About the work
Leben des Orest is a grand opera in five acts (eight scenes) by Ernst Krenek, to his own libretto freely adapted from the ancient Oresteia myth – his first libretto on a classical subject. Krenek composed the work in 1928/29; the premiere was conducted by Gustav Brecher on 19 January 1930 at the Neues Theater in Leipzig, directed by Walther Brügmann with sets by Oskar Strnad.
Plot
Hidden away before his intended sacrifice, the young Orestes grows up far from the royal house; he has numerous adventures at an Athenian fair before returning to Mycenae, where he avenges his father Agamemnon by killing Aegisthus and his mother Clytemnestra. Pursued by the Furies for the matricide, Orestes flees to the "Nordland" and is reunited there with his sister Iphigenia; only a court trial finally absolves him of the curse.
Cultural significance
Krenek blends the ancient myth with a tonal idiom, Viennese suburban music and touches of jazz into a deliberately open, unresolved form. The work saw thirteen productions before the Nazis banned it from German stages in 1933, and it is now regarded as a document of musical-theatre culture at the close of the Weimar Republic; it returned to the stage in Linz in 1947.