Oedipus rex

In this austere masterwork, Stravinsky presents an ancient yet famous Greek story in terms of anti-Romantic ritual. By the 1920s, Stravinsky felt the emotional Romanticism of operatic tradition was no longer artistically relevant. His “opera-oratorio”, as he described it, is based on Sophocles’ play Oedipus tyrannos (Oedipus the King—first performed in Athens in 429 BCE). Stravinsky’s Oedipus rex was premiered in Paris in 1927. Jean Cocteau’s libretto compresses Sophocles’ text, and adds a Speaker to announce each scene to the audience in advance. The staged drama is presented in Latin, a language today largely associated with ancient inscriptions and rituals. The result is a ritualistically detached presentation of the story of Oedipus. Exiled at birth from his native city of Thebes, Oedipus is brought up in Corinth. As a young man he comes across and kills his unknown father, the Theban king. Oedipus returns to Thebes, is made its new king, and marries the widowed queen, who then turns out to be his mother; she takes her own life, and in despair Oedipus blinds himself. The revelation of these fateful events is all the more disturbing for being presented in the work’s dispassionate dramatic style, with music to match. The default position of Stravinsky’s idiom here is a relentless severity, offset by passages ironically parodying the lyrical or comic operatic styles of the past.