Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Sometimes preparing for the performance of a work of art makes me reflect on the stages by which I got to know it. You would think this would be more likely to happen after the show than before it – but in fact, in this age of information technology, you can become quite familiar with a staged work, even see it, before you ever attend a live performance. This is particularly likely in a country where live performances are rare, or inaccessible.
At the risk of being annoyingly personal, I will describe how I got to know Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex. My parents attended a performance in Geneva sometime in 1954 or 1955, conducted by Ernest Ansermet – I was too young to be taken along, but years later I became interested in the recording bought as a souvenir of that performance, with the same cast, conductor, and orchestra, and my parents told me they had been there.
Ernest Ansermet, claimed the cover of the record, conducted the first performance, on May 30, 1927 (my research for this article tells me this was not so – the conductor then was Stravinsky himself; but Ansermet was certainly closely associated with the work when it was new). I was just beginning to discover Stravinsky’s music, and Oedipus Rex appealed to me for a further reason: it was in Latin, a language I was studying at school, so listening to it was a kind of practice. Not until many years later did I see Oedipus Rex staged – at the Sydney Conservatorium, in a production by Anthony Besch, which impressed me, but also raised my purist hackles, because I knew Stravinsky had specifically instructed that the characters should not move about the stage. Besch had Jocasta, in particular, running about like a mad thing during her aria (a plausible counterpart to her music).
There are dangers, of course, in forming too strong an idea of a piece while listening to it on records, or reading the score – it would not be a good way of learning most operas, unless it was corrected and enriched by seeing the drama enacted and sung. Maybe, though, Oedipus Rex was an exception? Anyone really interested in Stravinsky will have read his latter-day comments about his works, in his Conversations (suspected to have been heavily beauty-shopped by his live-in assistant Robert Craft). And in conversation Stravinsky expresses reservations about certain aspects of Oedipus Rex, especially from a dramaturgical point of view. Most of Stravinsky’s reservations are about Jean Cocteau’s contribution to the concept, and especially the spoken parts.
'...a certain monumental character...'
Because Stravinsky and Cocteau conceived their Oedipus Rex as a semi-staged opera-oratorio, they stripped Sophocles’ drama down to essentials, keeping only ‘a certain monumental character’ as Cocteau has the Speaker say in his introduction. With deliberate distancing, the performance is ‘presented’, as though by one of those talking heads who for some reason seem to be considered essential to introduce ‘cultural’ telecasts. The Speaker is in evening wear, and addresses the audience in the language of the place – in that Sydney production the speaker was Frank Thring. Stravinsky developed grave reservations about some of Cocteau’s words – he was particularly scornful of the empty grandiloquence of saying of Oedipus ‘he falls, he falls from a height’ (il tombe de haut). ‘The Oedipus narration’, Stravinsky said later ‘always was an embarrassment’.
For me, inclined to take Cocteau at Stravinsky’s valuation, this sense of pompousness was reinforced when I heard Cocteau’s own delivery of the narration, at a live performance in Paris from the 1950s (dubbed onto Stravinsky’s Cologne Radio recording). So mannered was Cocteau’s delivery of his own French text that it seemed a caricature. This Cocteau seemed an excrescence on the work – maybe he was the Cocteau American composer Ned Rorem described as always anxious to let you know he knew Stravinsky. But Oedipus Rex had deeply impressed me, and Cocteau had helped create it. Rorem also says ‘Cocteau worked with musicians; but for him, a great deal of worthwhile music would never have come into being’.
Like so many Cocteau collaborations, Oedipus Rex is a true multi-media work, as ‘opera-oratorio’ title tells us in its title. I share the English critic Jeremy Noble’s feeling that Oedipus Rex can’t be satisfactorily performed in straight oratorio manner, as in a London concert he attended: ‘What we were missing was the visual parallel to the stylised angularity of the Latin text. These gentlemen in evening dress (and Jocasta too, of course) suggested all too clearly the thousand-and-one other choral works that we have heard under the same circumstances – the neutral black-and-white limbo inhabited by performances of anything from the St. Matthew Passion to The Dream of Gerontius, from Belshazzar’s Feast to Messiah.’ Fortunately for me, I hadn’t experienced this oratorio tradition when I began to imagine Oedipus Rex in my head – my idea of oratorio, in fact, was formed as much as anything by this masterpiece of Stravinsky’s.
A young Igor Stravinsky. Taken by George Grantham Bain's news picture agency. Public Domain.
