The New York Times
By Seth Colter Walls
It’s a strange, seductive story. A young man becomes king. The king becomes a bit overconfident, deciding to test his power against a charismatic stranger’s worshipers. This stranger — it turns out he’s the god of wine and dance — responds by ensorcelling members of the royal family. Eventually, the king loses his head: to his own mother, a follower of the new cult.
The composer Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012) was approached with this streamlined adaptation of Euripides’s “The Bacchae” in 1963, and eventually created “The Bassarids,” which is getting a rare revival at the Salzburg Festival in Austria through Aug. 26.
When he first gave the subject serious thought, the 37-year-old Henze was already well known; his Fifth Symphony had just had its premiere with the New York Philharmonic and Leonard Bernstein. He had been writing operas for more than a decade, starting with his first full-length work for the stage, “Boulevard Solitude,” a jagged (and sometimes jazzy) take on the “Manon Lescaut” story.
But when Henze received the draft libretto for a Euripidean opera from the poets W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, he set it aside. In an essay later collected in his book “Music and Politics,” Henze wrote, “I was prevented from starting work on ‘The Bassarids’ straight away by the feeling that I still had to grow into it.”
Instead, he began work on a comic opera, “The Young Lord.” He also conducted; he later suggested that the experience of leading works by Schubert and Brahms seasoned him for the challenges of Auden and Kallman’s text. A year later, he felt he’d put in enough preparation, and began writing.
If the story of “The Bassarids” wasn’t a surprise, Henze’s music was. It had dodecaphonic (or atonal) elements but was not rigidly conceived in that language, the one preferred by Pierre Boulez and other titans of the post-World War II avant-garde. Nor was the sound a pure throwback that would delight Romantics weary of modernism. Instead, the score managed a rare balance of experimental and traditional effects. In his autobiography, “Bohemian Fifths,” Henze described himself as a Mahlerian, while also approvingly quoting a critic who called the opera “Strauss turned sour.”
This synthesis was not unanimously hailed at the opera’s premiere at the Salzburg Festival in 1966. Writing for The New York Times in 1974, Peter Heyworth recalled seeing the then-chair of London’s Royal Opera House leaping from his seat “like a scalded cat” at the curtain. But it was exactly what Auden, in particular, had wanted.
“I am convinced that Hans has written a masterpiece,” he wrote in a letter quoted in the complete edition of his librettos with Kallman.
The work soon found champions — most prominent among them Christoph von Dohnanyi, who not only conducted the premiere, but also campaigned for the work in the United States, presenting it in Cleveland and New York. Its return to Salzburg this month, in a staging by Krzysztof Warlikowski, is conducted by another of its supporters, Kent Nagano. In a phone interview between rehearsals, Mr. Nagano described “The Bassarids” as an opera that works “at the highest state of refinement.”
“It is based upon layered tonalities,” he said. “Sometimes you feel it’s a forerunner of what today we might call spectral music.”
Mr. Nagano said that when he led the opera in the 1980s, he felt Henze’s language to be progressive. But “now, from the perspective of 2018,” he added, “we see many of the dramatic gestures that Henze makes in ‘new music’ or even in popular music. The way that various elements of tonality will collide with each other — and, at the end, produce a resonance, upon which it makes room for a very lyric quality.”
Markus Hinterhäuser, a pianist and the artistic director of the Salzburg Festival, described the orthodoxy of the mid-20th century. “There was Stockhausen, there was Nono, there was Boulez,” he said. “There was a very defined monopole about what contemporary music grammar could be. And Henze was apart from that.”
Mr. Hinterhäuser said he admires the work’s political dimensions: “It’s the incredible conflict between the ecstasy — the passion — and the reason. Who triumphs over this question?”
Pretty clearly Dionysius, right?
“Yeah, of course,” he replied. “This is the victory of the ecstasy. But you can also interpret it so that it’s the victory of the total hedonistic world. And now it becomes very political, the whole thing. Looking at our very specific situation, our lives. Where is it going, this world?”
Mr. Hinterhäuser declined to be pinned down about these contemporary resonances, especially before rehearsals for the new staging were complete. But Mr. Nagano offered one way of placing the Euripidean conflict in our time, noting that, “as we confront the new and rapid evolution of the technical world that we live in,” questions of what is rational and what is irrational have become “regular and dominant social topics.”
Henze’s oratorio “Das Floss der Medusa” was presented in its late-1990s revision earlier this year in Amsterdam.CreditMonika Rittersh
Auden, for his part, was wary of tidy summations of the work, or overtly allegorical analyses of it. Responding to Henze’s request for an essay that could be included in the program, Auden wrote, “I am very much against trying to state a myth in abstract logical terms, which rob it of all its resonance, e.g., if one starts talking about recent history, one will have fools saying that Dionysus is Hitler.”
And the opera itself changes its already ambiguous meaning depending on the version you encounter. At the Salzburg premiere in 1966, there was an Intermezzo that included some attractive music at the king’s expense. (Auden and Kallman have their Queen Agave editorialize about her son: “My dear, I thought he’d never end. ‘I am Pentheus, King of Thebes. Obey me. Answer.’ He may be King. He’ll never make a dancer.”) The creative team also created a myth-within-a-myth dream scene, “The Judgment of Calliope.”
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