Word: oedipus
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Oracles and angry gods submitted to a strange purpose last week in Philadelphia. They were the oracles and gods of ancient Greece which Sophocles told about in his Oedipus Rex 2,300 years ago. As of old they decreed and prophesied that Oedipus, son of Laius, would murder his father and marry his mother, Jocasta. They served also last week to provide the material for one of Conductor Leopold Stokowski's most ambitious flights into modernistic musical production: the first U. S. stage performances of the Oedipus Rex of Composer Igor Stravinsky, an opera-oratorio with a text recast...
...modernized Oedipus might involve psychoanalysts and Freudian complexes but Stravinsky's Oedipus follows no such obvious trend. He wrote it when he was tired, perhaps incapable of cutting a trail any further into the forest of such untried dissonances and rhythms as he used in Le Sacre du Printemps. He had long dis carded the skirling imagery of Petrushka and The Firebird. When he wrote Oedipus he was deep in a desire to return to the classicists, anxious perhaps to begin all over again, to see where a new trail would take him. He chose an old, formal pattern fundamentally...
...from the music alone. But a part of Stokowski's genius is expressed in his willingness to walk where angels fear to tread. It is nothing new for him to appear to know more about a piece of music than the man who wrote it. Much of Stravinsky's Oedipus, despite its rigid pattern, is powerful dramatic music, worthy of translation. So, for Philadelphians, last week Stokowski proceeded to translate it, using modernistic idioms: The speaker (Negro Wayland Rudd; recalled the story in English through a loud speaker attached to the proscenium arch. On a platform above the singers, puppets...
April 21?Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex; at Manhattan. Production jointly by League of Composers and Philadelphia Orchestra Association. Scenic designs by Robert Edmond Jones. Radio by National Broadcasting system...
April 10-13-Production of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, jointly by League of Composers and Philadelphia Orchestra Association; at Philadelphia. Direction: Leopold Stokowski. Scenic designs: Robert Edmond Jones. Chorus: Princeton University. April 21-Oedipus Rex in Manhattan. Direction by Stokowski; chorus from Harvard. April 23-25-Festival of chamber music; at Washington, D. C. Sponsor: Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation. April 27-Opening of London opera season; at Covent Garden...