The Chamber-Opera Orestes-Oedipus by Cornel Ţăranu

The study explores on a musicological and esthetic level Cornel Ţăranu’s chamber opera Oedipus & Orestes, composed after the libretto of Olivier Apert – the theater-opera Orestes & Oedipus, finished in 2000. Acknowledging the current function and significance of the genre of chamber opera, the paradigmatic value of Ţăranu’s creation becomes prevalent within both, universal and Romanian contemporaneous music. Regarding the historical-structural mutations in the revitalization process of myths starting from George Enescu, Aurel Stroe and ending with Cornel Ţăranu, the author asserts that we are confronted with the face to face setting of two fundamental myths in order to explain each other as well as themselves in the signification of the senses of other times, representing new visions of modern musical interpretation. The analytical sections of the study illustrate the cathartic differentiation of the tragic faults of the main characters of the drama per musica. The way in which the main characters Orestes and Oedipus atone their faults at the end of the opera is the paradigm of loneness. In the solitude of collective alienation. The musical rhetoric of the leit motifs illustrate how they pass by each other, speaking deaf monologues to which nobody answers. They both suffer equally deeply, but they cannot utter their sufferance in order to be comforted. They live a lost present, always calling for the past, either in mad nightmares – Orestes – or, in longing for return – Oedipus …

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