Since Aeschylus's text in Ancient Greek has been directly set to music without alterations or cuts, Orff's score qualifies as one of the most typical examples for the operatic genre of Literaturoper.

The premiere took place on March 24, 1968, at Staatstheater Stuttgart under the direction of Ferdinand Leitner in a production by Rudolf Sellner with sets and costumes by Teo Otto.

The titan Prometheus, who has been placed in Scythian iron chains because of his alleged fire robbery, does not want to reveal to the Olympic ruler Zeus a secret knowledge that he claims to possess.

Hermes asks Prometheus one last time to finally name the hetaerae who would cost Zeus and his followers their eternal rule.

After Hephaistos, Kratos and Bia have left, the chorus of the daughters of Okeanos appears; they assures him of his friendship and inquire about the reason for this punishment.

Now Prometheus announces Io's future: She will cross the Bosphorus (which will be named after her) and will eventually reach Ethiopia following the Nile Delta to Canopus to give birth to Epaphos there.

Since they are not normally used in the percussion section of the symphony orchestra because of the chromatic arrangement of their keys, in current performance practice marimbaphones are substituted.

As Pietro Massa was able to show, an intensive exchange of ideas with the classical philologist Wolfgang Schadewaldt, the musicologist Thrasybulos Georgiades and with Wieland Wagner, the director who had originally been selected by the composer for the staging of the world premiere, accompanied the genesis of Orff's operas on subjects from Greek Antiquity.

[5] Since vast parts of the score require a rhythmic declamation of the Greek text in the speaking voice of the soloists, which is only occasionally interrupted by strong accents of the gigantic percussion, the score of Prometheus also marked a new stage in Orff's departure from traditional pitch structures in comparison with his previous operas on Greek dramas.

In the score of Prometheus, the four pianos and the xylophones, which in the traditional orchestra were only given marginal tasks, take on the role that the string body had in the orchestration of Viennese classical music.

Only five months after the opera's world premiere, on 1 August 1968, Orff's Prometheus received a second, highly successful production at the Bavarian State Opera Munich, conducted by Michael Gielen and staged by August Everding with the sets and costumes designed by Josef Svoboda; this production has received the composer's special praise.

[4] After the great success of these initial performances, the enormous difficulties of the title role, the problem of assembling a large collection of exotic percussion instruments and the reluctance of smaller opera houses to stage a work written in Ancient Greek have hindered a broader diffusion of Orff's score, although some basic notions of Ancient Greek would have been present at least among some members of an educated opera audience in Western Germany.