OEDIPUS REX

Opera – oratorio in two acts
Libretto by Igor’ Fërodovič Stravinsky and Jean Cocteau, from Sophocles (translated into Latin by Jean Daniélou)

Myth as monument. An actor, speaking in the language of the audience, wanders among musical numbers tracing Sophocles’Oedipus Rex. A contemporary voice among eternal elements, in Latin, a lingua franca, ancient and universal. The spoken word and the music. We are in France, at the end of the 1920s, and Igor Stravinsky no longer plays with quotations as he had done in Pulcinella, but creates a kind of ideal past in which the narrator is inspired by the Baroque tradition of the oratorio and constitutes a very modern alienating element between mythical action and present time, between theater and reality. The whole work is two-faced, as well as bilingual (by Jean Cocteau with Latin translations by Jean Daniélou, theologian and literary scholar), imbued with a rhythmic power that makes it as ancient and solemn as it is modern and vital, marble and pulsating. Murderer of his father, groom of his mother, annihilated by self-discovery, Oedipus in his harried quest continues to arouse pity and terror as in classical tragedy.