BaL 26.05.18 - Stravinsky: Oedipus Rex

[BBMmk2]

I’ve only the composer himself conducting. So I’m interested to see about the others that are available.

[visualnickmos]

This thread has taken a most bizarre turn! Lots of "obscure" generalisations described by great use of English, but really saying not much at all... What is the actual debate about? What is the point or statement that is being discussed?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

This thread has taken a most bizarre turn! Lots of "obscure" generalisations described by great use of English, but really saying not much at all... What is the actual debate about? What is the point or statement that is being discussed?

Such is the way of the Forum - the Thread morphed into a discussion of "Modernism & the Working Classes" in such an organic way that it was difficult to pinpoint where the "turn" could be said to begin. I've made an attempt and have moved the discussion to a new Thread with that title. The discussion about Ancerls missing final bars can continue here.

[Serial_Apologist]

Such is the way of the Forum - the Thread morphed into a discussion of "Modernism & the Working Classes" in such an organic way that it was difficult to pinpoint where the "turn" could be said to begin. I've made an attempt and have moved the discussion to a new Thread with that title. The discussion about Ancerls missing final bars can continue here.

Most apposite - and very kind of you, ferney! I shall follow the discussion diversion there. Apologies for (I guess) being myself responsible for introducing the matter of the Latin text in O.R.

[silvestrione]

Such is the way of the Forum - the Thread morphed into a discussion of "Modernism & the Working Classes" in such an organic way that it was difficult to pinpoint where the "turn" could be said to begin. I've made an attempt and have moved the discussion to a new Thread with that title. The discussion about Ancerls missing final bars can continue here.

I'm ashamed to say i've never noticed the missing bars (mine's an LP, but I don't suppose that's different). I don't often follow music with scores ( should one? Another thread in that!) and by the end of this work, particularly in that performance (Ancerl), I'm bowled over anyway. Used to play it to my A Level Theatre Studies students when we were doing Sophocles.

But I think the Oedipus may indeed be its weak point, as suggested above.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I'm ashamed to say i've never noticed the missing bars (mine's an LP, but I don't suppose that's different). I don't often follow music with scores ( should one? Another thread in that!) and by the end of this work, particularly in that performance (Ancerl), I'm bowled over anyway. Used to play it to my A Level Theatre Studies students when we were doing Sophocles.

But I think the Oedipus may indeed be its weak point, as suggested above.

IIRC - and it's been nearly forty years since I last heard it - only the final couple of pizzicato notes were lost in the editing process for the LP (so the work ends with the triplets) - so probably an inattentive editor a bit overkeen with the scissors.

[Mal]

In my first attempt to listen to the Stravinsky/Washington performance I gave up after five minutes, finding the strident Latin just too much to take. But I found this paper very useful for enabling me to sit and listen to the work in the second attempt:

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/h...ht_oedipus.pdf

Some points that struck home:

• This is music of the abyss.
• Stravinsky uses this music as a torture device, a machine for pounding, crushing, dismembering.
• Stravinsky attacks the human subject with the musical equivalent of mechanical warfare.
• Stravinsky is a flagrant mass murderer, killing language, the music, and the concept of drama itself.
• Stravinsky detaches language from any sort of speech to create a text that consists of purely musical material; he does this by writing in a language that few listeners could understand, the sounds and rhythms of the words are all that is important.
• Stravinsky uses Dadism to image the abyss; negating his material via Dadaist procedures. Devices, little tricks of music drama from Gluck, Verdi, Handel, everyone you can think of, are picked up with tweezers and glued together.
• Stravinsky is using the stuff of high music drama (e.g., Wagner) but in a way that reminds us that this stuff is passé.
• Oedipus Rex is a tombstone over the whole genre of opera.
• Oedipus Rex is dead music ornamenting a dead language, and kills drama: No one ‘acts'.
• Stravinsky dismembers the stage, and his music often tears the characters limb from limb.
• According to Adorno, Stravinsky is infantile, acrobatic, psychotic and hebephrenic (a form of schizophrenia involving disordered thought, inappropriate emotions, hallucinations, and bizarre behaviour.)
• Stravinsky wants to make money by shocking people.
• The Venus de Milo is exciting because she has lost her arms, Oedipus Rex, like The Waste Land, offers us pre-decayed materials, flitters and rubble – the truth of the past recognized by its lack of integrity.

The voices in the Stravinsky/Washington performance have been described as "strident" by some critics, but given the above analysis this is probably entirely Stravinsky's intention - to me they destroy the (rather beautiful) "Venus de Milo" melodies of the woodwinds, torturing the "beautiful music", throwing us (and it) into the abyss along with poor old Oedipus. Not being able to understand a word helps with the feeling of being thrown into hell.

My neighbours is having a yelling argument with his wife, great, sets me up nicely for the second act...

