Stravinsky: Oedipus rex

Ex. 8 p. 44

M^g J iJ3
ru - be - ski in ae -gra u - rbe cla - ma - re,

A.
V
road where Oedipus killed Laius); and from anger, Oedipus plunges to fear
and anxious questioning, a mood exactly caught by the disturbed quaver
triplets of the duet. But this rapid psychological evolution is contained by a
formal scheme which intensifies the feeling that the characters are in the grip
of inexorable forces.
One must add that this idea is hardly Stravinsky's invention. Verdi used it
with equal power in, for example, 'Ah fors' e lui' at the end of Act I of La
Traviata, where the regular two-verse aria-cabaletta form ending with a duet
subtly insists that Violetta's freedom - though asserted with such musical
bravura - is illusory.
Is Jocasta then a neo-Verdian heroine? It would surely be more helpful to
suggest that Verdi was for Stravinsky the model for a more generalised quality
of 'operatic-ness' which he wanted as a supporting context for his classical
drama. In a short article published a few months after the first performance
of Oedipus rex, Stravinsky referred to 'a deeper search than the simple
imitation of language'.30 In his instrumental works of the early twenties, that
search seems to have been for musical meanings and allusions to replace the
lost continuity of history and, in Stravinsky's case, geography as well. That
the models were studiously well-ordered ones was part of the common
movement towards 'reconstruction'. But a Sophoclean drama made more
complex demands, not least because the urge to write once more for the theatre
was itself apparently some kind of reaction to the hard matter-of-factness of
the instrumental scores.
It looks, then, as if Stravinsky wanted an enrichment of the coolly objective
patterns suggested by his original ideas for a Latin text and a constructivist
mise en scene, and found it in the passionate, larger-than-life, but essentially

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 In which the music unfolds

conventional idiom of the nineteenth-century Italian musical stage. It was

crucial to this choice that Stravinsky himself loved Verdi and attended his
operas on every possible occasion;31 that behind all the ham emotionalism and
spurious realism of works like // Trovatore and Aida, Verdi was a highly formal
artist with a respect for convention and a genius for artifice somewhat akin
to Stravinsky's own.32 But at the same time the 'ham' elements have also to
be reckoned with. Stravinsky certainly was not unaware of Verdi's reputation
for coarseness. On the contrary, it was precisely the crudities of Verdian style
that he was at pains to imitate: the square phrases, oom-chah accompaniments
and absurdly plain harmonies, the clarinets in thirds and sixths, the chromatic
scales and shock-horror diminished seventh chords.33 These are the unmis-
takable signals of routine Italianism, where more subtle quotation might well
pass unnoticed. Clearly Stravinsky wanted us to understand his characters
partly as refugees from the Verdian stage, whose masks conceal, not the cold
immobile beauty of Greek statues, but grimaces which we, when we go to the
opera, accept as the outward sign of an emotion too great to be borne in silence.
In other words, it is the simple directness and sheer force of operatic feeling
which Stravinsky wanted to suggest as attributes of these statuesque victims
of the most horrendous moral torments yet devised by speculative man. And
if this entailed intimations of vulgarity, so much the better. What fiercer
challenge could there be to the self-congratulatory primness of a classical
education than the thought that Oedipus's conceit and fear, Jocasta's
evasiveness, Tiresias's anger, might be on much the same emotional level as
Violetta's self-sacrifice or Amneris's vindictiveness, to say nothing of Verdi's
own grief at the death of Manzoni?
One needs, admittedly, to insist on that 'might be'. Whatever else Oedipus
rex may be, it is not imitation Verdi. Not only are the references oblique and
often fragmentary, but they are also, as we have seen, mixed with others of
a quite different character and all are strongly mediated by Stravinskyisms.
This whole scene, indeed, could be taken as a model of the synthetic approach
in Oedipus rex generally. Take the Verdi-isms in 'Nonn'erubeskite' (see Ex.
8). They boil down to a textural/rhythmic figure carrying the harmony,
combined with a certain style of ornamented vocal melody, four-square
phrasing, and some incidental details of scoring. But the harmonic figure at
once produces a Stravinskyism, in the shape of a bass-line which candidly
disregards the precepts of the simple, highly conventionalised Italian style. Ex.
9 suggests how a 'correct' bass-line might proceed (though this is already
adventurous by Italian standards).
The striking thing is that, in pure harmonic terms, Stravinsky's bass is only

49
 Stravinsky: Oedipus rex

Ex. 9 p. 44 (accompaniment modified)

