Word: oedipus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...famed modern composer. Hours, or even minutes, of Orff have indeed often proved too much for some tradition-minded audiences in Europe and the U.S. But last week crowds were thronging to the Stuttgart Opera House for a solid week of Composer Orff's works, including his latest: Oedipus der Tyrann, a highly individual dissertation on the Sophocles tragedy...
Roar of Agony. Without overture or curtain, the opera opened with Oedipus singing expository lines of 69 German syllables, every one of them on middle C. The orchestra then established the only genuine motif in the entire work-a rapid, stepwise up-and-down flourish that occurred again and again, eventually became Oedipus' climactic roar of agony. The work unfolded without set pieces or arias, and the staging by Director Günther Rennert was similarly spare, e.g., when Jocasta (Soprano Astrid Varnay) learned that she was the mother of Oedipus she threw her head back with mouth agape...
...final scene the audience was deeply moved by Oedipus (Tenor Gerhard Stolze) staggering onstage before Designer Caspar Neher's abstract backdrop (it looked like a microphotograph of a germ culture) and raising his sightless eyes with a beatific smile. Soprano Varnay refused to watch from the wings because "I dream about such things." Reported TIME Correspondent Paul Moor: "For a non-German-speaking audience, this opera has long, boring stretches because the music is so subservient to the text. Nevertheless, Orff has created a theater work of gripping power...
...previous manuscripts destroyed. Orff totally rejects the idea of "pure music," never writes for the concert hall. He places such importance on the texts of his "dramatic cantatas" that he will permit none of them to be translated, although he himself seems intrigued by foreign idioms. When working on Oedipus, he decided to write the musical directions in Italian, the stage directions in Latin, e.g., the entrance of the two children is signaled by the line "Inducuntur Oedipodis liberi Antigone et Ismene...
Chevalier's most tantalizing implication is that Bloch, blind as Oedipus in his pride, believes that only he can control the use and abuse of the superbomb. In this light, Mark Ampter is a human sacrifice to Bloch's God complex. This^ view may be colored by Chevalier's personal resentment (although he claims that "this book was written not with hatred but with love," the novel's underlying tone suggests an ex-worshipper stomping on a fallen idol). But strangely enough, the Atomic Energy Commission came to a very similar conclusion about Oppenheimer...