Antigonae

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Work data
Title: Antigonae
Shape: Tragedy in five acts
Original language: German
Music: Carl Orff
Libretto : Sophocles in the translation by Friedrich Hölderlin
Literary source: Antigone by Sophocles
Premiere: August 9, 1949
Place of premiere: Felsenreitschule Salzburg
Playing time: approx. 2 ½ hours
Place and time of the action: Thebes (Greece),
mythical time
people

Antigonae is Carl Orff's setting in five acts of the tragedy Antigone ( Greek Ἀντιγόνη ) by the ancient Greek poet Sophocles in the German translation by Friedrich Hölderlin from 1804. As a direct musicalization of the complete text of the drama in Hölderlin's translation, Orff's score is a prime example of a literary opera . The work had its world premiere on August 9, 1949 at the Salzburg Festival in the Felsenreitschule under the direction of Ferenc Fricsay and directed by Gustav Rudolf Sellner with set design and costumes by Caspar Neher .

action

In the war for Thebes, Antigonaes brothers Eteocles and Polynikes were killed . The former had fought for Creon, King of Thebes, and the latter on the side of the enemy besiegers. That is why Creon, the uncle of the dead, forbids burying the traitor. Antigonae cannot reconcile it with her conscience that such a disgrace should befall Polynice. She defies the prohibition and sprinkles sand on her brother lying at the gates of the city in order to comply with the command of the gods. A guard watches them do what they do and betrays them to the regent. Creon then sentenced his niece to be walled up alive.

When Hämon, the king's son and fiancé Antigonaes, hears about his father's verdict, he is appalled. He begs him to show mercy. But with this he falls on deaf ears with Creon. Desperate, Hemon rushes to his bride. Without it, life has lost all meaning for him. Now he wants to face death with her.

The blind seer Tiresias warns the ruler that there will soon be a dead man out of his blood to atone for those dead. This saying makes the king think. He doubts whether his actions were right. Finally he came to the conclusion that the prisoner should be released. He wants to bring the news to her himself, but it's too late for that: Antigonae has already put an end to her life herself. Even Hämon could not prevent this and followed his bride into death. Ultimately, Creon's wife Euridice also passed away voluntarily because of the terrible events.

music

Orff's true-to-text setting of Friedrich Hölderlin's Sophocles translation from 1804 meant the creation of a new form of musical theater in which the text itself is musicalized through the declamation of the voices. An extraordinary reduction of the pitch structure in connection with the predominance of the rhythmic form the essential characteristics of Orff's late style. The composer's method of thinking in constellations of fundamental surfaces without veritable chord syntax can be demonstrated especially in the large choirs, which show a pronounced tendency to build larger, closed sound surfaces. Orff's renunciation of the grammar of harmonic tonality allowed the composer to make the declamatory voice itself the carrier of the plot as the musical equivalent of Hölderlin's archaic language. As Pietro Massa was able to show, the Hölderlin reception of German classical philology after the Second World War, under the influence of Martin Heidegger, provided a major impetus for Orff's decision to set Hölderlin's later poems to music. An intensive exchange of ideas with the musicologist Thrasybulos Georgiades and with Wieland Wagner also accompanied the development process of Orff's ancient operas; Orff's friendship with the classical philologist Wolfgang Schadewaldt in Tübingen did not develop until after the premiere of Antigonae .

Concentrating on an ensemble of percussion instruments with a certain and indefinite pitch, originally born out of the fascination that the only still viable group in the orchestra exerted on the composers of the 20th century, appears at the same time as a veritable patent solution for a composer for whom the creation of Pitch organizations had never been a central concern. In the orchestra of Orff's Hölderlin operas , the idea of ​​a differentiated cooperation based on the division of labor, which characterized the orchestra of occidental art music, which has grown organically over the centuries, appears transposed onto instrument constellations that were previously unknown to European art music. The piano and xylophone, more familiar with marginal tasks in the traditional orchestra, play the role within the Antigonae score that the string body played in the orchestral composition of the Viennese Classic. Traditional instruments of the European orchestral tradition - such as flutes, oboes, trumpets and double basses - appear in Antigonae and Oedipus der Tyrann, on the other hand, entrusted with functions that were perceived by the rare percussion instruments in the orchestra of the 19th century: as special sound colors with an almost exotic sound stimulus only used for special, dramaturgically motivated tasks.

In retrospect of music history, Orff's ancient operas appear as an extraordinarily original special path in music theater after 1950, which has again received more attention in the years since 2000, not least because of the relationship between Orff's musical language and the tendencies of minimal music . Of the three ancient operas, Antigonae was able to assert itself best in the repertoire, as Arthur Honegger's opera Antigone (Brussels, Théâtre de la Monnaie, 1927) could not assert itself despite the poetry of Jean Cocteau .

orchestra

The score of Orffs Antigonae provides for an orchestral line-up that is unique in music history up to 1949:

The large group of drums requires ten to fifteen players:

The trough xylophones are instruments from the Orff-Schulwerk . Since they are not used in orchestras because of the chromatic arrangement of the bars, but only they enable the performance of chromatic glissandi, most of the deep trough xylophones are replaced by marimba phones in current performance practice .

While performing the percussion parts at the time of the premiere made considerable demands on the percussionists, Orff's score no longer presents any insurmountable obstacles thanks to the extraordinary development of percussion technique in recent decades.

