Stokowski Translates

Oracles and angry gods submitted to a strange purpose last week in Philadelphia. They were the oracles and gods of ancient Greece which Sophocles told about in his Oedipus Rex 2,300 years ago. As of old they decreed and prophesied that Oedipus, son of Laius, would murder his father and marry his mother, Jocasta. They served also last week to provide the material for one of Conductor Leopold Stokowski's most ambitious flights into modernistic musical production: the first U. S. stage performances of the Oedipus Rex of Composer Igor Stravinsky, an opera-oratorio with a text recast by Frenchman Jean Cocteau, then Latinized. Oedipus Rex will be repeated April 21 and 22 at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House, the only difference being that Harvard youths will sing the choruses instead of the Prince ton Glee Club. A sound film was made of the Philadelphia dress rehearsal. The Manhattan performance of April 21 will be broadcast, the first performance ever to be radioed from the Metropolitan Opera.

A modernized Oedipus might involve psychoanalysts and Freudian complexes but Stravinsky's Oedipus follows no such obvious trend. He wrote it when he was tired, perhaps incapable of cutting a trail any further into the forest of such untried dissonances and rhythms as he used in Le Sacre du Printemps. He had long dis carded the skirling imagery of Petrushka and The Firebird. When he wrote Oedipus he was deep in a desire to return to the classicists, anxious perhaps to begin all over again, to see where a new trail would take him. He chose an old, formal pattern fundamentally similar to the Handel oratorios.

It is doubtful if Stravinsky in his austere mood would approve the performances which Stokowski and his orchestra gave last week in collaboration with Manhattan's League of Composers. Stravinsky's intention was to scorn theatric devices, even program notes. He put his text into Latin for the sake of still greater obscurity; illusion was to come from the music alone. But a part of Stokowski's genius is expressed in his willingness to walk where angels fear to tread. It is nothing new for him to appear to know more about a piece of music than the man who wrote it. Much of Stravinsky's Oedipus, despite its rigid pattern, is powerful dramatic music, worthy of translation. So, for Philadelphians, last week Stokowski proceeded to translate it, using modernistic idioms: The speaker (Negro Wayland Rudd; recalled the story in English through a loud speaker attached to the proscenium arch. On a platform above the singers, puppets 15 feet tall represented the Greek protagonists, themselves nothing but puppets manipulated by the gods.

These puppets, designed by famed Robert Edmond ("Bobby'') Jones, executed by Puppet-Maker Remo Bufano, cleverly emphasized the tragic impotence of Oedipus and Jocasta. Tenor Paul Althouse sounded like a great heroic king as he offered to save his people from the pestilence. His dummy, with scrawny arm uplifted, pictured his power more truly. Contralto Margaret Matzenauer gave thrilling force to Jocasta's proclamation that all oracles lie. But her dummy, too, was a skeleton creature, its face a vacant mask with cavernous eyes and mouth. Jocasta hung herself when she discovered that Oedipus was her son. Oedipus gouged out his eyes with the clasp of her brooch. But the enacting of this awful climax was far too vigorous for the Jones-Bufano puppets. They discreetly disappeared behind the curtain while the orchestra and the chorus swung into a finale magnificently tragic. Oedipus' puppet, blinded and bonier than ever, came back in time to disintegrate before the final curtain.

Pas D'Acier. For the second part of the program, Serge Sergievich Prokofiev's Pas D'Acier (Age of Steel) had its first U. S. stage presentation, with a new scenario by Lee Simonson of the New York Theatre Guild. Prokofiev's music is full of rapid, repetitious rhythms and striding, driving energy. His strings whir, his trumpets bleat in celebration of the triumph of steel. But Simonson sees it all satirically. His two main characters are Efficiency Experts, done up in what resemble divers' costumes with wires run over their bodies and down their arms, and grotesque telephone arrangements for hats. Jumping and gyrating about they goad plodding laborers into fast mechanical production, organize iron, coal and steel, represented by dancers in three metallic shades of grey. Bucolic laborers threaten to hurt the System with their happy, carefree prancing. The Efficiency Experts kill them while the foolish-looking bourgeoisie look on admiringly.

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