of his biographers: “If I had been in Nietzsche’s place, I would have said Verdi instead of Bizet and held up The Masked Ball against Wagner”. In Buenos Aires, in 1936, Stravinsky shocked a journalist by saying: “Never in my life would I be capable of composing anything to equal the delicious waltz in La Traviata”.
Other influences besides Verdi’s are apparent. The “Gloria” chorus at the end of Act One, the Messenger’s music, and the a cappella choral music in the Messenger scene are distinctly Russian, but the genius of the piece is in the unity that Stravinsky achieves with his seemingly disparate materials.
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