La maldición de los labdácidas en la ópera de los siglos XX y XXI

Abstract

In the 20th and 21th centuries, Stravinsky (Oedipus Rex, 1927), Enescu (Oedipe, 1936), Orff (Antigone, 1949; Oedipus der Tyrann, 1959), Turnage (Greek, 1988), Theodorakis (Αντιγόνη, 1999), Le Gendre (The Burial at Thebes, 2008), and Anderson (Thebans, 2014), among others, composed operas about the myth of Labdacids. A fact quite significant if it is taken into account that during romanticism there are just two musical dramas by Mendelssohn related to characters of the Theban Cycle (Antigone, 1841 and Oedipus auf Kolonos, 1845). The aim of this article, therefore, is to analyse the operas about this myth composed since 1901 in order to understand its resurgence in the contemporary operatic context.