The Significance Isn’t Lost

“In the sixth and fifth centuries before the birth of Christ, an ancient civilization reached such heights of intellectual and artistic achievement that every succeeding period of Western culture, from the Roman Empire to the 20th century, has been heavily in its debt, whether acknowledged or not.”

--Bernard Knox,

from the introduction to “Sophocles: The Three Theban Plays,” translated by Robert Fagles, Viking Press, 1982.

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It is impossible to count the number of words written about Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” or overestimate the play’s importance.

Aristotle considered it the touchstone of tragedy. He took it as the model to describe the form and to define its impact--the arousal of fear and pity in the audience to stimulate a purgation (catharsis) of these emotions.

More than 20 centuries later, Freud used the play to name one of his most important psychological insights--the Oedipus Complex, the desire of a child to murder his father and marry his mother. Sophocles’ work maintained its great impact, he said, because it reflected the most deep and hidden of individual drives in both sexes.

Within another few decades, Russian emigre composer Igor Stravinsky turned to “Oedipus Rex” in 1926 to write what would be one of his most staggering and profound scores.

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This work, the centerpiece of the Philharmonic Society’s Eclectic Orange Festival, will be played twice this weekend by the National Symphony, led by Leonard Slatkin, at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

Before the music, Leonard Bernstein’s 1973 Harvard lecture, “The Poetry of Earth,” will be screened. The lecture focuses on Stravinsky’s music. It is heightened with enhanced visuals, floating text and superimposed graphics devised by Dean Corey, executive director of the Philharmonic Society. Corey’s supertitles will also be projected during the performance.

Bernstein will return, via videotape, after the music, to make concluding remarks that were his deepest credo.

It was the last of six talks the late conductor gave at Harvard as part of a Charles Eliot Norton Lectures series. (All six are published as Leonard Bernstein’s “The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard,” Harvard University Press, 1976. They also are widely available on videotape.)

All six focus on a wide-ranging investigation of musical meaning, with Bernstein drawing rich connections between music and the science of linguistics as pioneered by the transformational grammar theories of Noam Chomsky.

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Why did Bernstein consider Stravinsky’s work so important? Bernstein actually called it “a saving grace in our century.”

Because in this way, he said, Stravinsky showed how to impose aesthetic order on modern chaos.

“We tend to view our century as so advanced, so prosperous and swift in its developments that we lose sight of its deeper, truer self-image, the image of a shy, frightened child adrift in a shaky universe, living under the constant threat of Mummy and Daddy about to divorce or die,” Bernstein said. “And so we must cover up, we must hide our profound embarrassment at direct emotional expression.”

It was a deliberative covering up that began with Stravinsky’s choice of a Latin text. “The idea was that a text for music might be endowed with a certain monumental character by translation backwards, so to speak, from a secular to a sacred language,” the composer wrote in notes accompanying a recording of his work by the Chorus and Orchestra of the Opera Society of Washington, D.C. (CBS Masterworks, 1962).

“ ‘Sacred’ might mean no more than ‘older,’ as one could say that the language of the King James Bible is more sacred than the language of the New English Bible, if only because of its greater age,” Stravinsky continued. “But I thought that an older, even an imperfectly remembered, language must contain an incantatory element that could be exploited in music.”

Stravinsky ruled out Russian, the “exiled language of my heart,” as “musically impracticable.” French, German and Italian were, he felt, “temperamentally alien.”

Latin, however, stimulated his imagination.

“When I work with words in music, my musical appetite is set in motion by the sounds and rhythms of the syllables, and ‘In the beginning was the word’ is, for me, a literal, localized truth.”

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To make the text accessible, Corey has devised supertitles different from any before seen. They are color-coded according to the characters, and move and dance across the screen, even playing against each other in musical counterpoint.

They aim to illuminate the text and enhance the experience for the listener, even as Bernstein prepared his lecture audience for the aural experience.

“One of the points of Bernstein’s lecture is that Stravinsky is trying to obscure this piece as much as possible,” Corey said. “Bernstein spends a lot of time unearthing it and taking it apart. But it still remained in Latin, which was done on purpose.”

“With these,” Corey added, “people will come out with a great understanding and feeling for the work. There’s so much poignancy to the whole thing.”

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The Philharmonic Society will present “The Poetry of Earth”/”Oedipus Rex” with the National Symphony, led by Leonard Slatkin, on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $15-$55. (949) 553-2422.

Chris Pasles can be reached at (714) 966-5602 or by e-mail at chris.pasles@latimes.com.