[Richard Barrett]

• This is music of the abyss.
• Stravinsky uses this music as a torture device, a machine for pounding, crushing, dismembering.
• Stravinsky attacks the human subject with the musical equivalent of mechanical warfare.
• Stravinsky is a flagrant mass murderer, killing language, the music, and the concept of drama itself.
• Stravinsky detaches language from any sort of speech to create a text that consists of purely musical material; he does this by writing in a language that few listeners could understand, the sounds and rhythms of the words are all that is important.
• Stravinsky uses Dadism to image the abyss; negating his material via Dadaist procedures. Devices, little tricks of music drama from Gluck, Verdi, Handel, everyone you can think of, are picked up with tweezers and glued together.
• Stravinsky is using the stuff of high music drama (e.g., Wagner) but in a way that reminds us that this stuff is passé.
• Oedipus Rex is a tombstone over the whole genre of opera.
• Oedipus Rex is dead music ornamenting a dead language, and kills drama: No one ‘acts'.
• Stravinsky dismembers the stage, and his music often tears the characters limb from limb.
• According to Adorno, Stravinsky is infantile, acrobatic, psychotic and hebephrenic (a form of schizophrenia involving disordered thought, inappropriate emotions, hallucinations, and bizarre behaviour.)
• Stravinsky wants to make money by shocking people.
• The Venus de Milo is exciting because she has lost her arms, Oedipus Rex, like The Waste Land, offers us pre-decayed materials, flitters and rubble – the truth of the past recognized by its lack of integrity.

Gosh! I mean I quite like it, but I wouldn't claim it was that good!

But seriously...

It's the narration that jars with me. I think on balance I prefer hearing it in French. On the other hand, it does serve its function of eliminating stage action so that everything that "happens" in the music takes the form of static tableaux (it is an "opera-oratorio" after all). When I first got to know it, my knowledge of the operatic tradition it was "deconstructing" was very sketchy, so I took it all at face value, and that impression hasn't gone away in the meantime.

Anyway, if we look around us we see that obviously it hasn't destroyed opera, even if that was Stravinsky's intention, which I don't think it was - composers don't put all that time and effort and imagination into putting down something they only have negative feelings towards. There are many ways to express an attraction to tradition, and one of those (one of the less unthinking and superficial ones, in my opinion) is to use it as a starting point from which to create something else, which looks at the tradition in a way that could only be conceived at another time (1927 in this case). Crucially: if Stravinsky is saying that the 19th century operatic tradition is "passé", he isn't saying one should no longer listen to it but that one should perhaps no longer write it, that music should express a present-day world-view instead of nostalgia for a past one. If you reject that idea, Mal, you're creating your own abyss and you don't need Stravinsky to throw you in.

[Mal]

It's the narration that jars with me. I think on balance I prefer hearing it in French.

The Washington/Stravinsky narration also jars with me, but I wouldn't understand the French so I prefer it in English. Stravinsky ended up detesting the speaker in any language:

"My criticisms of Oedipus Rex? Criticism is too easy after thirty-five years, and, what is worse, too late, but I detest the speaker device, that disturbing series of interruptions, and I do not much like the speeches themselves. ‘Il tombe, il tombe de haut’ — from where else, indeed, given the gravity situation? (The English is not much better, though: ‘He falls headlong’ sounds like the description of a swan dive.) The line ‘And now you will hear the famous monologue, “the Divine Iokaste is dead,”’ is intolerable snobbery. Famous to whom? And no monologue follows, but only a four-word singing telegram..."

https://academic.oup.com/fs/article/65/1/30/621570

This is Stravinsky's only direct criticism of the work - a criticism of Cocteau's contribution. Of the music, he comments: ‘The music? I love all of it, even the Messenger's fanfares, which remind me of the now badly tarnished trumpets of early 20th-Century-Fox’.

But this is rather ironic. He loves it because it is bad? He says other parts sound like a "can can" or "Beckmesser aria" - I agree! But are these positive things? I think he's using music as a torture device to throw us into the abyss, and loves doing this.

The article goes on to indicate why the English translation jars:

"Cocteau is writing in a formal, rhetorical style in keeping with a mode of public speaking in French that does not have a direct equivalent in English. Hence in French the Speaker sounds authoritative; in English he tends to sound merely pompous."

if Stravinsky is saying that the 19th century operatic tradition is "passé", he isn't saying one should no longer listen to it but that one should perhaps no longer write it, that music should express a present-day world-view instead of nostalgia for a past one.

Yes, I think that's a correct account of what the paper is saying. But I'm not sure the paper is correct! Isn't "the Rake's progress" still to come? So if the paper is correct in suggesting "Oedipus Rex is a tombstone over the whole genre of opera", why did he write a proper opera? I think this just goes too far - he can be accused of undermining opera in this work, but it's hardly a tombstone.

"None of Stravinsky's earlier 'operatic' works , Le Rossignol, Renard, Mavra, Oedipus Rex, Persephone,can be unconditionally classifed as a fully fledged opera all of them in one way or another stretch the boundaries of the genre or compress its components to suit a specific dramatic purpose. But there is no ambiguity about The Rake's Progress, composed in the years after the second world war, and first performed in Venice in 1951" - Andrew Clements https://www.theguardian.com/music/20...lmusicandopera

[Richard Barrett]

That quotation from Stravinsky himself about the interruptions is spot on. (He certainly never spared his own work from the kind of putdowns he dealt out to others.)

