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Perplexing Prometheus

Let's see. The directions are in Latin, the musical indications are in Italian, so the libretto should be in—right, ancient Greek. The plot is Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, the story of a Titan who was chained to a rock in Scythia, so the setting should be—right, a jungle.

Such perplexities are typical of the work of Carl Orff. Everybody agrees that Orff, at 72, ranks as Germany's foremost composer, but nobody agrees on why, or even whether he ought to. Thus the world première of his Prometheus last week by the Stuttgart Opera was, depending on the listener, either the most satisfying Orff in a long time or the most exasperating.

The use of the original Greek text carried to an extreme his longtime interest in ancient (Subjects. The orchestration was bizarre even for a man who is noted for unorthodox noises from the pit: no violins, huge phalanxes of wind instruments, four banjos, and no fewer than 42 percussion pieces—not including the four pianos, whose keyboards were smashed by forearms and whose strings were struck with cymbals and strummed with fingernails. And the score—simple, severe and static—was the furthest extension yet of Orff's belief that music should be set to words, not the other way around.

Incantatory Drones. Ever since he wrote his first major work, Carmina Burana (1936), Orff has steadily pared away the body of Western musical devices—themes, counterpoints, harmonic progressions and so on—to arrive at a skeletal idiom of powerfully primitive, repetitive sounds. In Prometheus, what little melody was left was expertly sung by U.S. Baritone Carlos Alexander as Prometheus and Australian Mezzo Althea Bridges as the tormented lo. The other singers, obscured by grotesque masks and headdresses, declaimed the drama in incantatory drones, while the orchestra rolled along in seemingly endless ostinato figures or erupted with brash punctuations.

After two uninterrupted hours of this, some members of the audience may have welcomed the concluding thunderbolt from Zeus that plunged Prometheus into the netherworld; yet most cheered and stomped for 20 minutes when Orff appeared for curtain calls. The reviews were more divided. Hans Stuckenschmidt, Germany's leading music critic, wrote that "the performance counts among the best that one can see and hear today in European theaters." But Der Spiegel scoffed that the opera sounded like "a prehistoric equinoctial celebration of a voodoo ritual."