Antigone (Sophocles play)
Antigone ( ; ) is a tragedy by Sophocles written in or before 441 BC.
Antigone (Honegger)
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 Berg's "Wozzeck" were based on early 19th century German literature.