| Oresteia | |
|---|---|
| Opera by Iannis Xenakis | |
 Composer Iannis Xenakis | |
| Language | Greek |
| Based on | The tragedy of Aeschylus |
| Premiere | |
Oresteia is a Greek opera by Iannis Xenakis originally composed in 1965 and 1966. The work is based on the Oresteia by Aeschylus. It is written for a chorus and twelve instrumentalists, and runs approximately 50 minutes. [1] [2] [3] [4] Xenakis composed two further movements of the work in the 1980s and 1992.
Orestia begins at the end of the Trojan War with a song from the chorus about the sadness of human fate. Cassandra retells her rejection of Apollo, who punished her by allowing her to see the future but never to be believed by anyone. She goes on to describe the death of Agamemnon at the hands of his wife and her lover, Aegisthus. The chorus proceeds to sing a song mourning his death. Agamemnon's son, Orestes, vows revenge for his father's death. Orestes sets off to kill Aegisthus and his mother, and screams from off-stage indicate that he was successful. At Delphi, furies and the chorus realize Orestes' deed and decry him as a murderer who must be tried by the gods. As the trial of Orestes is held, Athena intervenes instead of allowing him to be convicted. She redefines the purpose of the court as a means of righting and preventing wrongs and persuades the furies to take a new role in human affairs. As the furies enter their new role, a hymn is sung to celebrate the new bond between humans and gods. [5]
The bulk of the opera was finished in 1966, composed for a Greek Festival in Ypsilanti, Michigan. [3] The festival would make the work's American premier on June 18, 1966, under the direction of Alexis Solomos. [6]
To prepare the opera for a world stage, however, Xenakis knew the opera would have to be lengthened substantially. In the mid-1980s, Xenakis composed a cantata for an additional movement, titled Kassandra. [7] The lengthened work would go on to make a world stage premier in Sicily, Italy on August 21, 1987, with conductors Michel Tabachnik and Dominique Debart. [5]
In the 1992, Xenakis would give his final addition, La Déesse Athéna (the goddess Athena), for the Athens production of his work. This would be one of the composer's last vocal works and his last addition into the Oresteia trilogy. The composer never specified why he decided to expand the roles of Athena and Kassandra instead of focusing on characters that were more important to the story, such as Orestes. [6]
The opera is scored for a children's chorus and twelve instrumentalists. [8] The choral sections are often described as chant-like with crude sounding yet complex instrumental interludes. These are often compared to Stravinski's The Right of Spring and cited as being ruggedly dissonant. [4] [7]
The work has been performed many times since its publishing. These include: [9]
In Greek mythology, Agamemnon was a king of Mycenae who commanded the Achaeans during the Trojan War. He was the son of King Atreus and Queen Aerope, the brother of Menelaus, the husband of Clytemnestra, and the father of Iphigenia, Iphianassa, Electra, Laodike, Orestes and Chrysothemis. Legends make him the king of Mycenae or Argos, thought to be different names for the same area. Agamemnon was killed upon his return from Troy by Clytemnestra, or in an older version of the story, by Clytemnestra's lover Aegisthus.
Aeschylus was an ancient Greek tragedian often described as the father of tragedy. Academic knowledge of the genre begins with his work, and understanding of earlier Greek tragedy is largely based on inferences made from reading his surviving plays. According to Aristotle, he expanded the number of characters in the theatre and allowed conflict among them. Formerly, characters interacted only with the chorus.
Aegisthus was a figure in Greek mythology. Aegisthus is known from two primary sources: the first is Homer's Odyssey, believed to have been first written down by Homer at the end of the 8th century BC, and the second from Aeschylus's Oresteia, written in the 5th century BC. Aegisthus also features heavily in the action of Euripides's Electra, although his character remains offstage.
Cassandra or Kassandra in Greek mythology was a Trojan priestess dedicated to the god Apollo and fated by him to utter true prophecies but never to be believed. In modern usage her name is employed as a rhetorical device to indicate a person whose accurate prophecies, generally of impending disaster, are not believed.
