Oedipus Psalms @ Disney

When we first took our seats for Oedpius Rex I was happy to see Elias Simé’s masks and thrones arranged on stage: they promised a production that was seriously engaged with the implications of the work, rather than a production that treated the work as a Parisian art deco curio.

 

Then the chorus and cast came out, and there was no Speaker in a tux. Instead, there was Antigone, played by Viola Davis, speaking a part based on but quite different in tone and content from Cocteau’s original “Spectateurs. Vous allez entendre un version latin d’Oedipe-Roi.” Then the chorus began writhing on the stage ….

 

Usually in these cases the next comment to be made is how offensive all this tampering was, and regret how ill-served the work had been. But I can’t say that. For one thing, music, the singing, was tremendous. I can’t imagine a better performance. It was such a revelation of power and refinement that I don’t think I can ever listen again to that tinny Opera Society of D.C. recording which hitherto constituted my whole experience of the score. 

 

Roderick Dixon was a fluent, brilliant Oedipus. Anne Sofie von Otter a jittery Jocasta. The parts of Creon, Tiresias and the Messenger were all deftly presented by Ryan McKinny. Even Daniel Montenegro was able to make an impression with the brief Shepherd part. And the men of the Los Angeles Master Chorale were beyond praise, writhing notwithstanding.

 

And the story they were telling was not some myth concerning a handful of famous Greeks, but the story of the collapse of AIG, the story of the Bush Administration, the story of every leader who gets too full of himself, and suffers a necessary correction, the inevitable slip-up. It was a pageant of the danger of power and charisma—a warning to the Obama administration? Stravinsky’s brassy blasts were the public face of these politicos, who are nothing other than their public faces.

 

Hence the ritualized gestures that all the principals and the chorus employed: a simplistic gesture-language for me, king, seeing, telling .... At first I thought, “This is going to drive me mad.” But actually it harmonized nicely with the repetitive-ritualistic music, and forged another path to understanding it.

 

Of course the contours of the work were the same as Oedipus Rex; you can’t just change the story of Oedipus. It ended with the shattering chorus that sounded like it would shake Disney Hall down.

But the show wasn't over.

After intermission, came the real coup: Antigone, Oedipus and Ismene returned to the stage. The chorus, the men now joined by the women, and changed from blue to green clothes, poured down the aisles. What was going on? Antigone explains: now we are going to see Oedipus at the end of his life, his final rest, and his transfiguration.

 

And so in effect we watched a concise Oedipus at Colonus, presented in mime and narration, with the three psalms of Stravinsky’s work functioning as choral commentary. Which is to say, providing something like Sophocles originally did—showing the redemption that followed the tribulation.

As the final chords reverberated, my hair was standing on end. I have heard the L.A. Phil do this work before, but never to such tremendous effect.

What we had seen was not Stravinsky’s idea. He had imagined a chorus “seating in a single row across the stage and reaching from end to end of the proscenium rainbow. I thought that the singers should seem to read from scrolls, and that only these scrolls and the outlines of their bearers’ cowled heads should be seen.” 

He called for principals who didn’t act, but “should stand rigidly” and “do not turn to listen to each other’s speeches, but address themselves directly to the audience.” 

For Stravinsky, “Those directors who whisk [Oedipus] offstage and then bring him back realistically staggering in an unreal, stylized, costume have understood nothing of my music.”

 

Stravinsky’s music makes the question of how to present his theater works inescapable. We know what he wanted, but that doesn't always suit. It was following his intentions that resulted in the unspeakable 1999 Sellars/Alvarez/Gronk Story of a Soldier. I don’t know if Oedipus Psalms was a model or just a happy accident. I’m just grateful to have seen it.

Comments

[Lobsang Damchoi]

I share your ethusiasm for the music performance, with one exception. von Otter, wonderful in the Tristan project, took on a vocal style in Oedipus that seemed more appropriate to Verismo opera; it was also a style that seemed at odds with the rest of the cast.
Btw, let's stop using the term "purist." It's not precise in meaning any more--you only set up a staw man for an easy kill! Definitely not cricket.