It probably helped me that I didn’t know Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex either; in fact, what Stravinsky and Cocteau were aiming at was precisely a new way of presenting such mythical tragic drama to audiences of the 1920s, avoiding the conventions in which it had become smothered. A tribute to their success is Arnold Schoenberg’s reaction to the (highly successful) staged performances of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex given by Otto Klemperer at Berlin's Kroll Opera in 1928. Schoenberg was no artistic reactionary, but his aesthetic was still Wagnerian, and he wrote ‘I do not know what I am supposed to like in Oedipus ... It is all negative: unusual theatre, unusual setting, unusual resolution of the action, unusual vocal writing, unusual acting, unusual melody, unusual harmony, unusual counterpoint, unusual instrumentation – all this is un, without being anything in particular…’ Prokofiev, more of an experimenter himself, was much more perceptive, if a little bemused by Oedipus Rex: ‘The libretto is French, the text is Latin, the subject is Greek, the music is Anglo-German (Handel), and the money is American – true cosmopolitanism’. Ravel was most positive, and in retrospect right: ‘while he plays with old forms, [Stravinsky] is actually finding something new’.
Stravinsky’s own accounts of how he came to compose Oedipus Rex changed as the years went on; the ‘authorised, late’ version (in the notes to the complete Stravinsky recorded edition) stresses his desire during the 1920s to compose a large-scale dramatic work. In 1925, reading a life of Francis of Assisi, Stravinsky discovered that the Saint used a hieratic Provençal for 'sacred' utterances, rather than his everyday Italian.
This crystallised for Stravinsky the idea that ‘a text for music might be endowed with a certain monumental character by translation backwards, so to speak, from a secular to a sacred language’. Thus Stravinsky resolved the problem of the language of his future vocal works: ‘Russian, the exiled language of my heart, had become musically impracticable, and French, German and Italian were temperamentally alien’. Latin was to become the language of Oedipus Rex, the Canticum Sacrum, and Threni.
'...the play I had loved most in my youth'
Stravinsky explains that as he wanted a universal, very well-known plot, he turned to ‘the play I had loved most in my youth’. ‘I invited Cocteau’s collaboration because I greatly admired his Antigone.’ Cocteau’s first offering was just what Stravinsky did not want – ‘a music drama in meretricious prose’. Stravinsky’s criticisms and Cocteau’s rewrites left the composer, according to him, uncertain how much of the libretto was purely Cocteau’s; the music, says Stravinsky ‘was inspired by the tragedy of Sophocles’. Yet in his 1935 autobiography (also partly ghost-written, and for a French audience) Stravinsky had written, of Cocteau’s final version ‘I could not have wished for a more perfect text, or one that better suited my requirements’. Stravinsky was unfair to Cocteau – there is much about Oedipus Rex proclaiming this French poet, and his idea of making the mythic familiar – Oedipus, Jocasta and Creon as 20th century socialisers, as Anna Kisselgoff once wrote in the New York Times.
This should have appealed to Diaghilev, for whom Cocteau and Stravinsky secretly planned Oedipus Rex as a present to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Ballets Russes – ‘a very macabre present’ Diaghilev called it, and privately found it boring (the money was put up by the Princesse de Polignac, born Winnareta Singer, the sewing machine heiress; hence Prokofiev’s reference to American money ).
Stravinsky had been very impressed by Cocteau’s Antigone: ‘Cocteau’s stagecraft is excellent. He has a sense of values and an eye and feeling for detail’. Antigone, ‘a free adaptation from Sophocles’, has been described as an attempt to photograph Greece from an aeroplane, and is the model for Oedipus Rex’s compression. Arthur Honegger’s music for Antigone (1927) is memorable, but in a very different style from Stravinsky’s Oedipus – Honegger’s style was considered ‘modern’; avant-garde listeners found disconcerting Stravinsky's re-workings of idioms from the past. The music of Honegger's Antigone makes a powerful effect (I have never seen it staged), but it is doubtful if anyone would want the experience more than once. Antigone is in Cocteau’s French, whereas Oedipus Rex was translated into Latin; not by Cocteau himself (who as Ned Rorem points out, had not the gift of tongues) but by Jean Daniélou (Daniélou, a highly distinguished biblical scholar, later became a Cardinal of the Catholic Church). Stravinsky’s own schoolboy Latin was insufficient, and he had to study the text using Cocteau’s French as a crib. Stravinsky’s music misaccentuates some of the Latin words, even in one case changing the meaning, but Stravinsky rationalised this to his own satisfaction by explaining that in his Oedipus Rex ‘the word is pure material, functioning musically like a block of marble or stone in a work of sculpture or architecture’. This deliberately subverts the conventional submission of the music to the words’ psychological implications and dramatic significance.
