Word: prometheus
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...other from Greek mythology. Both involve modern man's reversal of his traditional beliefs and show how present desolation, ironically, was born in past faith. Expelled from the Garden of Eden, man was bereft; expelling God from the cosmos, modern man is equally bereft. The legendary Prometheus stole fire from the gods to give men life, light, art and wisdom...
...castle takes on the air of a Dadaesque painting: a man walks the ceiling and the walls, like a fly; the old lady peels off her face like a mask, then drops her eyes in a wineglass. A malignant bird pecks away at Von Sydow as if he were Prometheus chained...
Such perplexities are typical of the work of Carl Orff. Everybody agrees that Orff, at 72, ranks as Germany's foremost composer, but nobody agrees on why, or even whether he ought to. Thus the world première of his Prometheus last week by the Stuttgart Opera was, depending on the listener, either the most satisfying Orff in a long time or the most exasperating...
Incantatory Drones. Ever since he wrote his first major work, Carmina Burana (1936), Orff has steadily pared away the body of Western musical devices-themes, counterpoints, harmonic progressions and so on-to arrive at a skeletal idiom of powerfully primitive, repetitive sounds. In Prometheus, what little melody was left was expertly sung by U.S. Baritone Carlos Alexander as Prometheus and Australian Mezzo Althea Bridges as the tormented lo. The other singers, obscured by grotesque masks and headdresses, declaimed the drama in incantatory drones, while the orchestra rolled along in seemingly endless ostinato figures or erupted with brash punctuations...
After two uninterrupted hours of this, some members of the audience may have welcomed the concluding thunderbolt from Zeus that plunged Prometheus into the netherworld; yet most cheered and stomped for 20 minutes when Orff appeared for curtain calls. The reviews were more divided. Hans Stuckenschmidt, Germany's leading music critic, wrote that "the performance counts among the best that one can see and hear today in European theaters." But Der Spiegel scoffed that the opera sounded like "a prehistoric equinoctial celebration of a voodoo ritual...