Oedipus the tyrant

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Work data
Title: Oedipus the tyrant
Shape: Thoroughly composed
Original language: German
Music: Carl Orff
Libretto : Sophocles in the translation by Friedrich Hölderlin
Literary source: King Oedipus of Sophocles
Premiere: December 11, 1959
Place of premiere: Stuttgart
Playing time: approx. 160 minutes
Place and time of the action: Thebes (Greece) in mythical times
people

Oedipus the Tyrann is Carl Orff's setting of the drama King Oedipus ( Greek Οἰδίπους Τύραννος Oidípous Týrannos ) in a prologue and five acts of Sophocles in the German translation by Friedrich Hölderlin (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 December 11, 1959 at the Württemberg State Opera in Stuttgart under the direction of Ferdinand Leitner and in the production of Günther Rennert with set design and costumes by Caspar Neher .

action

Because of an oracle who prophesied that he would die by his own son, Laios abandoned the future Theban king Oedipus as a child. Another oracle later prophesied Oedipus that he would kill his father and live in shame with his mother. Thereupon he leaves Polybos and Merope, the Corinthian king and his wife, who raised him as a son. On his hike he meets Laios and his companion at a crossroads. He is involved in a fight with them and - without knowing it - kills his biological father Laios. At the gates of Thebes he can redeem the city from the Sphinx, a monster, and receives as a reward Iokaste, the widow of King Laios. He takes her as his wife and receives the kingdom of Thebes. This is where the actual drama action begins, in which Oedipus reveals his past in six stages. An oracle that suggests the causes of a long raging plague relates Oedipus 'brother-in-law Creon to the unpunished murder of Oedipus' predecessor Laios. The new king of Thebes then opened an investigation into the case. The only surviving witness claims that the murder was committed by a gang of robbers.

When Oedipus summons the blind seer Teiresias to bring light into the darkness, he refuses to explain the true context. Only when he himself is suspected by Oedipus does he no longer hesitate: Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laios. He doesn't believe him and suspects a conspiracy between Creon and the seer. But with the memory of the incident at the crossroads, the first doubts arise. When Oedipus learns from a messenger arriving from Corinth that the deceased Polybos and his wife are not his birth parents, but received him from a servant of Laios, his fears become a certainty. Iokaste realizes that the Delphic prophecies were fulfilled in them. The juxtaposition of the Corinthian messenger who Oedipus received as a child brings the truth to light; the scars on his pierced feet at the time are obvious: Oedipus is Laios' and Iokaste's son. When Oedipus rushes into the house in horror, he finds Iokaste hanged. He blinds himself with her golden clasps. Oedipus, who now desires nothing more than to die, has to come to terms with the fact that the decision about it lies with the gods. He hands over his children to Creon, who will take control of Thebes.

music

orchestra

Like the score by Orffs Antigonae (Salzburg 1949), the score by Oedipus der Tyrann provides for an orchestral line-up that is unique in the history of music:


The large group of drums requires ten to fifteen players:

Behind the scene:

  • 8 trumpets
  • several large tam-tams struck with cymbals

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.

Musical language

Orff's true-to-text setting of Friedrich Hölderlin's Sophocles translations from 1804 meant the creation of a new kind of musical theater in which the text itself is musicalized through the declamation of the singing 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. In contrast to the large choirs of the Antigonae score, which use the choir, often singing in unison over the foundation of extensive rhythmic sound surfaces, the composer entrusted extensive text passages to the solo speaking voices of individual choir leaders in the score of Oedipus the Tyrant . The composer was to abandon this use of the speaking voice, which was not musically noted, in the sections of his later score of Prometheus (Stuttgart 1968) spoken in ancient Greek .

Orff's renunciation of the grammar of harmonic tonality allowed the composer, as the musical equivalent of Holderlin's archaic language, to make the declamatory voice itself the bearer of the action. As Pietro Massa was able to show, an intensive exchange of ideas with the classical philologist Wolfgang Schadewaldt , the musicologist Thrasybulos Georgiades and with Wieland Wagner as the director of the premiere originally requested by the composer accompanied the development process of Orff's ancient operas.

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, take on the role within the score of Oedipus der Tyrann 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, trombones 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 they are only used for special, dramaturgically motivated tasks.

In the music-historical retrospect, Orff's antique operas appear as an extraordinarily original special path in music theater after 1950, which has received more attention again in the years since 2000, not least because of the relationship between Orff's musical language and the tendencies of minimal music . Of Orff's three ancient operas, Oedipus the Tyrant was the least able to assert himself in the repertoire, as Igor Stravinsky's opera oratorio Oedipus Rex (Paris, Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, 1927) is based on the poetry of Jean Cocteau , one of the most important scores of Stravinsky's neoclassical period There is competition to Orff's setting.

Recordings

Audio

Video

literature

  • 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.
  • 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 (Ed.): Text, Music, Scene - Das Musiktheater von Carl Orff . Schott, Mainz 2015, pp. 231–245, ISBN 978-3-7957-0672-2 .
  • Stefan Kunze : The ancient world in the music of the 20th century , Buchner, Bamberg 1987, ISBN 3-7661-5456-7 .
  • Stefan Kunze : Orff's tragedy arrangements and modernity , 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 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 the ancient operas by Carl Orff , In: Thomas Rösch (Hrsg.): Text, music, scene - Das Musiktheater 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 , Schneider, Tutzing 1983, ISBN 3-7952-0308-2 .
  • Werner Thomas: What should I sing? A choir song by Sophocles von Hölderlin in Carl Orff's "Oedipus der Tyrann" , in: Werner Thomas: Das Rad der Fortuna, Selected essays on the work and impact of Carl Orff , Schott, Mainz 1990, pp. 221-238, ISBN 3-7957- 0209-7 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gunther Möller: The percussion with Carl Orff: performance practice of stage, orchestral and choral works. Schott Verlag, Mainz 1995.
  2. ↑ Stefan Kunze: Orff's tragedy adaptations and modernity , 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.
  3. ^ Thomas Rösch: The music in the Greek tragedies by Carl Orff , Hans Schneider, Tutzing 2003.
  4. ^ Pietro Massa: Carl Orff's Antikendramen and the Reception of Hölderlin in Post-War Germany , Peter Lang, Bern / Frankfurt / New York 2006.
  5. ↑ Jürgen Maehder : The dramaturgy of the instruments in the ancient operas by Carl Orff , in: Thomas Rösch (Ed.): Text, Music, Scene - Das Musiktheater by Carl Orff , Schott, Mainz 2015, pp. 197–229.
  6. ↑ 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 (ed.): Text, Music, Scene - Das Musiktheater von Carl Orff. Schott, Mainz 2015, pp. 231–245.

Web links