Opera

Oedipus Rex

7, 9, 12 October 2025

The opera

Libretto by: Igor' Fëdorovič Stravinskij e Jean Cocteau, da Sofocle (tradotto in latino da Je
Composer: Igor' Fëdorovič Stravinskij

Total 95 min. approx.

Comunale Nouveau

Production: New production of Teatro Comunale di Bologna
Information: Myth as a monument. An actor, speaking the language of the audience, moves among the musical numbers that retrace Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. A contemporary voice among eternal elements, in Latin, a lingua franca at once ancient and universal. Speech and music. We are in France, at the end of the 1920s, and Igor Stravinsky is no longer playing with quotation as he had in Pulcinella: he creates a kind of ideal past in which the narrator draws on the Baroque tradition of the oratorio and becomes a thoroughly modern device of estrangement between mythical action and present time, between theatre and reality. The whole work is two-faced as well as bilingual — the text is by Jean Cocteau, with Latin translations by the theologian and man of letters Jean Daniélou — and pervaded by a rhythmic power that makes it ancient and solemn as much as modern and alive, marble and pulsing. Killer of his father, husband of his mother, annihilated by the discovery of himself, Oedipus in his anguished search still stirs pity and terror as in classical tragedy.

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