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The Bassarids,
an opera by Hans Werner Henze,
with a libretto by W. H. Auden
and Chester Kallman.
Komische Oper, Berlin,
October 2019.

The Komische Oper was one of two major opera houses in the old East Berlin, and in comparison to the stately Staatsoper, it was the more folksy venue. Performances there were always in German, whatever the language of the original, and though the selections weren’t always comic operas per se, there was a tendency to put on productions that would be inviting to a general audience. The building, too, was less intimidating than the elegantly columned, marble-encased Staatsoper. It consisted of a rather prosaic modern shell wrapped around a gemlike old theater, and its various function rooms (for coat-checking, drink-selling, and so forth) were austere enough to eliminate any sense of economic or cultural inferiority that might be harbored by poor East Berliners.

To a certain extent this distinction persisted even after the fall of the Wall in 1989. Whereas the two other opera houses in the united Berlin (the Staatsoper and the former West’s Deutsche Oper) proceeded to render up all the standard operas in their original languages, performances at the Komische continued to be presented in German, and the audiences came largely though not entirely from the former East. The productions often retained at least a whiff of the old Brecht-style attitude toward political theater, too. The first opera I ever saw there—in the autumn of 2003, before I knew a word of German—was a rather striking production of Fidelio that featured a gigantic, looming, bare-bones set, at once obviously stagy and obviously prisonlike. As the chorus called out “Freiheit!” in Beethoven’s well-known salute to freedom, my seatmate, who was fluent in German, asked if I could tell what the sets, costumes, and performances were hinting at. I nodded and said, “East Germany.”

The director’s aesthetic—or lack thereof—is almost always the sticky point of opera performances in Berlin, since the music can pretty much be counted on to be great. These days I’m more likely to go to the Komische Oper than to either of the other two Berlin opera houses because I know I can rely on the directorial choices made there. Its experimentation tends to be seriously considered rather than merely show-offy, and the principles guiding any given production are at once evident and subtle. In fact, I would have to say that under the artistic direction of Barrie Kosky, the Komische has yielded up more enlightening evenings than any other opera house I can think of. I once saw a memorable Rosenkavalier there (the friends who took me were on their third visit to that production), and in the last two years alone, I’ve seen both a genuinely witty and moving performance of Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges and an astonishingly good West Side Story.

It was that West Side Story which led, indirectly, to my giving the unfamiliar Bassarids a chance. Having just published a book about Jerome Robbins, and knowing that the Komische production of this stellar Bernstein-Sondheim-Robbins collaboration was not using his choreography, I went to last spring’s West Side Story revival with the lowest of hopes—abetted, in this case, by my long-term experience of horrible choreography on a variety of Berlin stages. I shuddered, in advance, to think of what they would make of this beloved and easily ruined work. So you can imagine my surprise when I found myself thrilled by Otto Pichler’s vibrant and amusing choreography, which was at once totally unlike Robbins’s and yet completely true to the music and the script. The song lyrics, too, had been preserved in their original English, even though the accompanying dialogue had been translated into German, and that too proved to be a brilliant stroke. Apparently librettists as famous as Meyerhold and Da Ponte could safely be done away with, but Sondheim could not, and Barrie Kosky (who personally directed this West Side Story) realized that.

So when I read that Kosky and Pichler were being reunited on The Bassarids—and that the orchestra was to be led by Vladimir Jurowski, my latest favorite conductor—I scheduled my next Berlin trip to include the opening night of this heretofore unknown-to-me opera. At the time I had barely heard of Hans Werner Henze (though I had a faint notion that he was a twentieth-century composer who had written music that was at once atonal, jazzy, and melodic, somewhat in the fashion of my beloved Shostakovich). Still, the fact that these three genius creators had decided to restage this one-act “Musikdrama” by the recently dead German composer was more than enough validation for me.

The Bassarids, I soon learned, was based on Euripides’ play The Bacchae, with an English-language libretto written by the poet W. H. Auden and his lover Chester Kallman. I also discovered that Henze had composed this 1966 opera while living in Italy, to which he had moved in 1953 to escape the West German intolerance of both his homosexuality and his avowed Communism. That’s all I knew when I walked in the door of the Komische Oper on October 13, at which point I was informed that a) the entire opera, in a violation of Komische tradition, would be performed in English, and b) it would last two and a half hours without intermission.

