Word: worke
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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 work was typical, too, in its close welding of music to text (by 18th century German Poet Friedrich Hölderlin). The oddly assorted orchestra-which included four pianos for eight players, four harps, a glass harmonica, marimbaphone, xylophones, bongos, congas, gongs and no strings except for nine double basses-served...
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...
...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...
...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 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...
...after life in the Northern Hemisphere has been wiped out by a brief atomic war, and five months before the drift of radioactivity is expected to blight the Southern Hemisphere. Outwardly at least, the survivors keep a stiff upper lip about what is going to happen. They go to work in the morning, beach in the afternoon, pub at night. Soon, the drinking begins to get a bit heavier, the sex a bit out of hand...