OEDIPUS REX
Igor Stravinsky
Tragedy Of Epic Impersonality
Text by Max Harrison
During one phase of his career Stravinsky
had a particular leaning towards the culture of ancient Greece. The Hellenic
world first appeared in his Op. 2, Faune et Berg?e of 1906-07,
then in the Pastorale, also 1907. But this interest was most sharply
focused during 1926-1934. That was the time of his balett Apollon
musag?e, the melodrama Persephone and above all
of the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex. This tendency also had its effect on
the Duo concertante and later ballet Orpheus.
Oedipus Rex was written at Nice between January 1926 and
March 1927, the orchestration being finished in May, 20 days before the
premiere. This was given purely as a concert performance by members od
Diaghilev's ballets Russes company at the Theatre Sarah Bernardt in Paris
on 30 May 1927, conducted by Stravinsky. In this form, and coupled with
L'oiseau de feu, Oedipus Rex didn't creat much impression. However,
it marks almost the mid-point in his composing career and was the first
masterpiece of his neo-Classical period, which can be taken as having started
with Mavra (1922) and ended with The
Rake's Progress (1948-51).
Stravinsky had for some years wanted to write a big dramatic work,
but now that he was living far away from his native land, as he would for
the rest of his long life, the question of the language in which it was
to be cast took on an added importance. Indeed, it is significant that
the language was chosen before the subject. He wanted something older than
any currently spoken tongue, a language in a way distant, sanctified, and
with an incantatory aspect if which he could take advantage in his music.
He decided on Latin because, he later said, it "had the great advantage
of giving me a medium not dead but turned to stone, and so monumentalised
as to have become immune from any risk of vulgarisation."
For a subject Stravinsky turned to Ancient
Greek mythology. He had read omnivorously from childhood onwards and
during his late teens had discovered Shakespear, Dante and Greek drama
in Russian translations in his father's library. Now he remembered having
been particularly excited by Sophocles's Oedipus Rex in the translation
of Gneditch, and this became his subject. It had the attraction of being
an extremely known story, the audience's familiarity with which, Stravinsky
felt, could be assumed, leaving him to concentrate on a strictly musical
dramatisation. At this point he contacted Jean
Cocteau, with whom he had been acquainted since the pre-World War I
Paris seasons of the Ballets Russes. More recently Stravinsky had admired
Cocteau's adaptation of Antigone by Sophocles, and so he asked to
write the libretto for Oedipus Rex. After much revision, Cocteau's
French text was translated into Latin by Father Jean Danielou and then
Stravinsky at once began work on the music.
Evidently from am early stage, the abortive premiere notwithstanding,
he had decided ideas about how the work ought to be presented, and in particular
wanted a minimum of stage action. He saw the chorus as sitting in a single
row , reading from scrolls, their faces concealed, while the solo singers
were to stand on elevated platforms at different heights from each other.
As he said to Cocteau, what he wanted was "a still life," and
a note in the score reads: "Except for Tiresias, the Shepherd and
the Messenger, the characters remain in their built-up costumes and masks.
Only their arms and heads move. The shoud give an impression of living
statues." Oedipus was to be visible the whole time, while Jocasta
and Creon were to be illuminated only during their arias and thus revealed
on the stage rather then making entarnces and exits. Oedipus's blindness
in the final scene was to be indicated by a change of mask.
The idea of having a speaker narrating the events of the tragedy
in whatever is the language of the audience was Cocteau's. In other words
not Stravinsky's, which no doubt is why the latter subsequently reiterated
his intense dislike of having someone to tell a story which, he thought,
everyone knew. But in fact it is in several ways highly effective, whether
on stage or listening to a recording. Firstly, knowledge of Latin and of
the literature of the ancient world is less wide spread than when Oedipus
Rex was written. Secondly, the Narrator distances listeners, partly
by means of the language difference, from the story's dreadful happenings.
