Edipo in Berlino: Mendelssohn e la riscoperta della tragedia greca

In 1840, Frederick Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia invited Felix Mendels- sohn to Berlin to take part in a project of rediscovery of Greek theatre. Although Men- delssohn was not particularly attracted by the Prussian capital, he was motivated by af- fective factors and the desire to work on ancient subjects. Mendelssohn accepted the invitation without completely abandoning Leipzig. His stay in Berlin, however, was characterised by a series of human and artistic conflicts: the king’s ambitious interdis- ciplinary plan did not work because of various misunderstandings due to age differences (for example with Ludwig Tieck), but above all to the different understandings the par- ticipants had of Greek tragedy: theatre to be read, theatre to be rethought in modern terms, or perhaps a model for rewriting modernity in a more serious way? While these polemics intertwined, Mendelssohn was writing the music for Antigone and Oedipus in Kolonos and discussing it with his friend Johann Gustav Droysen. While doing this, he was refining a compositional approach that, without claiming to rewrite the lost choruses of Greek antiquity, attempted to evoke their inspiration and their osmosis with the text. This article discusses the context of these compositions and focuses on some problems connected with the musical writing, the relationship between the German translation and the Greek original and the musical rendition of the classical poetic rhythms.