BROOKLYN ACADeMY OF MUSIC The Little Orchestra Society THOMAS SCHERMAN, Music Director YLADO HABUNEK, Stage Director ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION SERIES-SEASON 1967-68 Final Concert-Series C-Sunday Afternoon, Apri/21, 1968, at 2:30 liERDERT BARRETT, Manager THOMAS SCHERMAN, Conductor CARL ORFF ANTlGONAE American Premiere A Tragedy by Friedrich Holderlin Based on Sophocles Antigonae ...................................... lnge Borkh Kreon ............................ .. ...... Carlos Alexander Ismenc .................................. Elizabeth Mannion A Guard ....................................... Leo Gocke Haemon ..................................... William Lewis Tiresias ...................................... Norman Paige A Messenger .... .. ....... ........ ............ 1. B. Davis Eurydice . 0 • 0 0 ••••••••• • ••••• 0 •• 0 • 0 0 • 0 •• 0 • Elizabeth Mannion Leader of the Chorus .. 0 ••• 0 •••••••• 0 •••••••••• John Ostendorf Theben Elders Choral Director-Jonathan Dudley Time: Ancient Greece Place: Thebes ACT 1 Scene 1 - Antigonac ACT HI-Chorus and Krcon lsmene Scene 1-Kreon Scene 2 - Kreon Haemon Chorus horus Scene 3 - Kreon Scene 2- Antigonac A Guard Chorus Chorus Scene 3 - Kreon ACT 11 - Chorus Antigonae Scene 1 - Chorus Chorus A Guard ACT IV Antigonae Scene 1 - Antigonac * Kreon Chorus Scene 2 - Tiresias Kreon Scene 3 - Chorus Kreon ACT Y-Chorus Scene 1 - A Messenger Chorus Eurydice Scene 2- Chorus Kreon ':'There will be an intermission following Scene I, ACT IV Baldwin Pianos By arrangement with Associated Mu!,ic Publi hers, Inc., New York, agent for B. Schott's Soehne, Mainz. ANTIGONAE An Introduction by WOLFGANG SCHADEWALDT Carl Orff's Antigonae, first performed at the Salzburg Festival in August 1949, showed a distinctly new direction in the then 54-year-old master's output: a turn to tragedy. The tragic element had indeed occupied Orff in his arrangements of Monteverdi operas, which .. go back to the year 1925. After the scenic cantata Carmina Burana in 1937 and the two fairy-tale operas Der Mond ( 1939) and Die Kluge (1943), its note was perceptible in the Catulli Carmina: and in the "Bavarian folk-tale'' Die Bemauerin of 1947 he had already found, in the framework of the mediaeval mystery, a strong dramatic form which represented a kind of first step towards Antigonae. But this tragic element first grew into a peculiarly all-embracing creative form when Orff adopted Sophocles' Antigonae, in Holderlin's German version, for a musical interpretation of an original Greek tragedy, creating with it at the same time a new idiom of composition which completely left behind the forms and methods of classic-romantic opera from which he had already been in­ creasingly turning in his earlier stage works. The innovation was so radical that it may be regarded. with no small justice, as a truly epoch-making turning-point in the history of the modern musical theatre. And yet it was in no sense merely a determination to evoke something new at any price. With his Antigonae Orff was striving with new means, and in his own way, for that regeneration of tragedy which is one of the oldest, yet ever vital, concerns of musical history in modern Europe: one thinks of the Renaissance in Italy, which created opera from this particular ideal, of Gluck's new serious treatment of tragic myths within the means offered by the Baroque theatre, of the new immediacy of Richard Wagner's romantically-conceived recourse to Greek-born music-drama and sacred festival play. For Orff, the original tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, with their characters and plots, their aforedoomed acts of fate, their gods, are not outdated. For him, Greek tragedy represents a basic man-god relationship which still (or again) directly concerns us too in our own day, when the very essence of this tragedy succeeds once again in inspiring creative activities. And so Orff, in his musical interpretation of Antigonae, follows most exactly the unchanged, unabbreviated and completely untouched text of Sophocles in Holderlin's version. There are no archaisms or period touches to make it seem as histori­ cally "correct'' as possible. In this adherence to the original text of the tragedy may be seen a characteristic of our century, which in other spheres also of our thought seeks a new directness of understanding of historical events (which is not just "the past"), and once again ferments our own ideas with Greek forms and thoughts, the Greek view of humanity and the Greek belief in the gods. Thus Sophocles' words in his Antigonae are for Orff not merely a text round which he arbitrarily spins music of his own, or with which he seeks to make an emotional or im­ pressive effect. Properly to understand Orff's A ntigonae all thoughts of any operatic "setting to music" of Sophocles must be immediately put aside. Sophocles' words, as rendered by Holderlin, are for Orff the "authentic" words, and as such inexorably