Taking Sophocles’ ancient Greek tragedy Oedipus tyrannus as his inspiration, Igor Stravinsky created a powerful opera-oratorio in the 1920s. It was the composer’s idea to set the Oedipus story to music with a Latin text, giving it a ritualistic character. His librettist, the famous French playwright Jean Cocteau, embraced his friend’s experiment and collaborated with Stravinsky to create a sung text for translation into Latin, together with a French-language text for the narrator. The first concert performance, which was not particularly well received, took place under the composer’s baton on 30 May 1927 at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt in Paris. This venue, where Sergey Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes also performed, had strong ties to Stravinsky through his ballets (L’Oiseau de feu, 1910; Le Sacre du printemps, 1913). Ever since a 1928 staged production in Berlin, conducted by Otto Klemperer and designed in the post-expressionist style of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, Oedipus Rex has been regarded as the most monumental work of Stravinsky’s neoclassical period.