And thirdly, by narrating the events in advance the Narrator's five commentaries
remove the element of dramatic surprise, leaving the audience free to concentrate
on the music.
This work is in its basic structure shaped by the classical forms
of aria, duet and chorus. Quite apart from the voices, including the great
dramatic impact of the chorus, this was the first time Stravinsky had composed
for full symphony orchestra since his symphonic poem Le chant du rossignol
of 1917. If the results were very different from in that seductive score
it was partly because of the experience gained since of writing chamber
works as diverse as L'histoire du soldat and Mavra and pieces
from which strings are absent, like the Octet and Symphonies of Wind Instruments
(1920) points to Oedipus Rex.
In accord with this cooler stance, the musical material of this
latter work is set down in adjacent blocks without thematic cross-references.
The Narrator tells us at the beginning that we are to hear a version of
Sophocles's tragedy "preserving only a certain monumental aspects
of his various scenes," and the effect of Stravinsky's treatment is
monumental indeed, this being achieved by a variety of means. It is partly
a matter of the simplicity of the harmony acting with the rigidity of the
rythm. Concerning the latter, Stravinsky, except in the Messenger's aria,
"Reppereram in monte," does without the frequent changes of stress
and time signature that hitherto had been a prominent feature of his style.
There are sustained episodes when the rhythmic pattern, far from altering,
has a heavy regularity suggesting not a machine but Fate's inexorable pursuit
of Oedipus. Significantly, this kind of treatment pervades almost the whole
score, a vivid instance being the initial chorus of Act I, "Caedit
no pestis," where the men of Thebes beg Oedipus, who vanquished the
Sphinx, to save them from a plague.
On the harmonic level, too, a pungently expressive use is made of
the simplest resources, for example the C major triad played by a solo
trumpet in the accompaniment to Creon's aria, "Respondit deus."
But to rescue such commonplaces from banality Stravinsky divests them of
their organic tonal function. In a sense the familiar harmonies of the
classical tonal systems are not so much employed in fresh ways as isolated,
"fossilised," and hence given a dignity akin to that of the dead
language in which this work is sung. The predominance of minor keys should
also be mentioned, as should Oedipus's striving in his arias towards the
positive effects of major keys, which generally elude him. Noteworthy also,
for a different reason, is Stravinsky's own description of the penultimate
chorus, "Adest! Ellum," as "a mortuary tarantella."
Of the solo parts Oedipus's is of course the most individually characterised.
He attempts, albeit unconsciously, to avoid the inevitable consequences
of his earlier crimes by emphasising his powers as a king and as a man
with an assertive, even arrogant, style of melody which includes elaborate
decoration in the shape of ascending and descending scale passages, the
notes of which are sometimes repeated, as in "Ego divinabo,"
his undertaking to solve the riddle of Laius's murder. The ornamentation
derives from Baroque opera, although the tendency of Oedipus's phrases
to oscillate in high register around a fixed point, as in "liberi
vos liberado," is reminiscent of liturgical incantation. Also, when
he wants to be particulary assertive he is inclined to repeat a phrase
a tone or semitone higher. It is especially characteristic that in response
to Tiresias's revelation "Rex peremptor regus est" (The king
is the kings murderer!), closing in D minor, Oedipus screws the tonality
upwards for the E flat major start of his "Invidia fortunam odit."
Though written quite early in Stravinsky's long neo-Classical period,
Oedipus Rex summarises his discoveries of the several previous years.
Links with the Octet and particularly the Serenade for solo piano are obvious,
and the manner of contrapuntal accompaniment reminds us of Mavra.
So far as outside influences are concerned Stravinsky adapted the conventions
of heroic opera and especially of the seventeenth-century opera-oratorio,
yet his emphasis is ritualistic and at the expense of humanistic aspects.
It is typical that after each phase of the narration of Jocasta's suicide
and Oedipus's self-blinding there are trumpet fanfares, lending the human
tragedy an epic impersonality. Oedipus Rex has at times a rather
frightening grandeur.
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