Oedipus Rex

Directed by Julie Taymor

With Jessye Norman, Philip Langridge, Bryn Terfel, Harry Peeters and Min Tanaka

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”.