Word: anding
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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The long-awaited score proved to be typical Orff, avoiding such devices as standard harmonic progressions or even the modern "tone row." Instead, it sustained for page after page a single chordal theme, varied only with starkly primitive rhythm in the orchestra and percussion-punctuated declamation by the singers. The...
Roar of Agony. Without overture or curtain, the opera opened with Oedipus singing expository lines of 69 German syllables, every one of them on middle C. The orchestra then established the only genuine motif in the entire work-a rapid, stepwise up-and-down flourish that occurred again and again...
In the final scene the audience was deeply moved by Oedipus (Tenor Gerhard Stolze) staggering onstage before Designer Caspar Neher's abstract backdrop (it looked like a microphotograph of a germ culture) and raising his sightless eyes with a beatific smile. Soprano Varnay refused to watch from the wings...
No Headaches. At 64, Composer Orff is more confirmed than ever in the direction he took in 1936, when he completed Carmina Bur ana, his first major work, and ordered all his previous manuscripts destroyed. Orff totally rejects the idea of "pure music," never writes for the concert hall. He...
According to some critics, Orff devotes so much attention to choreography, staging, and what he calls "language power" that he slights musical values. But the accusation bothers genial Composer Orff not at all. "I belong to no school," says he. "It doesn't give me a headache."