Édipo - Tragédia de Saber

What interests me in Oedipus?
The father and the mother? Yes, yes but that is in everyone.
More important is knowledge turned into power and immediately
arrogance, ignorance and immediately blindness.
Knowledge is in permanent flux, transforms
rapidly into non-knowledge.
Then the men tried everything to avoid the fulfillment of the
oracle.
Ah, but people made unpredictable decisions
and things did not happen as they were supposed to. What,
by the way, is always happening…
Music can only derive from the text,
never replace it.
(October 1995)

My father was an admirer of Italian opera and so during my adolescence, I heard quite a lot of that music. I didn’t like it much, with two or three exceptions, and quickly formulated the opinion that opera was a spectacle full of absurd conventions and was most evidently linked to political power and its ostentation. I had not yet realised that all spectacles have conventions, that power infiltrates wherever it wants, and, if my father liked it, it was natural for me to want to like other things, isn’t it? (the famous complex!)

My convictions suffered a shock when one day I was taken almost by force to La Traviata and after quite some time of inner protest against what I saw and heard, I felt an indescribable emotion when the two protagonists meet near the end and sing notes in the high register while hugging.

What could have moved me? The fact that she is near death and can finally hug her beloved after many obstacles to love between a respectable young man and a woman of ill repute? The musical conduction of the two voices? I finally thought that if it were only theatre it would not be the same thing and if it were only music it would not be either, and for the first time I doubted the correctness of Pierre Boulez’s opinion that “it was necessary to blow up the opera houses”!

When, fifteen or twenty years later, Lisbon 94 invited me to compose an opera, I did not hesitate, but I was forced to give up later, for various reasons.

After some vicissitudes, when the project was resumed by Culturgest, the idea of the myth of Oedipus remained from the initial idea. I proposed to Pedro Paixão that he write a text on the theme for the opera. Gradually, I received several texts that could be grouped into three types:

1. a synopsis of the myth, pre- and post-Sophocles
2. a long and beautiful poem and
3. fragments of Sophocles’ text chosen and translated by Paixão.
   I worked on these texts, which I liked immediately, distributing them among the characters and the chorus with various functions, especially in the case of Creon and the Chorus. Later, after an exchange of readings of Nietzsche and Deleuze-Guattari (Mille Plateaux), Pedro Paixão wrote two more texts that constitute the finale and the epilogue.
   The structure of the libretto (for lack of a better use of this word to designate the way I organised and divided Paixão’s text) and the subtitles are my responsibility. All the words of the text proper are by Pedro Paixão.
   I organised the text into 8 parts: Prologue, 1. “Power”, 2. “Ignorance”, 3. “The Wrong Hypothesis”, 4. “The Discovery”, 5. “The Quick Unraveling”, 6. “Modernist Monologue”, and Epilogue. This formal division was initially motivated by reading the text but gradually the music itself “organised” the text. Schoenberg, quoted by George Steiner, says of Moses and Aaron: “it is only while I’m composing that the text becomes definite, sometimes even after composition”. 

Oedipus, one of the founding myths of Western culture, has been the subject of numerous commentaries and re-readings over the centuries and is a fundamental given for the theoretical edifice of Freudian psychoanalysis. The Oedipus of Greek tragedy has a different nuance from the Oedipus made popular (?) by Freud. During the action of Oedipus has no Oedipus complex! (except insofar as we all will have). What inspires Freud in adopting the term is the guilt that Oedipus feels desperately after realising that he has fallen into the trap of the gods, despite all the efforts of humans to prevent the oracles from being consummated. This guilt, which in Oedipus is not neurotic, because, after all, the thing really happened, will be felt by the child when in some way he feels a kind of desire for the mother and a will to eliminate the father, an obstacle to the realisation of the desire. It is not interesting to deepen this question here, indeed complex, but I pass by it because it becomes necessary to explain my subtitle “tragedy of knowledge”. The question of knowledge is at the centre of the problem. First, because Oedipus ascends to the throne of Thebes by deciphering the riddle of the Sphinx, “because he sees what others do not see”. He is given power through knowledge. Faced with the new disease of the city – a metaphor for all diseases today? -, Oedipus unleashes a process to know what happened. 

