Fate as ritual: Enescu’s Œdipe at the Bucharest National Opera

Few operas challenge fate with such unflinching grandeur as Enescu’s Œdipe. In the Bucharest National Opera’s staging, revived for the George Enescu International Festival, the tragedy unfolds as ritual, stark and monumental, overwhelming in both its visual and musical impact.

Since its 1936 Paris premiere, Œdipe has remained a rarity – admired for its ambition, daunting in its demands, yet never fully integrated into the operatic canon. Stefano Poda approaches the work as total theatre. At first misty, the stage gradually clears to reveal a space awash in white. Textured walls embossed with sculpted eyes evoking prophecy and blindness, a revolving platform, and a floor strewn with sand combine to create an austere, temple-like setting. The chorus moves in choreographed processions that confer ritual weight. The effect is hypnotic, sometimes overwhelming, but cohesive: a symbolic framework that seeks to unify the opera’s four sprawling acts.

Individual episodes revealed both the strengths and limits of Poda’s vision. The fight with Laius, staged in stylized gestures, conveys inevitability more than violence, blunting the brutality of the clash. The blinded Oedipus crawling through the “eye” of a massive block at centre-stage produces an image both excessive and naive. The recurring presence of mute, barely clad figures, whose clustered formations amplify the score’s sense of crisis, works effectively in the plague scene but is visually redundant elsewhere. By contrast, in the final act, the stage opens to light and space: Oedipus’ transfiguration, with Antigone by his side, unfolds in a tableau of luminous simplicity.

The appearance of the Sphinx is striking. Clad in red, scaling the bars of a metal cage, she is surrounded by figures reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. It is in this scene that Edmond Fleg’s libretto diverges most sharply from the classical myth. Her question – who can overcome fate? – is itself a provocation, a challenge directed as much at the gods as at Oedipus. He responds with stark simplicity: man. Enescu underpins this exchange with taut, declamatory music. As the later course of the drama confirms, Oedipus is no mere solver of riddles but one who confronts necessity, suffers its consequences, and achieves knowledge through endurance. Poda emphasises this reading through recurring symbols: the chorus’s robes bear the inscription ΠΑΘΕΙ ΜΑΘΟΣ (learning through suffering), while later a colossal knife inscribed with ΑΝΑΓΚΗ (Necessity) descends from the sky, underscoring the inevitability of fate.

The staging’s symbolic idiom echoes the contrasts in Enescu’s score, at once richly layered and tightly constructed. The music shifts between lyric expansiveness colored by Romanian folk inflections and dense, chromatic writing that edges toward expressionism. Under Tiberiu Soare, the Bucharest National Opera Orchestra conveyed these contrasts with supple vitality and clarity. The opening pastoral pages breathed with freshness and buoyancy, while the darker textures of the plague scenes emerged with bite and urgency. At climaxes the orchestra sometimes threatened to overpower individual voices, an almost inevitable risk in this score, yet Soare’s pacing carried the drama forward, balancing grandeur with detail. The chorus sang with discipline and weight, while the children’s choir contributed an ethereal sheen in their brief but haunting appearances.

No staging of Œdipe succeeds without a commanding protagonist, and Ionuț Pascu rose to the role’s immense demands. His baritone projected stamina and authority, cutting through the densest orchestral textures and shifting from lyrical warmth in moments of intimacy to darker, more forceful colours in passages of anguish. His Act 3 monologue was especially compelling, controlled in pacing and searing in intensity, while the closing scene with Antigone radiated a serenity hard won from suffering. If signs of fatigue surfaced in the final pages, they only heightened the sense of destiny’s inexorable weight.

Around Pascu, the cast offered notable strength. Ruxandra Donose infused Jocasta with warmth and tragic dignity, her mezzo-soprano giving substance to the character’s conflicted tenderness. Ramona Zaharia embodied the Sphinx as a striking presence, her dark timbre heightening the menace. Adrian Sâmpetrean’s Creon carried resonance and authority, while Paul Curievici’s Laius and Alexei Botnarciuc’s Tiresias, though brief roles, left vivid impressions. In the final act, Kaarin Cecilia Phelps was a clear-voiced, sincere Antigone, her bright tone setting the stage for Oedipus’ transfiguration.

In the end, Œdipe fused spectacle with a vision of peace attained by accepting fate and suffering, shaped by music that still compels through its gravity and mystery.