Orff's Oedipus

"Eight hours of Orff is simply too much!" The speaker, a tall, lank-haired man in tweed jacket and maroon wool shirt, was none other than rehearsal-weary Carl Orff, Germany's most famed modern composer. Hours, or even minutes, of Orff have indeed often proved too much for some tradition-minded audiences in Europe and the U.S. But last week crowds were thronging to the Stuttgart Opera House for a solid week of Composer Orff's works, including his latest: Oedipus der Tyrann, a highly individual dissertation on the Sophocles tragedy.

The long-awaited score proved to be typical Orff, avoiding such devices as standard harmonic progressions or even the modern "tone row." Instead, it sustained for page after page a single chordal theme, varied only with starkly primitive rhythm in the orchestra and percussion-punctuated declamation by the singers. The work was typical, too, in its close welding of music to text (by 18th century German Poet Friedrich Hoelderlin). The oddly assorted orchestra--which included four pianos for eight players, four harps, a glass harmonica, marimbaphone, xylophones, bongos, congas, gongs and no strings except for nine double basses-served less to score Sophocles' tragedy than to underscore it. Every word of dialogue took precedence over the music.

Roar of Agony. Without overture or curtain, the opera opened with Oedipus singing expository lines of 69 German syllables, every one of them on middle C. The orchestra then established the only genuine motif in the entire work--a rapid, stepwise up-and-down flourish that occurred again and again, eventually became Oedipus' climactic roar of agony. The work unfolded without set pieces or arias, and the staging by Director Guenther Rennert was similarly spare, e.g., when Jocasta (Soprano Astrid Varnay) learned that she was the mother of Oedipus she threw her head back with mouth agape in a silence more horrifying than a scream.

In the final scene the audience was deeply moved by Oedipus (Tenor Gerhard Stolze) staggering onstage before Designer Caspar Neher's abstract backdrop (it looked like a microphotograph of a germ culture) and raising his sightless eyes with a beatific smile. Soprano Varnay refused to watch from the wings because "I dream about such things." Reported TIME Correspondent Paul Moor: "For a non-German-speaking audience, this opera has long, boring stretches because the music is so subservient to the text. Nevertheless, Orff has created a theater work of gripping power."

No Headaches. At 64, Composer Orff is more confirmed than ever in the direction he took in 1936, when he completed Carmina Bur ana, his first major work, and ordered all his previous manuscripts destroyed. Orff totally rejects the idea of "pure music," never writes for the concert hall. He places such importance on the texts of his "dramatic cantatas" that he will permit none of them to be translated, although he himself seems intrigued by foreign idioms. When working on Oedipus, he decided to write the musical directions in Italian, the stage directions in Latin, e.g., the entrance of the two children is signaled by the line "Inducuntur Oedipodis liberi Antigone et Ismene."

According to some critics, Orff devotes so much attention to choreography, staging, and what he calls "language power" that he slights musical values. But the accusation bothers genial Composer Orff not at all. "I belong to no school," says he. "It doesn't give me a headache."

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