Oedipus Rex

Impressed by Jean Cocteau’s rewrite of Antigone, Stravinsky asked the poet for an adaptation of Oedipus Rex. The resulting libretto brings together the key scenes of Sophocles’s tragedy translated by the Abbé Jean Daniélou into Latin—a language that, according the composer, “is not dead but engraved in stone, and so imposing that it is immune to any popularization”. A narrator outlines the plot for us: when Oedipus, King of Thebes and unlucky descendant of Laïos, discovers his double crime of patricide and incest, he gouges out his eyes, and Jocasta, widow and accomplice in the crime of incest with her son, hangs herself… The opera-oratorio is written for voice, narrator, soloist, and men’s choir, and received its 1927 premiere in Paris under the baton of the composer himself!