Polla ta Dhina

The work begins with a high chord in the woodwinds, whose tones are then repeated separately at irregular time intervals. Accents (also irregular) are added to this: a mixture of definite pitches and noise, a tremolo in the low strings mixed with a short roll of four tom-toms. After the second accent, a boys’ choir begins to declaim words rhythmically at one pitch. The first section of the composition sets the words of Sophocles’s opening stasimon. The internal divisions of the poem determine the structure of the musical work; at the same time, the musical construction serves to clarify the structure of the text. The characteristically pulsating wind passages that open the composition and recur later in the piece underline the divisions within the overall form. Also the details of construction are precisely composed right from the first strophe, where the poetic praises of the master as “lord of the seas and the earth” are accompanied first by dense multilayered glissandi and then with accumulated repetitions of tones.

In the central section, the wind instruments fall completely silent and the string texture completely dissolves into dense intersecting bundles of glissandi.

It is only in the last section of this setting of Sophocles’s ode that the compact sound sets and accumulations of massive orchestral sound break up. Man, cleverly planning but eventually helpless in the face of death, is portrayed by voices and instruments against a background of fast-changing orchestral accompaniment patterns. The winds and percussion now overlap, now play alternately in wide harmonies, rhythmic pulsations or wide-stretched glissandi of instrumental groups.

Before the end of the piece the orchestra falls silent: we only hear singing at one pitch, underlined in just one place by a vibraphone chord. Instruments only join the voices toward the very end: a wide-stretched layer of string sound, and in the last bars, also repetitions of tones in two horns, which swell up in a powerful crescendo up to the coda.

Rudolf Frisius

 

There is much that is strange, but nothing

that surpasses man in strangeness.

He sets sail on the frothing waters

amid the south winds of winter

tacking through the mountains

and furious chasm of the waves.

He wearies even the noblest

of the gods, the Earth,

indestructible and untiring,

overturning her from year to year,

driving the plows this way and that

with horses.

And man, pondering and plotting,

snares the light-gliding birds

and hunts the beasts of the wilderness

and the native creatures of the sea.

With guile he overpowers the beast

that roams the mountains by night as by day, he yokes the hirsute neck of the stallion

and the undaunted bull.

And he has found his way

to the resonance of the word,

and to wind-swift all-understanding,

and to the courage of rule over cities.

He has considered also how to flee

from exposure to the arrows

of unpropitious weather and frost.

Everywhere journeying,

inexperienced and without issue,

he comes to nothingness.

Through no flight can he resist

the one assault of death,

even if he has succeeded in cleverly evading

painful sickness.

Clever indeed, mastering

the ways of skill beyond all hope,

he sometimes accomplish evil,

sometimes achieve brave deeds.

He wends his way between the laws of the earth

and the adjured justice of the gods.

 

Sophocles, Antigone (vv. 332–67), translated by Ralph Manheim, quoted after Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (“The Ode on Man in Sophocles’ Antigone”), 1959.