condition (records/box): M / NM

Insert included. | The culmination of Carl Orff's lifelong engagement with ancient tragedy — a massive, austere theatre work that has almost nothing to do with the popular image of the composer of Carmina Burana, and everything to do with the musical philosopher who spent the final decades of his career pursuing a music stripped to the essentials of speech, rhythm, and ritual. Prometeo (1968), setting Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound in a German translation by the composer himself, is scored for soloists, choirs, speakers, and an orchestra dominated by percussion, keyboard instruments, and low brass — the textures deliberately archaic, the pace glacial, the drama of a kind that has nothing to do with theatrical narrative and everything to do with the confrontation of a human voice with an enormous silence.

In this context Orff belongs not to the tradition of German late Romanticism but to something much closer to the primitivism of early Stravinsky or the ritual theatre of Harry Partch — a composer who decided that the deepest questions about the relationship between music, speech, and human experience could only be answered through the most radical reduction of means. The Acanta / Fonit Cetra 3LP box, issued in Germany and Italy simultaneously, is the complete recording. Long out of print and rarely encountered.