Antigone (Honegger)

Antigone
Opera by Arthur Honegger
Émile Colonne as Créon in the 1927 premiere
Librettist	Jean Cocteau
Language	French
Premiere	28 December 1927 (1927-12-28) La Monnaie, Brussels

Antigone is an opera (tragédie musicale) in three acts by Arthur Honegger to a French libretto by Jean Cocteau based on the tragedy Antigone by Sophocles. Honegger composed the opera between 1924 and 1927. It premiered on 28 December 1927 at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie with sets designed by Pablo Picasso and costumes by Coco Chanel.

Honegger had a passionate interest in theatre. Prior to Antigone, he had composed film scores and incidental music for plays as well as an oratorio, Le roi David, which he called a "dramatic psalm" and premiered in 1921. From 1922 Honegger began thinking about adapting the Greek tragedy Antigone by Sophocles as his first opera. He wrote that the plot is "not the standard anecdote of love which is the base of nearly all lyric theatre". The decade between 1920 and 1930 saw several new operas based on works or themes from the past. Like Antigone, Satie's Socrates and Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex were based on ancient Greek subjects while both Hindemith's Cardillac and Alban Berg's Wozzeck were based on early 19th century German literature.

Honegger had fallen out with Jean Cocteau in 1921 over Cocteau's reaction to his Le roi David. Both Cocteau and Milhaud had called the work "treasonous" for its failure to adhere to the progressive principles of modern theatre and music which they espoused. However they resolved their differences and Cocteau agreed to collaborate with Honegger on Antigone. In Cocteau's words, his adaptation was a "contraction" of the Sophocles play. He described his method of reworking it as like taking "photographs of Greece from an airplane."Antigone was first performed as a play at the Théâtre de l'Atelier in Paris in 1922 with sets by Picasso, costumes by Coco Chanel, and incidental music by Honegger. Honegger began composing the complete text of the play as a three-act opera in 1924 and completed it in 1927. Cocteau did not participate in the project during its composition stage and did not attend the premiere.