This is a brilliant dramatic solo piece for mezzo soprano and orchestra. It is highly passionate music, a great display piece for mezzo soprano or alto, and a work that—despite its twentieth century idiom—can be a gripping experience for the audience. George Rochberg (born in 1918) was an early practitioner of a twentieth century musical phenomenon later dubbed polystylism. This means that the composer feels free to use any style from the past to the present, depending on subject matter or personal fancy. This tendency in his music replaced his earlier devotion to serial (twelve-tone) music, which he gave up when it proved inadequate to express grief on the death of his son. Since then, numerous American composers have followed his example and rejected serialism. He wrote this work for mezzo soprano Neva Pilgrim, a close family friend, on an American Bicentennial Commission for a major work for the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra. (Rochberg and his wife are godparents to their son.) It is work of symphonic scope at over a half-hour long in seven sections, three of which are purely orchestral. For its text, it draws on Robert Lowell's contemporary English translation of Racine's Phèdre, which is itself based on Euripides' Hippolytos. It tells the classic tale of the wife of Theseus, ruler of Athens. Having angered Aphrodite, the Goddess causes her to fall passionately in love with Hippolytos, Theseus' son by a prior wife. The work is her speech before her execution for having this forbidden desire. By coincidence, English composer Benjamin Britten (1913—1976) was writing his own version of Lowell's Phaedra at the same time. The texts are not identical; Rochberg's wife and he carefully chose their text, as did Britten and his partner. Britten's work, which is also for mezzo soprano and orchestra, is more in the nature of an operatic scena, while Rochberg's work is more symphonic in scope and sound. Both are highly dramatic in their own way and considered to be among their respective composers' masterworks. Listening to them both affords a fascinating comparison. Rochberg's work is the more overtly emotional of the pair. Rochberg, at the height of his neo-Romantic phase, is more forceful and more apt to create blazing, rhythmically driving music than Britten in his severe late style. Britten's Phaedra keeps more of her dignity than Rochberg's. The vocal and orchestral parts of the work seem to have a link to the arias and cabalettas of middle-period Verdi, particularly in the simplified rhythmic patterns Rochberg uses. The orchestral interludes are short tone poems that tell the "back story" of Theseus and, after Phaedra's death, Hippolytos' fate. Rochberg wanted to relate these events to round out Phaedra's story without inflating the work to operatic proportions. Pilgrim sang the premiere of Rochberg's Phaedra on January 9, 1976, in Syracuse just five months and a week earlier than the first performance of Britten's Phaedra in that year's Aldeburgh Festival with Dame Janet Baker performing.

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