STRAVINSKY: Oedipus Rex – Peter Pears, tenor/Martha Modl, mezzo-soprano/Heinz Rehfuss, bass-baritone/Otto von Rohr, bass/Helmut Krebs, counter-tenor/ Jean Cocteau, narrator/Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra & Chorus/Igor Stravinsky
Historic-Recordings HRCD 0009, 51:40 [www.historic-recordings.co.uk] ****:
Consciously or unconsciously, Stravinsky’s opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927) falls precisely in the middle of his creative output, occupying a special pride of place in his neo-Classical persona. Stravinsky composed the piece in Latin, seeking to create an austerity of tone in a language “not dead but monumentalized.” This inscription with the composer at the helm of the Cologne Radio had its initial US release on Columbia Records (ML 4644, rec. 1951-1952) and found CD incarnation on Naxos (9.80177). In order to exact the sense of inexorable fate or Moira at work, Stravinsky kept the harmonic syntax of the piece deceptively simple, and the rhythm assumes a rigid, stolid character as Fate pursues Oedipus to his merciless self-confrontation, the old saw that a man may be blind to the truth and then blinded by the truth.
Jean Cocteau, who wrote the libretto, intrudes five times to elucidate–in French–the context of the proceedings. The brass often sally forth with an abrupt interjection into the stark psychological procession, especially as the effect is meant to jar us from our detached sympathies for the principals’ painful revelations. Heinz Rehfuss proves particularly adept in his dual roles as both Creon and the Messenger, often traversing a broad tessitura that modulates into either falsetto or antiquated plainchant. The mutual influence on and away from Orff’s Carmina Burana may warrant significance. Otto von Rohr’s Tiresias resonates with doom at every note, especially over rolling tympani and open intervals from the woodwinds. Peter Pears, on the other hand, projects a tender vulnerability, despite Oedipus’ hubris in assuming his penetrating intellect–which had solved the Riddle of the Sphinx–can likewise discover the true murderer of King Laius. His long aria embraces cantilena, parlando, and Sprechstimme vocal styles, the sheer diversity of his many-faceted mind.
Martha Modl’s haunted entrance as Jocasta–Oedipus’ mother/wife–resounds with regal, tragic irony. In one particularly extended, grueling moment of Sophoclean paradox, she utters her impatience with Oedipus’ quest for the truth of Laius’ murder with the epithet “trivia”–as indicative of the triteness of the crime after 20 years–only to have inadvertently alluded to “the place where three roads meet,” the “tri-via,” that selfsame spot where Oedipus slew his biological father. Stravinsky’s scoring becomes alluringly transparent for such a fiendish moment of self-delusion, flute, plucked strings, and harp often underlying her admonitions to break off further inquiry into the ancient whodunit. The subsequent duet with Oedipus in polyrhythmic interchange achieves a murderous weight, the stretti of guilt and imminent self-revelation pushed to critical mass. Cocteau alerts us to the death of Polybus, Oedipus’ adoptive father, so tympani and Khorus can intone the futility of denying one’s fate. By the end of this long scene, Pears invests his vocal line with a nervous, shivering quality that ripples with impending dread.
A trumpet fanfare announces the Divine denouement. Patricide, incest: so a cosmic dolor falls upon our sorry protagonist, unluckiest of men, whose penetrating intellect has undone itself by relentless probity. Has the maxim, “Know thyself” become a self-consuming injunction? Such wickedly ironic counterpoint surrounds the final pages of this primal hour of antique wisdom, we cannot know if we have experienced pleasure or pain.
–Gary Lemco