Nonn' e - ru - be - ski te in ae-gra u - rbe cla - ma - re,

V V

ma - re cla-ma - re ve - stros do-me-sti-kos cla - mo - res etc

very subtly 'wrong', though it is also, as a musical line, unidiomatic, since it

mainly obeys 'top-line' rules of motion by step, and ignores the strong tonic-
dominant motion that would invariably be reflected in an Italian operatic bass-
line. This procedure is quite in keeping with Stravinsky's normal melodic
technique, derived originally, it seems, from modal folk-tunes. Such melodies
keep in close position, and return persistently to one or two focal notes which
are felt to be embellished by the notes around them. Jocasta's own vocal line
here is in that vein, despite its obvious feints towards cadential tonality.
Though harmonisable, it has a shape akin to that of a folk-song embellishing
the note G, which is why it fails to insist on an obvious bass-line as a Verdi
melody would do. Verdi also sometimes wrote highly focused and motivic
tunes of this kind (a well-known example is 'Addio del passato', in Act III of
La Traviata); but their patterning is invariably dictated by the conventions
of tonal harmony. In 'Addio del passato' the harmony is entirely V-I (in the

50
 In which the music unfolds

tonic or the relative major), except in the visionary tonic major section, which
introduces modestly vagrant elements. In general this is as much a case of
melodisable harmony as of harmonisable melody.
The point having been made, the rest of Jocasta's aria largely abandons the
Verdian model (except, of course, for the da capo, which is a literal repeat).
The Vivo middle section at fig. 100, with its bravura clarinet arpeggios, follows
late eighteenth-century formulae (those of Mozart's Requiem rather than
Verdi's), while the frenzied duet grafts on to this stock a kind of wild Rossinian
patter which introduces an element of the grotesque into Jocasta's self-
delusion, highlit by prominent scoring for that ostentatiously unclassical
instrument, the El> clarinet. In these quick sections Jocasta takes on certain
musical attributes of the Queen of the Night. Her repeated-note 'oracula'
recalls the sinister head-motive of 'Der Holle Rache', and also 'Nur stille,
stille', in Act II of The Magic Flute, But the figure is conventional, and might
have any number of classical forebears. Stravinsky, unclassically, infests the
whole orchestra with it, and later it echoes menacingly in the figure for the
word 'trivium', an obsessive treatment which seems to locate the chorus, who
sing it, firmly within Oedipus's own guilty brain. Musically these patterns,
like the so-called motor rhythms of the contemporary instrumental works, are
simply a classicised version of the irregular ostinato figures so characteristic
of the early ballets. But the composer would surely have been less pleased at
the suggestion that the dramatic technique here is essentially Wagnerian. The
rhythmic leitmotif links the trigger-word 'trivium' to the oracle whose
prophecy it fulfils, and later, in Oedipus's ceremonial confession (at fig. 119),
to the crucial act of murder ('kekidi'). This important idea, with its associated
methodology, continues into the next scene; and it is in fact one of the chief
devices by which Stravinsky sustains the dramatic tension from Oedipus's first
tremor of foreboding (Tavesco subito'), to the culminating moment of truth
at 'Lux facta est' (Ex. 10).

Lux facta est

Some such device seems to have been needed particularly because musically
the ensuing scene of the Messenger and the Shepherd demanded a change of
tone, one which, on the face of it, might have implied a relaxation in the tension
just when, dramatically, it had to be increased. The witness who 'steps from
the shadows' at this point is, as we saw earlier, not the Messenger but the
Shepherd who in Sophocles escaped from the scene of Laius's murder.
Returning to Thebes and finding Oedipus already king, the man lied to Creon

51
 Stravinsky: Oedipus rex

Ex. 10

p. 47 p. 51

i K K K

J? J> J) J?
O - ra- cu - la, o - ra - cu - la
Ne pro

p. 54 pp. 54-5

J J> J>
r p p um, tri - vi - um
Pa - ve - sco su - bi - to

p. 55 p. 68

ITse r IP is i p^
E - go - nem ke - ki - di Re - ppe

about the number of Laius's assailants and begged Jocasta to send him as her
shepherd far from the city. But the Messenger had also been a shepherd,
tending flocks on the mountain where the baby Oedipus was to have been
abandoned by his parents. In the play he identifies the other shepherd (the
survivor from the murder) as the very man who had originally handed the baby
to him, having balked at killing the child as ordered. The Messenger/
Shepherd had then taken Oedipus to Corinth, where Polybus had adopted
him.34
The pastoral motif is central to this whole scene, and gives it both musically
and dramatically a unique character. Messengers and shepherds are arche-
typal. The messenger, by definition, has special knowledge which may
possibly alter the course of events. The shepherd - 'omniskius pastor', as the
chorus call him at the start of the scene - stands apart from ordinary social
intercourse and is uninfluenced by the follies of urban man. He too is felt to
know and understand better than the rest of us, because his life is led close
to nature and in conditions of hardship and self-abnegation. But the shepherd

52