Georges Enescu's only opera constitutes a fascinating sidebar in the history of opera. A work of enormous scale, Oedipe has not attracted many opera producers who have the means to mount a convincing production, nor has it caught the attention of a broad audience through the creditable recordings it has been accorded. Still, it has drawn a small but fiercely enthusiastic body of admirers and remains a superior work whose day may yet come.

Enescu, who excelled as pianist, violinist, conductor, pedagogue and composer, approached his the task of composition with measured deliberation. Oedipe was one of only 33 works completed in his lifetime. Inspired by a performance of Sophocles' Oedipus the King at the Comédie-Française in 1909, he found himself unable to begin composition until 1921. Although portions were performed in concert during the 1920s, orchestration of the entire work was not finished until 1931, and still more tinkering was done by the composer up to the moment of its 1936 premiere. For that first production, bass-baritone André Pernet, one of France's most respected singing actors, appeared in the title role.

More philosophical, less starkly tragic than Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, Enescu's opera unfolds over four acts and three hours' running time. While Sophocles' Oedipus the King provided the basis for the third act, and Oedipus at Colonnus the essential story for the final act, other Greek epic tales informed the rest of the work. Using a range of contemporary effects, including quarter tones, Enescu infused his opera with vast musical interest.

Set in antiquity, Oedipe begins in Thebes with a dark, portentous prelude that establishes the psychological complexity of the score. Edmund Fleg's libretto follows the tragedy familiar to most secondary students: people celebrate the child born to King Laius and Queen Jocasta; there are warnings that the child will kill his father and marry his mother; and Laius orders the Shepherd to take the child to the mountains and abandon him. In the second act's second scene, Oedipus kills Laius at a crossroads and, after answering the riddles of the Sphinx, returns to Thebes in triumph. In the third act, Oedipus learns the truth about his parentage and accepts his own sentence of banishment. In Act Four, however, Fleg affords Oedipus the redemption missing in Stravinsky's opera: justified and with sight restored, Oedipus can contemplate his final hours in peace.

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