That's what I meant about the triple alienation; translation; Stravinsky intended the work to be sung in Latin a tongue 'not dead, but turned to stone', with narration in the tongue of the audience, so that they know what's going to happen before it happens. Stylistically, because he asks for the actors to be masked and limited to a bare minimum of gesture and movement, even going so far as to suggest that they should either be static and revealed by raised and lowered curtains, or even wheeled on and off. It's neo-classicism in another guise; an attempt to recreate the aura of Greek Drama. And whereas Orff took Svadebka/Les Noces and trivialised them to hell and back in Carmina Burana what's not so well known is that when he came to create his Greek opera trilogy, Antigone, Oedipus der Tyrann and Prometheus he went very much further than I.S. in reviving the conventions of Greek Drama as we know them. Did the notes tell you none of this?

Did anyone else see Canadian Opera's Oedipus directed by Girard when it visited the EIF a few years back? It had Michael Schade in the title role and Ewa Podles as Jocasta. It was a fantastic production focusing on the analogy between pestilence and disease. You gradually realised (from the back of the stalls) that the mound that the action took place on was composed of human bodies. Oedipus gradually descended from the mound as the action unfolded - unforgettable as an introduction to the work.

Since it's a poll, my two sestertii worth: sometimes I enjoy Oedipus Rex, more often I'm frustrated by it - for me it's a piece usually better in the memory than in the ears. No denying it does what it says on the tin; for me my attitude to it generally mirrors my attitude to the neo-classical thing in general...

Anyway, I love the work, and my favourite recording is actually not the Ancerl, it's Stravinsky's Cologne recording from 1951, with Pears intherole of Oedipus.

As far as Orff's actual actions were concerned, there was very little you could pin on him, certainly not that would justify a trial (compared to tens of thousands of others who were actively involved in the machinery of genocide and who mostly got away scott-free). In terms of accommodating himself to the regime, and also as one whose music accorded with Nazi culture, it's a different matter (according to Michael Kater, in his excellent Composers of the Nazi Era, when Goebbels heard a tape of Orff's music in 1944, he was beside himself for not having known about Orff before, and very eager to meet him, writing in his diary about his admiration - the source for this that Kater uses is an interview that Orff himself gave with Gottfried von Einem). After 1945, Orff was writing, and having produced on a large scale, works that were very similar to those he wrote during the Nazi era. This is one of various facts that shows how unsustainable is the idea that there was a musical Stunde Null in West Germany after 1945.

But in the end, I can't really go along with the idea that Fürtwängler, Karajan, Schwarzkopf, Orff, Strauss and others should have somehow been prevented from composing, performing or being performed after 1945. In the case of some of these figures, their very active role in providing cultural propaganda for the Reich is no small matter, and perhaps they should have gone on trial for that - in the case of Orff (for all he tried to make out that he was somehow involved with the resistance, so as to cover his tracks), that's a harder case to make all things told. On the other hand, I think some of his music comes as close to epitomising a Nazi aesthetic as anything.

I'm basically with you on that, although I've never been worried by Puck in Britten's Dream or the Voice of God in Noye, let alone the spoken passages in L'Histoire du soldat. But so much Stravinsky is throwing caution to the wind anyway - and he's a past master at covering his tracks by changing the story completely to confuse matters still further, either intentionally or (sometimes it seems) on a whim.

FM, that Craft recording is now on Naxos. I too like the Colin Davis, but do look out for that 1951 recording of Stravinsky conducting it. The narration is in German, by the way.

http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Oedipus-Rex-lyrics-Tom-Lehrer/EC79BE5CC40829F348256A7D00251CC4

NB