The Erinyes, also known as the Eumenides, are chthonic goddesses of vengeance in ancient Greek religion and mythology. A formulaic oath in the Iliad invokes them as "the Erinyes, that under earth take vengeance on men, whosoever hath sworn a false oath". Walter Burkert suggests that they are "an embodiment of the act of self-cursing contained in the oath". They correspond to the Dirae in Roman mythology. The Roman writer Maurus Servius Honoratus wrote that they are called "Eumenides" in hell, "Furiae" on Earth, and "Dirae" in heaven. Erinyes are akin to some other Greek deities, called Poenai.
In Greek mythology, Orestes or Orestis was the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, and the brother of Electra. He is the subject of several Ancient Greek plays and of various myths connected with his madness, revenge, and purification, which retain obscure threads of much older works. In particular Orestes plays a main role in Aeschylus' Oresteia.
The Oresteia is a trilogy of Greek tragedies written by Aeschylus in the 5th century BCE, concerning the murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra, the murder of Clytemnestra by Orestes, the trial of Orestes, the end of the curse on the House of Atreus and the pacification of the Furies.
Giannis Klearchou Xenakis was a Romanian-born Greek-French avant-garde composer, music theorist, architect, performance director and engineer.
Iphigénie en Tauride is a 1779 opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck in four acts. It was his fifth opera for the French stage. The libretto was written by Nicolas-François Guillard.
Electra, also Elektra or The Electra, is a Greek tragedy by Sophocles. Its date is not known, but various stylistic similarities with the Philoctetes and the Oedipus at Colonus lead scholars to suppose that it was written towards the end of Sophocles' career. Jebb dates it between 420 BC and 414 BC.
Iphigenia in Tauris is a drama by the playwright Euripides, written between 414 BC and 412 BC. It has much in common with another of Euripides's plays, Helen, as well as the lost play Andromeda, and is often described as a romance, a melodrama, a tragi-comedy or an escape play.
The Flies is a play by Jean-Paul Sartre, produced in 1943. It is an adaptation of the Electra myth, previously used by the Greek playwrights Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. The play recounts the story of Orestes and his sister Electra in their quest to avenge the death of their father Agamemnon, king of Argos, by killing their mother Clytemnestra and her husband Aegisthus, who had deposed and killed him.
Oresteia is an opera in three parts, eight tableaux, with music by Sergei Taneyev, composed during 1887–1894. The composer titled this work, his only opera, a "musical trilogy". The Russian libretto was adapted by A. A. Wenkstern from The Oresteia of Aeschylus. The opera was premiered on October 29 [O.S. October 17] 1895 at the Mariinsky Theatre. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote that soon after the premiere, the Mariinsky management made cuts to the opera, which angered Taneyev.
Oreste is an opera by George Frideric Handel in three acts. The libretto was anonymously adapted from Giangualberto Barlocci’s L’Oreste, which was in turn adapted from Euripides' Iphigeneia in Tauris.
Clytemnestra, in Greek mythology, was the wife of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, and the half-sister of Helen of Sparta. In Aeschylus' Oresteia, she murders Agamemnon – said by Euripides to be her second husband – and the Trojan princess Cassandra, whom Agamemnon had taken as a war prize following the sack of Troy; however, in Homer's Odyssey, her role in Agamemnon's death is unclear and her character is significantly more subdued.
Reflections of the Oresteia in the arts and popular culture show the influence of the classic trilogy of tragedies by Aeschylus.
Agamemnon is an opera in one act by composer Felix Werder. Werder used his own libretto for the work which is based on Gilbert Murray's English language translation of the Ancient Greek tragedy Oresteia by Aeschylus. The work was composed in 1967 with the title The Agamemnon of Aeschylus, and was first performed under that name in that year on ABC radio. Afterwards Werder reworked some of the music and retitled the piece Agamemnon for the opera's first staged performance at the Grant Street Theatre in Melbourne on 1 June 1977 in a production led by conductor Hiroyuki Iwaki. The opera uses Twelve-tone technique in its composition and is structured in 25 sections.
L'Orestie d'Eschyle is a French-language opera by Darius Milhaud based on The Oresteia triptych by Aeschylus in a French translation by his collaborator Paul Claudel.
Khoaï, also referred to by its original Greek title, Χοαί, is a 1976 composition for solo harpsichord by Iannis Xenakis.
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