binding for the composer, who regards himself throughout as their interpreter. It follows from this that the words of the tragic poet are not merely to be spoken: to experience anew the basic meaning of "deeds" and "happenings", they must be apprehended creatively and allowed to unfold afresh in our world. This will not be fully achieved so long as the words of the tragedy are merely spoken or declaimed on our stages. It will only be attained again in that full existence in which tragic Man is not restricted to thinking or feeling, nor to a modern individuality, but is, as the Greeks put it, that body (soma) whose basic feeling, thought and will stem from the unbroken entity of his being, and, also, who does not remain isolated by himself in this entity but exists in a living, flexible harmony with the Universe and with the Daemon. In order to realise the tragedy afresh, the tragic text must become song again and must enter into that original emotional and spiritual unity of sound, gesture, staging and mimed action which Greek tragedy was and is. Everything-not only the meios-is the "music" here, the mousike in the original Greek sense of the word, which, as is known, first broke up into a divided trinity of speech, music and dance, through which also tragedy, as it was later played, became reduced to spoken drama, but which recently has been further diminished by shedding the remainder of that "music'· (namely verse and rhythm) and leaving only prose speech. Certainly music now demanded a new type of singing as the language of that truly • fundamental existence which also embraced the spiritual. The invention of thoughts and feelings, and the illumination of "inner depths"' by means of musical characterisation, psychology and even depth-psychology, would not accord with this. What was needed was a language of enthusiasm, of that ecstatic awareness of divinity in which character and spirit in mankind are one, and actively express themselves in words with the force of an inescapable compulsion through strong outside pressures. It would be no less in­ appropriate to put to music some purely foreground drama. A rhythmic musical structure had to be built up with complete intellectual mastery which would bring out to the full the drnmatic quality, but in which, above all, the main course of the underlying divine events would be dominant. This new language, this new type of song draws from Orff a body of sound of a primary nuture which allows to the strings only a group of double-basses, and which apart from this, with its large array of percussion (including six pianos sounded in different ways), its harps, woodwinds and muted trumpets, is as far removed from the symphonic orchestra as tragedy understood as broad elemental action is removed from its orthodox romantic meaning. The composition follows the compulsive text of the action practically without pause, yet is arranged according to the developed world of form of ancient tragedy, with its alternating lines of dialogue (stichomythia), messengers' speeches, dialogues of con­ flict, monodies, choruses. Here the dialogue-instead of the recitative-is carried over long stretches on the same held intoning-note to points which have the stress-word, which is reinforced with heavy accents. The chief weight rests on the big speeches (taking the place of arias), which with their unprecedented rhythmic displacements, interval leaps, coloratura melismata, over the even tread of long ostinati, yet always following the natural rise and fall of speech, are evocatively impressed on the hearer's soul through meaningful musical gestures expressing the essence of the divinely-inspired, dream-filled Antigonae, of the daemon-possessed Kreon and of the ecstatic seer Tiresias. The strongly emotional is everywhere here comprehended from its basic source, the "pathetic", namely the ecstatic stirring of the soul which is an emotion of awe in the face of divine power. The Antigonae of Carl Orff is no more merely that "most sisterly of creatures" (Goethe) who goes to her death in fulfilling the humanitarian loving duty of burying her dead brother. Her struggle against the ruler Kreon is not just the conflict of principles between the demands of the State and family affection (Hegel) . And the more one honours her example of noble strength of purpose, which in her resistance to State despotism and fanatical law brings death upon her and thereby creates a newer, purer order, so much more will the real action of the tragedy extend beyond that drama of moral, legal and political conflict. With good reason Orff adheres to Holderlin, who in his poetic version as well as in his explanatory "Observations" understood the tragedy as the encounter between god and man. Tragic Man, innocently guilty, in pursuit of a noble task, quite oversteps the bounds in his impulse towards God, and is then struck by the divine recoil-a ''rebel", a "holy heretic" against the all too rigorously revered God.