Cocteau’s Narrator even says that his function is to spare you (the audience) ‘any effort in hearing or remembering’ – it may not matter if the audience doesn't grasp the exact meaning of the Latin words. The young Benjamin Britten, attending the first London performances, commented astutely that Oedipus Rex gives the impression of an impersonal comment on Sophocles rather than a re-enacting of the drama.
Religious feeling v. Brechtian alienation
Stravinsky preferred Latin to Greek or Slavonic because ‘Latin is definitely fixed’. The language helped dictate the presentation, and Stravinsky and Cocteau specified that the singers should stand behind built-up costumes, with masks, moving only their hands and arms. The entrance of new characters was to be made by withdrawing curtains or screens. Stravinsky also commented that Latin was a universal language, thanks to its diffusion by the church. Stravinsky (always aware of the commercial possibilities of his artistic decisions) liked the fact that Oedipus Rex could be performed anywhere in the world, only the narration needing to be translated (e.e. cummings made an English version). The Latin had yet another resonance. Robert Craft and Vera Stravinsky in their book on the composer find Oedipus Rex imbued – in spirit, language, and musical substance – with religious feeling. Some of its melos, they find, could have been inspired by religious chant.
The mode of presentation of Oedipus Rex, the way it is framed, ensures an almost Brechtian alienation, lifting the tragedy from a personal to a universal plane – it becomes a ritual from which listeners or onlookers are deliberately excluded. Noël Goodwin, whose comments these are, goes on ‘that is not to say that we should feel nothing for Oedipus, trapped in the snare the gods had laid for him, and its consequences for those around him’.
Attention on the singing line
The compelling power of Oedipus Rex is due to its music, but perhaps also to the choice of subject. That explains how a work adopting the conventions of heroic baroque opera can also be close to religious ritual. Wilfrid Mellers, under the title ‘Stravinsky's Oedipus as 20th Century Hero’ points out that Stravinsky chose a myth the more buoyant humanists of the heroic age had preferred to leave alone: his Oedipus deals with pride, but also with the ego's insufficiency.
The closed forms of the baroque, such as the da capo aria, throw all the attention on the singing line, and Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex is dominated at every point by the singing voice, never submerged in the orchestra as it can be in Wagner, Strauss, or even Schoenberg. This enables the listener, invited to focus on the sound and the melodic line more than on the text, to notice how the drama is conveyed – the modification of Oedipus’ manner of singing, the melodic outline as well as the harmony, tells us of the breaking down of his hubris and his gradually realising his true situation. Like the great baroque composers of oratorio, and especially Handel, Stravinsky uses the conventions, the form, to make profound musico-dramatic points.
At first listeners, especially those musically aware enough to notice what Stravinsky was doing (remember Schoenberg and Prokofiev) were often bewildered by the surface diversity. Ravel, who observed that Stravinsky, playing with old forms, was finding something new, recognised a fellow artificer: to Ravel also applies what Jeremy Noble says of Stravinsky, that it is in the nature of his genius to be fully expressive only against the grain of pure naturalism.
So Stravinsky seemed, in Oedipus Rex as in all works of his so-called neo-classical phase, to be jumping backwards over the supposedly naturalistic expressiveness of the romantics. Yet even here there was a surprise; Leonard Bernstein, a great admirer and conductor of Oedipus Rex, was one of the first to be intrigued. As he studied the music, he was reminded again and again of Verdi, and not just any Verdi, but Aida, ‘the splashiest and flashiest of all the Verdi operas’. Could it be, Bernstein wondered, that Stravinsky was having a secret romance with Verdi’s music, in those super-sophisticated mid-20s? Stravinsky confirmed that he was, and with some Donizetti as well. You can hear the Italianate character in places like the arias for Jocasta and Creon, but also in the music of characters trapped, like the slave girl princess Aida, in destinies of state tied up with personal relationships and emotions. Stravinsky allowed himself to be guided by Verdi when re-establishing the predominance of the singing voice in opera; the result is compelling musically, and emotionally as well. That, for me at least, is the main reason I look forward so much to a performance of Oedipus Rex.
First published in Opera Australia, 1993