You will perhaps not believe me, but you should, when I tell you that the entire hundred and fifty minutes passed in a flash. Recently, when I sat down to take a few notes on the YouTube version of that premiere performance, I had the same experience all over again: I was planning to watch only a few minutes here and there, but I couldn’t tear myself away until the last notes of the score had sounded. The music itself, even on YouTube, was stirring and evocative, but that wasn’t what kept me watching. It was the incredible coherence of the production itself, in which singer-actors, dancers, and musicians, along with set, costume, and lighting designers—not to mention the excellent duo behind the scenes and the excellent conductor in front of them—had all collaborated with perfect singlemindedness to yield one of the most powerful, affecting spectacles I have ever seen.

Even before the piece begins, you can sense that something unusual is about to happen. There is no curtain, and the set, though rather grand, is simple—a series of wide, pale steps narrowing in pyramid-like fashion to a platform at the top, where a thin vertical exit slices the backdrop apart at its center. As the audience takes its seats, various performers, some dressed all in black and others in black-and-white outfits, come out and assemble casually on the stage. We do not yet know which of these are chorus members and which are dancers, but there are clues: some of them are doing stretching exercises, for instance, while others stand chatting or looking curiously at us. Even the conductor, Vladimir Jurowski, who has by now emerged onto his center podium in shirtsleeves (an almost unheard-of style for an opera conductor), leans his elbows on the edge of the orchestra pit and gazes around at the audience, as if to ascertain for himself who we are.

As the musicians tune up, the black-and-white-garbed dancers seat themselves along the highest step, while the black-clad male and female chorus takes up all the steps below, joined on either side by the brass and wind elements of the orchestra. And now, shortly after the melodic but nonetheless modern music starts up, the chorus members begin to behave in a most unchoruslike fashion—clapping their hands, say, at the most percussive moments in the music, or raising one arm in unison. These gestures are performed by the dancers as well, and the movements are so carefully calibrated that they appear exactly the same when done by non-dancers and dancers. In fact, that is to be one of the hallmarks of the whole production: choreography that is at once so simple and so effective that it looks like skilled movement even when non-professionals do it. (And, conversely, one might observe that it conveys a sense of normal human gestures even when the dancers do it.)

An offstage singing voice informs us that Dionysus has entered the realm, and the chorus members, now swarming over the steps, begin to shake and quiver in the manner of nineteenth-century hysterics. That, too, is to be a keystone of the production—the sense that even the rumored presence of the god (whom we do not actually see for a long time) is enough to drive the Theban population crazy.

You do not have to be familiar with The Bacchae to follow the plot as it unfolds, but it might help if I remind you that among the play’s main characters are Pentheus, King of Thebes; his mother, Agave; his grandfather, Cadmus; and Dionysus/Bacchus, the god of wine and self-abandonment. Early in the play, Dionysus recounts the story of Semele, his beautiful mother, who, because she was having a love affair with Zeus, was destroyed by the jealous Hera—though not before giving birth to Dionysus, who is therefore half-divine. Now Dionysus has come to Thebes to take his revenge on the mortals he considers partly responsible for Semele’s death, including Cadmus (Semele’s father), Agave (her sister), and the entire city of Thebes, as embodied in its proud and overly rational monarch, Pentheus.

To this basic plot, Auden, Kallman, and Henze have added one additional soprano (Autonoe, Agave’s other sister) and one mezzo (Beroe, who served as nurse to both Semele and Pentheus); a baritone-voiced captain, who stands in for all of Pentheus’s military might; and, most importantly, a tenor singing the role of the blind hermaphrodite Tiresias, who elsewhere in Greek literature appears as a prophet but here functions mainly as an idiosyncratic commentator. It is Tiresias, embodied in the remarkable singer-actor Ivan Tursic, who is in fact the first soloist to appear on the Komische stage—a balding man bundled so tightly into women’s clothing that he appears upholstered rather than dressed, with dark glasses, a rubbery, mobile face, and an intense, contorted movement style that somehow evokes the postwar “poor theater” of Grotowski and Kantor. He is soon joined by Cadmus (a feeble-looking old man with stringy gray hair) and Agave (a kind of Cruella DeVille figure—dark hair piled high on her head, her mouth a slash of red lipstick—who wears a long white skirt, an elegant white jacket, and a sparkly silver shirt underneath it). All three of them are singing about the imminent arrival of Dionysus and the dangers to Thebes that could result.