When the first clues displease him, he suspects a conspiracy to take away his power, but he continues to want to know how things happened. Finally, in the face of tragedy, he tears out his eyes so as not to see. The process of knowledge became a process of self-knowledge intolerable. “To think the unthinkable”, says Carlos Amaral Dias. “There are no words”, says Pedro Paixão. Sophocles’ Oedipus has everything. None of the aspects of this work is absent from the problematic of the Greek text. But the selection of scattered phrases made by Pedro Paixão allowed me to make a reading that underlines Oedipus’ initial arrogance, his excessive self-confidence. Once having deciphered the riddle of the Sphinx, he takes it for granted that once again he will be able to save the city. He did not save in the way he expected. Which, by the way, frequently happens to politicians when they take themselves to be providential. But, in his fall, he is forced to cast a glance at himself, to think the unthinkable “my eyes saw what they should not have seen”, and at that moment the political dimension of his arrogance fades in the face of the human dimension (all too human…) of his limits. Despite the knowledge.

I wrote for the programme of the S. Carlos about my piece 8 Canções de António Ramos Rosa a text that I will now transcribe:
“In recent years, for each piece I compose, I make a small theory. It is not elaborated before or after, but during the composition itself. To be more precise. There is some theory before, but it concerns mainly some ideas about the current state of musical creation and its context. There is some theory afterwards, but in the sense of gathering and formulating globally the set of principles that informed the piece. This text belongs to this last category (theory-afterwards).

I start with the theory-before. I think that today (1996) there are musical objects of all kinds available to composers. A perfect chord has a historically circumscribed past, a dodecaphonic series likewise, an irrational rhythm ditto, a regular pulse ditto and so on. I think there are no sustainable reasons today to use only a part of these objects in the name of any “idea of the future” of music. So I use the ones that seem best to me at any given time. The tonal system as it existed in the 18th and 19th centuries is not reconstitutable. But its objects, linked to the inexorable existence of the harmonic series, can, in my perspective, be used like any others. The idea of exhaustion, like a boomerang, always returns, hitting the new languages, making them quickly old. The problem for me is discourse, not vocabulary. I am not alone in this conviction, but I do not think it is the only possible one.

(…)
A musical piece is only a musical piece. It does not carry with it the weight of the future of humanity, nor its destiny. Apart from that, ‘it has all the dreams of the world’.”

This was written in March 1996, already after finishing the composition of Édipo – tragédia de saber, and applies integrally to my work in this piece. The superimposition of text and music provokes supplements of meaning. In the chapter of the theory-during, I realised that I had families of different chords and intervals. Thus, the initial chord, formed by superimposition of thirds from F to F#, the second structuring chord, formed by the four missing black notes, but distributed in intervals of fourth or fifth, divide the sound space clearly. Alban Berg frequently uses procedures of this type, namely in the series of Lulu, but here I am far from that method and that capacity. But, for all intents and purposes, I can affirm that the chorus in major seconds “at the crossroads of the three paths”, always has a very different character from the chorus “oedipus let me tell you” in C minor, or the chorus “who are you oedipus” organised in mixed chords (major thirds and fifth in the middle) or in the chord of the spoken scene between Jocasta and Creon and of the finale ( tritones and fifth in the middle). The tritone is the interval of “the city is sick” and the interval towards which the proud ascending perfect fourth of Oedipus’ first intervention tends (Don Giovanni of the commander…) The music of “The Wrong Hypothesis”, when the semi-divine attributes of Tiresias “of seven human lives” are enunciated, was associated by me, through a figure in septuplets, with what seems to me to have been a wrong hypothesis about the future of music (…).

The vocal writing of Jocasta has the largest leaps and many more melismas than the other vocal parts. I tried here to realise a contradiction between a clear text, which tells a quite credible version of the story, but, unfortunately, false. The meaning of the text is, so to speak, disfigured and anguished by the music. (…)
The Quick Unraveling is the most complex and concentrated section of the opera: almost all the music of the opera is heard, and there are several superimpositions of text. (… ).

The Chorus and Creon are ambiguous characters. Part of the Chorus’s text belongs to Sophocles’ Chorus, part to Paixão’s poem, and part still to the synopsis of the myth. Same with Creon. They are both before and after. Or inside as outside (…).

Art, like knowledge, is in permanent transformation. That which at a given moment can be taken as true, be it a scientific truth, or an aesthetic line considered right, or even a simple idea about ourselves, can very easily collapse, placing us on the threshold of a sensation of catastrophe.
The advantage of art is that it can sometimes exist even beyond that limit.