Classifying Stravinsky’s rich diversity of stage works is no easy matter. Each composition appears to be a unique, sui generis experiment – an impression conveyed by the sheer variety of ways in which music, words and gesture are combined, contrasted and juxtaposed. To which genre do they belong, apart from those obviously classifiable as ballets? The operatic and music theatre works present quite a challenge in this regard. Stravinsky’s subtitles often allude to past theatrical conventions, but these only further highlight the diversity of genre, indeed their very uniqueness. For example, ‘opera-oratorio’ – the label tied to Oedipus rex – refers to its frequent allusions to both nineteenth-century Italian opera and Baroque oratorio; and Perséphone’s subtitle mélodrame clearly refers to this eighteenth- and nineteenth-century genre where a spoken, not sung text is accompanied by and intercalated with instrumental music. However, these labels only have the function of recalling an ideal model and cannot be considered as true genre definitions such as might usefully be applied to an entire set of works. When considered as a whole, in fact, Stravinsky’s operatic/music theatre output is not based on any single consolidated or stable system of genres. Rather, it is as if Stravinsky is working to a more general aesthetic principle by which he considers the artistic means of the work, that is, its words, gestures and music to be autonomous and capable of being combined in a different way in each work.

In a way, Igor Stravinsky’s turn to Greek antiquity as a source of inspiration came about as a gift to the man who arguably played the most important role in the composer’s artistic development: Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929). Indeed, Stravinsky’s very first work on a Greek theme, the opera-oratorio Oedipus rex (1926–7; rev. 1948), materialised as an anniversary present to the Russian impresario for the twentieth season of the Ballets Russes, in 1927.1 The fact that Diaghilev disliked what he described as ‘un cadeau très macabre’ (a very macabre present), says very little about the significance of this work – or, in fact, of Stravinsky’s subsequent works on ancient Greek topics – in the composer’s artistic evolution.