Autonoe, when she appears, is like a strawberry-blonde counterpart to her sister Agave: another chattery, foolish, laughing woman with too much makeup and a fancy evening dress. The nurse, a heavy-set peasant woman, represents the tender, sympathetic antidote to these flighty females, though even she proves incapable of protecting her charges. The captain, who comes on in uniform, is made of stiffer and sterner stuff, and it is he (rather than Dionysus, in this version) who gives us the backstory about Semele and her tragic fate. Soon after he finishes, Pentheus enters for the first time.

There is not a singer in this production who is not also an excellent actor, but if I were forced to single out one person for his acting talents alone, I would choose Günter Papendell, the baritone who portrays King Pentheus. He projects his full character—wary, intelligent, serious, vain, and somewhat tight-assed—from the very first moment he appears onstage. Clad in an all-black suit, including black shirt and black tie, he wears no finery, no crown or scepter, and his slicked-back hair frames a face alight with nervous energy. “Where are my people? Were they not told to gather?” he sings (the chorus has by now disappeared from the stage), and the captain confirms that they were indeed so informed. It is the first sign that Pentheus is losing control of his subjects, who are already falling under the influence of the invading Dionysus. When Agave, Autonoe, and the chorus members reappear, their jerky, erotic movements and evident lack of self-control reinforce this idea, which only strengthens Pentheus’s resistance. His grandfather, Cadmus, pleads with him—“Great king, bow your head!… Have you no awe, no fear?”—but Pentheus retorts that the followers of this so-called god are worshipping lies. He wants rationality and asceticism to be what govern his kingdom, not hysteria and magic. As a pledge of his own firmness in the face of Bacchic temptations, he promises that he “will abstain from wine, from meats, and from women’s bed,” and “will live sober and chaste until the day I die.”

One of the great things about this production, among many great things, is the way it succeeds in portraying Dionysus as a kind of dark mirror-image of Pentheus, at once his opposite and his twin, his enemy as well as his potential lover. Casting is a part of it: whereas Papendell is pale and edgy, Sean Panikkar, the American tenor cast as Dionysus, is dark of complexion and wonderfully sinuous in his movements. Both costuming and choreography are skillfully deployed to further delineate their differences. Dionysus, though also clad in black, is barefoot and informally dressed, and the gestures he has been given, which seem to derive in part from Indian dance, emphasize the softness and pliability of the human body. As with nearly all the movement in this work, his choreography erases the boundary between dancers and singers; the gestures are simple enough for the chorus members to copy (as they do whenever Dionysus is near them, visibly exercising his influence over them) but also delicate enough to look like real dance when performed by the dancers and, indeed, by Panikkar himself.

Dionysus first appears onstage as a silent ghost or spirit, standing directly behind Agave as Pentheus interrogates her about whether she has been to Mt. Cithaeron (the place where the Bacchic worshippers assemble and dance). While she faces front and murmurs a quiet but steady “Yes” in response to each of her son’s questions, the dark god faces away from us, his back against hers, as he reaches out to either side and grasps her extended hands in his. She is dressed in white and silver, he all in black, and her body basically hides him from us, so he is presented almost literally as her clinging shadow. The only person who seems to notice him is the blind Tiresias, who peers lasciviously at the two of them. A bit later Tiresias, in profile, will also press himself against the body of Dionysus (who has still not uttered a note), while Agave and Autonoe sandwich him in from the other side. At the end of this brief scene, the dark, silent figure is left alone, kneeling at the front of the stage, and when Pentheus eventually perceives him there, he asks if he is Dionysus’s priest. “I serve him, yes” are the god’s first, quietly sung words. “And I have known his presence, yes.”

