Abstract

Daniel Albright argues that Stravinsky's opera “Oedipus Rex” is about the subjugation of Dionysus by Apollo. Stravinsky accomplishes this subjugation through a kind of thanatography that extends the logic of death to the opera's words, music and drama. Albright situates his analysis of “Oedipus Rex” against Adorno's disparaging comments about Stravinsky, finding within the logic of Adorno's critique that Stravinsky has given us the death-head of opera itself.

Highlights

  • Most treatments of Sophocles felt the weight of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, especially treatments of Oedipus Rex, since Nietzsche treated Sophocles’s play as something like the ideal specimen Greek drama: Oedipus blinded himself after gazing into the pit, facing the intolerable truth not just about his own parentage but about all human life – better never to have been born

  • In Oedipus Rex Stravinsky confronts Dionysus, Nietzsche’s Dionysus. Stravinsky conceived his art in Nietzschean terms, as a struggle between Dionysus and Apollo, as he said in a 1939 Harvard lecture printed in Poetics of Music: What is important for the lucid ordering of the work – for its crystallization – is that all the Dionysian elements which set the imagination of the artist in motion and make the life-sap rise must be properly subjugated before they intoxicate us, and must be made to submit to the law: Apollo demands it.[1]

  • In a sense Oedipus Rex is a play about Dionysus Chained; it is as if Euripides’ Bacchae were rewritten to show King Pentheus triumphant over the subjugated body of the god

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Summary

Introduction

In a sense Oedipus Rex (like all of Stravinsky’s work) is a play about Dionysus Chained; it is as if Euripides’ Bacchae were rewritten to show King Pentheus triumphant over the subjugated body of the god. Latin isn’t the only dead language present here: Stravinsky uses extinct musical means as well.

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