Recordings

Audio

Video

literature

  • Nicholas Attfield, Re-staging theWelttheater: A Critical View of Carl Orff's "Antigonae" and "Oedipus the Tyrann" , in: Peter Brown / Suzana Ograjenšek (eds.): Ancient Drama in Music for the Modern Stage , Oxford (Oxford University Press ) 2010, pp. 340–368.
  • Alberto Fassone: Il funerary song di Antigone: Orff ed il ritorno alle origini. In: Studi Musicali 19/1990. Pp. 183-202.
  • Alberto Fassone: Carl Orff. Libreria Musicale Italiana, Lucca 2009, ISBN 978-88-7096-580-3 .
  • Hellmut Flashar : staging of antiquity. The Greek Drama on the Modern Stage 1585–1990. Munich, CH Beck 1991.
  • Thrasybulos Georgiades , On the "Antigonae" interpretation by Carl Orff , in: Thrasybulos Georgiades, Kleine Schriften , ed. Theodor Göllner, Hans Schneider. Tutzing 1977, pp. 227-231.
  • Theo Hirsbrunner : Carl Orff's “Antigonae” and “Oedipus the Tyrann” in comparison with Arthur Honegger's “Antigone” and Igor Stravinsky's “Oedipus Rex”. In: Thomas Rösch (Hrsg.): Text, music, scene - The music theater by Carl Orff. Schott, Mainz 2015, ISBN 978-3-7957-0672-2 , pp. 231–245.
  • Wilhelm Keller: Carl Orff's "Antigonae". An attempt at an introduction , Schott, Mainz 1954.
  • Stefan Kunze: The antiquity in the music of the 20th century , Bamberg (Buchner) 1987, ISBN 3-7661-5456-7 .
  • Stefan Kunze : Orff's tragedy adaptations and the modern. In: Yearbook of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts 2/1988, pp. 193–213; reprinted in: Stefan Kunze, DE MUSICA. Selected essays and lectures , ed. by Erika Kunze and Rudolf Bockholdt, Tutzing (Schneider) 1998, pp. 543-564.
  • Jürgen Leonhardt , speech treatment and ancient poetry with Carl Orff , in: Jürgen Leonhardt / Silke Leopold / Mischa Meier (eds.): Ways, detours and astray. Ancient opera in the first half of the 20th century , Stuttgart (Steiner) 2011, pp. 67–98.
  • Jürgen Maehder : Non-Western Instruments in Western 20th-Century Music: Musical Exoticism or Globalization of Timbres? , in: Paolo Amalfitano / Loretta Innocenti (eds.), L'Oriente. Storia di una figura nelle arti occidentali (1700–2000) , Bulzoni, Roma 2007, vol. 2, pp. 441-462.
  • Jürgen Maehder : The dramaturgy of the instruments in Carl Orff's ancient operas. In: Thomas Rösch (Hrsg.): Text, music, scene - The music theater by Carl Orff. Schott, Mainz 2015, pp. 197-229, ISBN 978-3-7957-0672-2 .
  • Pietro Massa: Carl Orff's antique dramas and the reception of Hölderlin in post-war Germany , Peter Lang, Bern / Frankfurt / New York 2006, ISBN 3-631-55143-6 .
  • Thomas Rösch: The music in the Greek tragedies by Carl Orff. Hans Schneider, Tutzing 2003, ISBN 3-7952-0976-5 .
  • Thomas Rösch (Hrsg.): Text, music, scene - The music theater by Carl Orff. Symposium Orff Center Munich 2007 , Schott, Mainz 2015, ISBN 978-3-7957-0672-2 .
  • Werner Thomas (Ed.): Carl Orff and his work. Documentation , Volume VII: Abendländisches Musiktheater , Tutzing (Hans Schneider) 1983, ISBN 3-7952-0308-2 .
  • Werner Thomas: Carl Orff's "Antigonae" ─ Reproduction of an ancient tragedy , in: Werner Thomas, Das Rad der Fortuna. Selected essays on the work and impact of Carl Orff , Schott, Mainz 1990, pp. 209–219, ISBN 3-7957-0209-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Stefan Kunze: Orff's tragedy adaptations and the modern. In: Yearbook of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts 2/1988. Pp. 193-213; reprinted in: Stefan Kunze, DE MUSICA. Selected essays and lectures , edited by Erika Kunze and Rudolf Bockholdt, Tutzing (Schneider) 1998, pp. 543–564.
  2. ↑ Thomas Rösch: The music in the Greek tragedies by Carl Orff. Hans Schneider, Tutzing 2003.
  3. ^ Pietro Massa: Carl Orff's Antikendramen and the reception of Hölderlin in post-war Germany. Peter Lang, Bern / Frankfurt / New York 2006.
  4. ↑ Jürgen Maehder : The dramaturgy of the instruments in the ancient operas by Carl Orff. In: Thomas Rösch (Hrsg.): Text, music, scene - The music theater by Carl Orff. Schott, Mainz 2015, pp. 197–229.
  5. ↑ Theo Hirsbrunner : Carl Orff's “Antigonae” and “Oedipus the Tyrann” in comparison with Arthur Honegger's “Antigone” and Igor Stravinsky's “Oedipus Rex”. In: Thomas Rösch (Hrsg.): Text, music, scene - The music theater by Carl Orff. Schott, Mainz 2015, pp. 231–245.
  6. ^ Gunther Möller: The percussion with Carl Orff: performance practice of stage, orchestral and choral works. Schott Verlag, Mainz 1995.
  7. ↑ Karl Peinkofer, "Yes, you're still learning it!" , In: Horst Leuchtmann (Ed.), Carl Orff. A memorial book , Hans Schneider, Tutzing 1985, pp. 115–119.