What follows is both a fight and a seduction. Pentheus, furious, strikes and kicks this unknown, despised figure, beating him into a corner—at which point Dionysus stands up and stares the king down, moving him backward, nose to nose, through the sheer power of his personality. As the melodic line shifts from one to the other, they move together physically as well, with Dionysus at one point covering Pentheus’s eyes with his hands and crooning in his ear. Later they almost seem to dance together, swaying, while the god holds the king’s head between his hands as if he is hypnotizing him into obedience or passivity.

When the chorus returns, singing its praise of Dionysus, “god of the vine,” Pentheus leaps up and responds, “Lies! Lies! Am I not king?” But then, speaking directly to the god, he is forced to admit, “You are beautiful. No doubt you dance with much success.” Dionysus strokes Pentheus’s hair and reassures him (falsely), “What should my beauty matter were the rites as you think they are?… The chaste are chaste, the unchaste unchaste.” As the scene ends, the two men press their palms together and then run offstage in opposite directions, leaving Tiresias and the two women, Agave and Autonoe, at the center of the steps, writhing with sexual energy and singing about their god (“He is so manly… a beast”). Even the heretofore rigid captain—who now reappears in some disarray, having lost his uniform’s jacket—finds himself succumbing to the craziness.

At this point Tiresias introduces what is described in the program as an Intermezzo. Most productions of The Bassarids have left it out, but Kosky, Pichler, and Jurowski wisely concluded that it was essential to their vision of the opera. And indeed it seems utterly continuous with what has gone before, in part because dance and mime, which feature heavily in this interlude, have already contributed importantly to the plot. It is Tiresias who introduces the explicit link—“I understand what this is all about. We do best to act it out. Let’s play the Judgment of Calliope”—and then offers to perform the role of Calliope himself, insisting that they fetch him a long red wig in which to act the role. Wearing the wig and wielding a judge’s gavel, he then converts himself into a combination of director, choreographer, and conductor, ordering, “Take your positions. Dance your dance. Strike up, musicians.”

What ensues is both creepy and fascinating, at once delightful and scary. The dancers now come into their own, wearing grotesque, oversized masks and sacklike black clothes as they express through their bodily movements the emotions that the white-clad singers (Agave, Autonoe, Tiresias, and the captain) are presenting in song. Even here, though, the dancers have been given gestures that the singers can imitate, so no firm line divides the two categories. It is not until much later in the production—nearly the final scene, when both the music and the Bacchic celebrants go wild—that we get these highly skilled dancers on their own, lined up on a specially constructed platform between us and the orchestra pit, where they writhe and leap and kick and twist in a way no ordinary mortal could manage. As the opera suggests all the way through, in the lyrics as well as in the performances, it is dance that finally defines the lawless, self-abandoned, fearless quality of Dionysian ritual.

But music has its role to play, too. As Tiresias’s words suggest, the man who tells the musicians to strike up their tune is also serving Dionysus in his own less conspicuous way. Raised up before us on a higher-than-usual podium, clothed in a simple white shirt and with his signature dark flowing hair, Jurowski is also in some ways a stand-in for the god who is causing all this trouble. He does not interrupt our view of the stage, and his gestures are remarkably restrained—more restrained, I should note, than in his usual orchestral performances—but he is nonetheless allied with the forces of wildness and abandon which opera (and this opera in particular) predicates itself upon. And to the extent that we find ourselves falling into ecstasies over the spectacle in front of us, we too must confess ourselves to be worshippers of the god of the vine.

That this is not just a pleasure, but also a danger, becomes even clearer to us after the Intermezzo. If we find ourselves siding with the seductive magic of Dionysus over the rigid rationalities of Pentheus, then we must also be willing to take partial responsibility for the horrible, vengeful fate that the god ultimately assigns to the king.

