An Analysis of Dionysus Opera by Wolfgang Rihm; Storytelling and Choice of Symbols

Wolfgang Rihm, the German composer could have become a poet or an artist. He chose to become a composer, expressing himself through music. Rihm is an extraordinary composer –in terms of both his encyclopedic knowledge and his creative output, which also has something encyclopedic, something all-embracing about it. The same is true about his activities as a teacher (he is a professor of composition at Karlsruhe University of Music), as a writer (he has published several volumes of written works, including interviews), as a lecturer (he is a charismatic speaker), and as a representative of his craft in public bodies. Wolfgang Rihm has premiered his latest opera (Dionysus) in 2010. Similar to his previous stage-works as he claims, the scenario and libretto which is an operatic fantasy is written all by himself. In this fantasy, Rihm has brutally combined Greek Myths with Nietzsche’s controversial life events and thoughts in a surprisingly delusional manner. A work of immense ambition and delirious, at times up-itself complexity, it draws its text from Nietzsche’s Dionysian Dithyrambs –the philosopher’s final confrontation with the ecstatic god of his own aesthetic theories, written in the years preceding his mental breakdown in Turin in 1889. Rihm in Dionysus opera utilizes music and orchestral excitations, different types of symbols in stage design and manipulated libretto, in order to express his philosophical perception of Nietzsche’s thoughts. Rihm’s approach, as one might expect, is far from naturalistic. Nietzsche, played by baritone is designated simply and impersonally as “N”. An ensemble of singers surrounds him, playing multiple symbolic roles, ambivalently delineated. The principal soprano is at once the mythical Dionysus’s lover Ariadne and –perhaps– the novelist and psychologist Lou Andreas Salomé, to whom Nietzsche was briefly drawn. The leading tenor is simply called “a Guest”. Sometimes he designates Nietzsche’s friend Heinrich Köselitz, sometimes Apollo, the ostensibly rational god of Nietzschean theory – though he also proves capable of the ultimate act of horror and betrayal, which finally drives N over the edge. Rihm assumes that the audience has considerable knowledge of Nietzsche’s work, biography and central position in specifically German-language culture. Since it is hard to separate fact from the fiction, the writers in this article try to decrypt and explain the scenario and symbols to make the opera intelligible.