‘The music? I love all of it, even the Messenger's fanfares, which remind me of the now badly tarnished trumpets of early 20th-Century-Fox’. But this is rather ironic. He loves it because it is bad? He says other parts sound like a can can or Beckmesser aria - I agree! But are these positive things? I think he's using music as a torture device to throw us into the abyss, and loves doing this.

"Abyss" is far too strong. Stravinsky in these words (spoken in the early 1960s, remember) is making wry and amused retrospective observations about his younger self. (And doesn't Beckmesser have some of the most interesting music in Meistersinger? He's a self-important and pedantic character - like Creon in the Greek tragedy - but that doesn't mean Wagner made his music boring.) Now, stylistically The Rake's Progress "deals with" Mozart in an entirely analogous way to that in which Oedipus Rex deals with 19th century opera. Its division into set-pieces and use of harpsichord accompaniment, to name only these features - in the late 1940s, after Pelléas, Salome, Wozzeck and so on - make it anything but a "fully fledged opera".

[Bryn]

Quoting from White, again:

.....in his Chronicle he [Stravinsky] states:
The choice [of Latin] had the great advantage of giving me a medium not dead but turned to stone and so monumentalised as to have become immune from all risk of vulgarisation.

Doesn't explain why not Greek though, and presumably he wasn't yet aware of the 'vulgarisation' that the Americans would inflict with their Eddipus, as Michael Wagner pronounces it in the Bernstein recording (according to the Penguin Guide)!

Oi! Never mind about the American 'Ed'. What about the 'Oi Deepus' of the Salonen recording? Can of the Latin scholars here comment on the rationale for that?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Given the varying accents the composer puts on the different syllables of "Oe -di-pus", maybe the choir might also sing the first syllable with a different pronunciation each time?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

That quotation from Stravinsky himself about the interruptions is spot on. (He certainly never spared his own work from the kind of putdowns he dealt out to others.) ... Stravinsky in these words (spoken in the early 1960s, remember) is making wry and amused retrospective observations about his younger self.

It seems that the composer of the Movements for Piano & Orchestra was more than a little embarrassed by the original aesthetics that motivated Oedipus - regarding the work in the '60s with the same mixture of pride and mortification of somebody in their seventies today looks at photos of themselves from the '70s. The comic/absurd aspects of the work is something that he doesn't discuss - but which, after listening to recordings in the past few days seems very much a part of the whole experience. The narrator who doesn't really "narrate" (describing events that are to happen, but which don't actually occur, missing out those which are - it's as if s/he has come onto the rostrum, and realized that the script hadn't been put on the stand, and s/he has to "recite" as best s/he can what they can remember from rehearsals) - the deliberate way the dramatic flow of the Music is repeatedly thrown off by the narrator's interruptions - the way the Gloria has to be repeated literally as if the chorus is annoyed at such an interruption, and are making a collective "as we were saying ... " - the appropriately totally inappropriate Music associated with Creon (the "bring on the dancing girls"/Folies Bergere bit); the Messenger's repeating his brief announcement four times, as if no one's listening to him and the jaunty Music with which the chorus surround these announcements ....

Many of these absurdities originate in Cocteau's text; but Stravinsky chose to work with Cocteau, and ruthlessly scrutinized Cocteau's work - rejecting passages that didn't meet what he wanted to not express in his Music, and demanding other passages be rewritten, so he knew exactly what was going on in the text, for all his later disclaimers. And Stravinsky decided to work with Cocteau after hearing - and being impressed by - the latter's Orphée (in which, amongst other absurdities, Death is presented not as a dusty, terrifying skeleton with scythe, but as a fashionable woman in a pink ballgown and fur coat). "For all his later disclaimers" ... over the past few days, I've been more than once tempted to wonder if these "disclaimers" create more problems than those they sought to remove: guiding us to a conception of the work as "simple" Tragedy, and making the farcical aspects seem incongruous.

[BBMmk2]

Stravinsky certainly wasn't messing around here when he was thinking about the text, and the music?

[Richard Barrett]

the jaunty Music with which the chorus surround these announcements ....

Indeed the "tragic" seems to have little place in any of Stravinsky's work - in Dialogues he says "if a truly tragic note is sounded anywhere in my music, that note is in Apollo" (written directly after Oedipus). Even Oedipus's "Lux facta est" seems to me a "tragic moment" in inverted commas. An interesting comparison is with Orff's Oedipus der Tyrann (by some distance that composer's finest work I think) which sets every word of Hölderlin's idiosyncratic German translation of Sophocles, and where the austere musical means produce an almost unbearable accumulation of tragic momentum by the time the corresponding moment takes place. (Rather strangely, Orff quotes Stravinsky's reiterated G minor arpeggio in the scene with Jocasta as if this is some kind of ancient archetype associated with the character.)