Word: oedipus
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...Walter Kerr, 46, onetime drama professor at Catholic University and since 1951 theater critic for the New York Herald Tribune, who reads all scripts, adapted Oedipus Rex for Omnibus, is now adapting Richard Marsh's The Datchett Diamonds for the new classical mystery series, which he thought up. Kerr would like to do the historical plays of Shakespeare, in order, on consecutive nights, from King John to Henry VIII, is meanwhile having a rough time finding a Sherlock Holmes story for the mystery series because A. Conan Doyle's plots were so "simple-minded...
...conspicuously low on highly dissonant intervals like minor seconds, thereby permitting continual suggestions of tonality, while orthodox twelve-tone theory axiomatically excludes anything tonal. (Concerning Threni, Stravinsky has mentioned the "triadic references in every bar.") Also, the series is fragmented, transposed and otherwise manipulated so that lines recall Oedipus Rex and the Canticum instead of Schoenberg. The rhythm and scoring is all Stravinksy; in particular the reserved, consciously archaic Stravinksy of the past few years; more reflective, less apparently expressive than, say, Krenek's twelve-tone setting of Jeremiah, also deliberately archaic...
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, eventually became Oedipus' climactic roar of agony. The work unfolded without set pieces or arias, and the staging by Director Günther Rennert was similarly spare, e.g., when Jocasta (Soprano Astrid Varnay) learned that she was the mother of Oedipus she threw her head back with mouth agape...
...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 because "I dream about such things." Reported TIME Correspondent Paul Moor: "For a non-German-speaking audience, this opera has long, boring stretches because the music is so subservient to the text. Nevertheless, Orff has created a theater work of gripping power...
...previous manuscripts destroyed. Orff totally rejects the idea of "pure music," never writes for the concert hall. He places such importance on the texts of his "dramatic cantatas" that he will permit none of them to be translated, although he himself seems intrigued by foreign idioms. When working on Oedipus, he decided to write the musical directions in Italian, the stage directions in Latin, e.g., the entrance of the two children is signaled by the line "Inducuntur Oedipodis liberi Antigone et Ismene...