Impressed by Jean Cocteau’s rewrite of Antigone, Stravinsky asked the poet for an adaptation of Oedipus Rex. The resulting libretto brings together the key scenes of Sophocles’s tragedy translated by the Abbé Jean Daniélou into Latin—a language that, according the composer, “is not dead but engraved in stone, and so imposing that it is immune to any popularization”.

Cast

Jessye Norman

Jocasta

Philip Langridge

Oedipus

Bryn Terfel

Creon

Harry Peeters

Tiresias

Min Tanaka

Dancer (Oedipus)

Kayoko Shiraishi

Narrator