ABSTRACT
Since I first struggled at school to construe the Greek text of Agamemnon, I have felt that Greek tragedy and epic were live, direct performance mediums concerned with real people in real situations, and designed to involve their audiences emotionally in the predicaments of the characters. I am totally unmoved (except to exasperation) by versions of ancient Greek drama which present it as an austere, remote and archaic form of theatre in which there is little movement, and invest it with a solemnity which precludes the range of emotions (from tears through even – at some extraordinary moments – to laughter) which the original scripts invite. In consequence, I have felt unable to study Stravinsky’s ‘opera-oratorio’ Oedipus Rex. In this work the characters stand in designated positions in a tableau for the duration; Stravinsky’s abbreviation of Cocteau’s text is declaimed in Latin to ensure that the events are remote from the spectator, and an impersonal neo-Handelian mood pervades the score. All the brilliance, the immediacy, the subtlety and the power of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King have been removed, in an attempt to create a ‘universal’ message through abstraction and ceremony. Stravinsky’s ‘neo-classic’ style gives spectators a false picture of the Greeks and of the richness of their legacy. Stravinsky insisted that the Dionysian elements in music and drama ‘must finally be made to submit to the law; Apollo demands it’ (1970, 105). To my mind, this preference for the supremacy of rationality over emotion is a fatal flaw in neo-classicism, when it attempts to engage with the great tragic myths.
