Die Bakchantinnen (review)

It is both remarkable and wonderful that this recording was ever made. Despite his obvious gifts as a composer, Egon Joseph Wellesz (1885-1974) can hardly be regarded as a household name today. His six operas are rarely performed, barely even mentioned in the standard histories of twentieth-century music. While Wellesz's instrumental works have fared slightly better than his vocal compositions, relatively few of them appear in the standard repertoire. In most surveys of modern music, Wellesz, if he is mentioned at all, is usually cited as a musicologist whose works on Byzantine and Arabic music still remain influential, as a student of Arnold Schoenberg and Guido Adler, as a colleague of Anton Webern, or as a teacher of the composer Peter Sculthorpe. What the textbooks fail to disclose is that Wellesz himself was a remarkably accomplished composer whose works spanned a vast number of genres and styles. Gradually, some of these all but forgotten works are beginning to be available to a new generation of audiences through series like Orfeo's innovative Musica Rediviva—"restored or renovated music"—program.

Wellesz was born in Austria and, during his studies with Schoenberg, was a contemporary of Berg and Webern. His early compositions (of which Die Bakchantinnen is a good example) still bear the influence of Mahler, Bruckner, and Debussy. As he continued to pursue musicological research, however, Wellesz became increasingly drawn to Middle Eastern music, and his compositional style began to evolve. Wellesz's interest in world music gave birth to such books as Eastern Elements in Western Chant (1947) andA History of Byzantine Music and Hymnology (1948). By good fortune, Wellesz happened to be in Amsterdam attending a performance by Bruno Walter as the Anschluss was unfolding in his native Austria. Rather than return home, the composer traveled to England, where he joined the faculty of Oxford University and, while there, wrote an increasingly diverse body of work.

Even aside from music, Wellesz's interests were eclectic. His early comic opera Scherz, List, und Rache (Jest, Cunning, and Revenge, 1927) was based on a Singspiel of the same name by Goethe. Two early operas, Alkestis (1924) and Die Bakchantinnen (1931), took their inspiration from Euripidean tragedies. ¹ Die Opferung des Gefangen (The Sacrifice of the Prisoner, 1926) was suggested by an Indian text found in southern Mexico. The three-movement symphonic poem Prosperos Beschwörungen (Prospero's Entreaties, 1934-36) was based on Shakespeare's The Tempest. The composer's late comic opera Incognita (1950) resulted from Wellesz's collaboration with the poet Elizabeth Mackenzie and took its story from a comedy of manners by the eighteenth-century English playwright William Congreve. ²

For Die Bakchantinnen, Wellesz shaped his own libretto but remained extraordinarily faithful to the plot of Euripides' last tragedy, The Bacchae (406 B.C.). In condensing the 1,392 lines of Euripides' play by roughly one third, Wellesz produced a two-act opera that lasts roughly an hour and forty minutes in the performance under review here. He also made one slight change to the background story that occurs before the action of drama begins. In Euripides' original version, Zeus's jealous wife, Hera, treacherously murders the high god's mistress Semele by urging her to insist that her lover must appear to her in his full majesty. The complete splendor of Zeus's epiphany, taking the form of lightning (!), incinerates Semele herself and nearly destroys the yet unborn god Dionysus. Only through Zeus's intervention is the young god saved and reared among the nymphs of Mount Nysa. In Wellesz's telling of the story, however, it is Semele's sister Agave, not Hera herself, who is responsible for this act of treachery. Agave deceived...