Klage der Ariadne

SYNOPSIS

The Minotaur with its bull’s horns endlessly terrorised the population of Thebes by demanding the lives of fourteen individuals as a sacrifice every nine years until the hero Theseus succeeded in killing the monster with the aid of the King’s daughter Ariadne. In return, Theseus promised to marry her and took the passionately enraptured young woman with him when he sailed from Thebes in his ship. He was however subsequently careless, leaving her stranded after a stop at the island of Naxos.
Chained to the barren landscape, the disbelieving and desperate princess condemned the faithless hero who had taken advantage of her love and trust, only to disappear immediately like a traitor. In a brief reflection, Ariadne recalls the formerly so happy time of her youth and curses Theseus for having abducted her from this golden era. Her thoughts of revenge directed at the now distant Theseus however remain unheard across the endless expanse of the sea, dying away into silence; in her helpless situation, Ariadne, reduced to impotence, ultimately only longs for redemption in death.

COMMENTARY

As in his previous arrangement of Orpheus, Orff also attempted to revive this only surviving scene from Claudio Monteverdi’s opera Arianna through an adaptation for the stage.
For Orff, language was of essential importance, regarding it as the initial trigger for music which was a causal development originating from words and therefore also from language. The composer and poet therefore created a new translation for Klage der Ariadne: a completely different text which provided the basis for the development of musical expression and performance style. At the same time, he also rearranged the emotional outbreaks and passages of invocation to increase the dramatic tension. Orff’s arrangement also had repercussions in his orchestral scoring: the first version from 1925 which was almost exclusively performed concertante was scored for harpsichord, three violas, three cellos, double bass and trombone, but the composer revised the work in 1940, creating a more substantial and varied scoring for a purely staged version, adding numerous wind instruments and dividing the harpsichord part among several extra instruments in the orchestra.