Throughout the opera, that outcome has been powerfully intertwined with overt displays of a sexuality that bridges and crosses the boundaries between male and female. This element is there from the beginning, of course, in the person of Tiresias, but it becomes more and more present to us as we watch the characters, under the influence of Dionysus, release their own personalities and merge with those of others. In particular, the once hard and masculine Pentheus is converted into a soft, womanly figure—a female figure that specifically resembles Agave, Pen-theus’s mother. Toward the end of the scene that follows the Intermezzo, the king comes onstage wearing an outfit identical to what Agave wore in her opening appearances, up to and including the high heels and the sparkly silver shirt. By this time he has become Dionysus’s puppet, moving in response to the god’s gestures and singing in unison with him. At one point, just after Dionysus has embraced him from behind—holding the king’s arms out in a Christlike position and then folding them into his chest—the two of them kiss. It is a long, erotic kiss, aggressive on Dionysus’s part, slightly resistant on Pentheus’s.

None of this feels at all gratuitous. On the contrary, it is all there in the very structure of the opera, and even in the lyrics. “Let me help you,” Dionysus croons, to which Pentheus responds, “What must I do?” The god answers, “Dress as they dress…the women.” When he returns in full costume, Pentheus asks, “Have I dressed myself well, in truth? Dressed like Agave?” The kiss itself foreshadows the lines that Pentheus will soon be singing as he prepares to meet his death at the hands of the rabid Bacchantes: “I looked into a red mouth… There stood my grief. It smiled at me.” It also harks back to the earlier moment when he told Dionysus, “You are beautiful.” That Henze, Auden, and Kallman (and, for all I know, Kosky and Pichler) have projected their own sexuality onto the pairing of these two men seems more than acceptable. It seems right.

There is only one place at which the director and his collaborators have chosen to part company with the details in the written lyrics, and that choice seems, in this context, utterly necessary. The scene in question is the most wrenching scene in the opera, the one where Agave—dressed only in a bloodstained white slip, her dark hair loose around her head, her hands bloodied up to the elbows—comes back onstage after Pentheus’s death. She is carrying a huge axe as well as a bloody plastic bag, and as she descends the steps, she greets a despairing Cadmus with the line: “Smile, father. Can old age never smile?” He watches her in horror as she kneels and proceeds to pull out of the bag a series of stringy red intestines, like a small child playing with the disgusting leavings from a butcher shop. “A cloud seems to be lifting. There’s something I have forgotten but ought to remember,” she sings softly to herself. And then, as if to avoid the realization that is gradually dawning on her, she emphatically insists that the creature she has killed in her Dionysian ecstasy is a lion. But Cadmus makes her look at what she has in her hands. According to the lyrics, what she sees is not a lion’s head, but that of her son, Pentheus.

A recognizable human head can only look tacky onstage. Such a prop would represent opera at its most theatrical, its most demanding of disbelief’s suspension. But this production, especially at this crucial point, is going for an intense degree of emotional realism, and so the faky head has been replaced by the very plausible entrails. As a result, we in the audience are duly shocked and horrified. And though the opera carries on for another ten or fifteen minutes, we never recover from the sight of the pathetic Agave (played to perfection by Tanja Ariane Baumgartner) cradling the bag of entrails in her arms as if it were a baby, and singing, “To cry ‘Forgive me,’ to weep, son, would change nothing… We both did what neither would. The strong gods are not good.”

That is the line that sticks with us, throughout Dionysus’s closing remarks about the success of his vengeance and his consequent ability to release his mother from Hades. We are collectively stricken with the kind of pity and fear which Aristotle prescribed for tragedy, but which one hardly ever experiences in the theater. Here this galvanizing catharsis has been achieved by the stirring plot and its piercing words, by the staging with its many evocative movements, by the powerful acting and singing, and above all by the music, which seems both to encompass and to generate all of these other things.

The effect on us is so strong that for a full five or ten seconds after the final note sounds from the orchestra—before the rousing cheers and applause have a chance to break forth—we all sit silently in our seats, stunned. Five seconds is an eternity in the theater, and it strikes me that in the whole of my opera-going life, I have hardly ever heard or felt any response as intense as this silence.

Wendy Lesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review. Her new book, Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a Mystery, will be out in May.