2011: Oedipus Rex: An involuntary offender’s tragedy

The Norwegian crime writer Gunnar Staalsen once said, “I wish I had come up with the plot of the criminal unfoldings in King Oedipus myself. The investigator is, unwittingly, the culprit!”

King Oedipus by Sophocles and Oedipus Rex by Stravinsky were composed 2354 years apart but both show us the difficult as easy and the easy as difficult. Their main theme: parents and children.

Sigmund Freud and Stravinsky shared an interest in the mythological King of Thebes who killed his father and married his mother. It's every small child’s fantasy – at least according to Freud. But the story in Stravinsky's opera focuses on the family's curse. The Oracle of Delphi has foretold that if the King and Queen of Thebes have a son, he will be fated to kill his father and marry his mother. When a son is duly born they order a servant to take the child out and to leave it for dead, hoping to escape the prophecy. But the child is found by a shepherd, who takes it to the King and Queen of Corinth and they bring the boy up as their own.

One day Oedipus hears a rumour that his parents are not his “real”, or bioglogical, family. He travels to Delphi, where the Oracle confirms that this is true. On the way home he finds himself in an argument at a crossroads and, in the ensuing fracas, he kills an elderly man. On the way to Thebes he solves the riddle of the Sphinx and becomes a hero; his reward is the Queen. They marry and have children.

Thus runs the myth, and (if we can think of the Greek tragedies as kinds of opera too) this is where the operas of both Sophocles and Stravinsky begin. The city of Thebes is beseiged by the plague. The old King is dead and the Gods demand that his killer be brought to justice. To save the city, Oedipus puts all his effort into solving the murder. Gradually he uncovers the facts until, finally, he must look the truth in the eyes; then he blinds himself with the needle of his mother's broach, but not before she has hanged herself in their bedroom.

Oedipus has committed "the ancient crimes": patricide and incest. The family drama in both operas begins when Oedipus is an adult. He is King, the great Sofos and the city's wisest man. Then he is brought down by a tragedy: his own life story. He is struck by the realisation that he is the victim of abuses committed against him whilst too small to remember them. His parents did not want him, he was discovered a foundling and grew up adopted. The truth sends Oedipus into a rage. It is in this fury that he kills his biological father and goes on to sleep with his biological mother. He committs these crimes unknowingly, in blindness and without insight.

But what is the play really about? It asks questions such as: What makes a father and a mother? Who is it that has nurtured me? How important is biology? How do these things relate to social bonds and care?

It is the investigator, the investigation, and the resulting offender that enable us to consider these things honestly. This is the worst offender of all – a murderer and a committer of incest – yet Sophocles' protagonist is the wisest and most truthful of men.

Oedipus' main opponent in the play is Tiresias. Oedipus sees, but is blind. Tiresias is blind, but sees. When Oedipus has seen the truth, he blinds himself. Throughout King Oedipus the relationship between blindness and insight is the subject of metaphorical wordplay.


The avant-garde and publicmindedness

Stravinsky was trained as a lawyer but he broke with the law, just as he broke the rules of his art! Stravinsky was preoccupied with the musical in poetry and the poetical in music, and the inter-artistic parallels are apparent within the historical avant-garde movements. The Latin libretto approaches, for most people, pure sound and rhythm, with "only" musical meaning.

Stravinsky's opera is epic. Oedipus Rex is a Medieval station drama. People like Stravinsky, "neo-classicists", clung to older vernacular forms, such as the passion play and commedia dell'arte. Gestures and expressions were important; Stravinsky had his first success with the ballets performed by Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes; and what is called the "theatre of silence" was a musical play too, another gestural, musically eloquent art form.

It is no coincidence that Brecht and Weill's Threepenny Opera, and Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex were contemporaries. They quoted the classics, while they created something no one had seen before by blending styles that made the classical forms new and popular art forms "serious". Both are musical plays, opera-vaudevilles; where the tableaux almost stand out when the action stops and the singing starts. But there the similarities end.

Because when, in the final scene, Oedipus stands naked and stripped of all the attributes of the avant-garde, we grasp something of the incomprehensible. Stravinsky gets an archaic shiver to creep down our spines as he poses the question: "what would art be, as the writing of history, if it shook off the memory of accumulated suffering." (Theodor W. Adorno).

Text: Arild Linneberg

English version: Alistair Spalding