The premieres of Carl Orff's three ancient dramas - Antigonae (Salzburg 1949) and Oedipus the Tyrant (Stuttgart 1959) in Hölderlin's translation, as well as Prometheus in the original ancient Greek by Aeschylus (Stuttgart 1968) - were central events in the music theater of the Federal Republic of Germany. To place Orff's tragic compositions within the context of German theater history and to understand the intellectual background of his reception of antiquity, the question of the composer's intellectual environment was brought to the forefront. The evaluation of a multitude of previously unknown documents, published here for the first time and preserved at the Munich Orff Center, sheds light on the diverse relationships that connected the composer with philosopher Martin Heidegger, classicist Wolfgang Schadewaldt, musicologist Thrasybulos Georgiades, and directors Wieland Wagner, Gustav Rudolf Sellner, and Günther Rennert.