- To his great regret, Lorenzo Viotti has been forced to cancel his participation in the first two concerts of the Vienna Philharmonic due to acute illness. The Salzburg Festival is grateful to Esa-Pekka Salonen for stepping in at short notice to conduct the concerts, with a slightly altered programme.
Taking Sophocles’ ancient Greek tragedy Oedipus tyrannus as his inspiration, Igor Stravinsky created a powerful opera-oratorio in the 1920s. It was the composer’s idea to set the Oedipus story to music with a Latin text, giving it a ritualistic character. His librettist, the famous French playwright Jean Cocteau, embraced his friend’s experiment and collaborated with Stravinsky to create a sung text for translation into Latin, together with a French-language text for the narrator. The first concert performance, which was not particularly well received, took place under the composer’s baton on 30 May 1927 at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt in Paris. This venue, where Sergey Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes also performed, had strong ties to Stravinsky through his ballets (L’Oiseau de feu, 1910; Le Sacre du printemps, 1913). Ever since a 1928 staged production in Berlin, conducted by Otto Klemperer and designed in the post-expressionist style of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, Oedipus Rex has been regarded as the most monumental work of Stravinsky’s neoclassical period.