Wolfgang Rihm
Wolfgang Rihm (born 13 March 1952) is a German composer and academic teacher. He is musical director of the Institute of New Music and Media at the University of Music Karlsruhe and has been composer in residence at the Lucerne Festival and the Sa ...
based on
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (; or ; 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, prose poet, cultural critic, philologist, and composer whose work has exerted a profound influence on contemporary philosophy. He began his ...
's '' Dionysian Dithyrambs''. The composer wrote the libretto and subtitled his work: "Opernphantasie nach Texten von Friedrich Nietzsche / Szenen und Dithyramben" ("Operatic fantasy after texts by Friedrich Nietzsche / Scenes and dithyrambs"). It premiered at the
Salzburg Festival
The Salzburg Festival (german: Salzburger Festspiele) is a prominent festival of music and drama established in 1920. It is held each summer (for five weeks starting in late July) in the Austrian town of Salzburg, the birthplace of Wolfgang Ama ...
on 27 July 2010.
History
''Dionysos'' is Rihm's eleventh work for the stage. He considered an opera around Dionysos for 15 years and realized it when he received a commission from the Salzburg Festival, the
Staatsoper Unter den Linden
The (), also known as the Berlin State Opera (german: Staatsoper Berlin), is a listed building on Unter den Linden boulevard in the historic center of Berlin, Germany. The opera house was built by order of Prussian king Frederick the Great from ...
Berlin and
De Nederlandse Opera
The Dutch National Opera (DNO; formerly De Nederlandse Opera, now De Nationale Opera in Dutch) is a Dutch opera company based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Its present home base is the Dutch National Opera & Ballet housed in the Stopera building, a m ...
. Rihm wrote the libretto, based on Nietzsche's late work, which he fragmented and arranged in a different order. He chose the passages according to his plans for the music. Rihm said in an interview that opera needed more ''
Magic Flute
''The Magic Flute'' (German: , ), K. 620, is an opera in two acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to a German libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. The work is in the form of a '' Singspiel'', a popular form during the time it was written that inc ...
'', "mehr Machwerk" (More action), citing the opening scene with three ladies coming to the rescue of the prince attacked by a snake. Rihm said that opera finds its potential in situations that are not ordinary ("... findet ihre Möglichkeiten in Situationen, die nicht alltäglich sind"). The opera has autobiographical traits and is in a way his first
comic opera
Comic opera, sometimes known as light opera, is a sung dramatic work of a light or comic nature, usually with a happy ending and often including spoken dialogue.
Forms of comic opera first developed in late 17th-century Italy. By the 1730s, a ne ...
.
Rihm dedicated the work "in friendship" to the conductor
Ingo Metzmacher
Ingo Metzmacher (born 10 November 1957 in Hanover) is a German conductor and artistic director of the festival KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen in Hanover.
Life
Ingo Metzmacher is the son of the cellist Rudolf Metzmacher and the research biol ...
. Rihm composed mostly between December 2009 and May 2010, sending it in batches to the conductor. He finished the finale last minute.
The opera premiered at the Haus für Mozart in Salzburg on 27 July 2010. Johannes Martin Kränzle performed the title role (N.), with
Mojca Erdmann
Mojca Erdmann (born 29 December 1975) is a German soprano who is particularly associated with the Mozart operas. She created the role of Ariadne in Rihm's ''Dionysos'' at the Salzburg Festival.
Career
Born in Hamburg, Erdmann sang in the chi ...
Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin
The Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin (DSO) is a German broadcast orchestra based in Berlin. The orchestra performs its concerts principally in the Philharmonie Berlin. The orchestra is administratively based at the ''Rundfunk Berlin-Branden ...
and the , conducted by Metzmacher and staged by
Pierre Audi
Pierre Audi (born 1957 in Beirut, Lebanon) is a French-Lebanese theatre director and artistic director.
Early life
Audi is the son of the Lebanese banker Raymond Audi and Andrée Michel Fattal, the eldest of three children. The magazine ''
Opernwelt
''Opernwelt'' (''Opera World'') is a monthly German magazine for opera, operetta and ballet. It includes news about current performances, portraits of composers and performers, articles about opera houses, performance spaces, and contemporary and ...
'' chose the performance as the premiere of the year (''Uraufführung des Jahres''), and Kränzle as singer of the year. A live recording was published as DVD.
The production was repeated from 8 June 2011 in Amsterdam and from 8 July 2012 in Berlin. A new production was staged on 8 February 2013 at the Theater Heidelberg by .
Plot
The main character is called N., a symbol for both the poet Nietzsche, but also for
Dionysos
In ancient Greek religion and myth, Dionysus (; grc, Διόνυσος ) is the god of the grape-harvest, winemaking, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, festivity, and theatre. The Romans ...
whose name Nietzsche used as his pen name for the dithyrambs. Some scenes relate to events in Nietzsche's life, others with the Dionysos myth. The action is not a linear story, but shows different views on life (''Lebensbilder'').
Music
A review of the premiere in ''Opernwelt'' notes the overwhelming echos of late-romantic sensuality of sound (''überbordender "Nachhall spätromantischer Klangsinnlichkeit"''), reminiscent of Richard Strauss and Johannes Brahms.