Abstract

An overlapping vision of two ancient masterpieces – Aeschylus' Oresteia and Sophocles' Oedipus, created jointly by a French playwright, Olivier Apert and a reputed Romanian musician, Cornel Ţăranu, the opera Orestes & Oedipus is an innovating response given in the early 3rd millennium to topics that have been discussed for nearly a century – Electra by Richard Strauss and Oedipus by George Enescu. While Aeschylus' hero is, unlike Homer's, a victim of dishonour and of his own crime, which eventually triggered his decline, Sophocles' hero is in search of the truth, locked up in an implacable destiny. Olivier Apert's text attempts to capture the two mythological figures, Orestes and Oedipus, in an imaginary meeting. Their destinies are similar, though seen in the mirror: Orestes avenges his father's murder by committing matricide, while Oedipus marries his mother and finds himself guilty of patricide. In his opera, composer Cornel Ţăranu employs a modal-chromatic language "of a certain sensitivity, with a certain expressiveness", spiced with a few ancient Greek melodies, of which one was found inscribed on a vase in the Bihor County.

Keywords:  Greek antiquity, overlapping myths, chamber opera, chromatic modalis

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