 At the end of the play, and the opera, Kreon is the only principal left alive.Orff's musical setting of Friedrich Hölderlin's Sophocles translation from 1804 created a novel form of musical theatre in which the poetic text itself becomes musicalized through the declamation of the singing voices.An extraordinary reduction of the structures of the pitch domain, in connection with the predominance of rhythmic patterns, has been described as an essential feature of Orff's late style.