The Eclectic

Three years ago, Poet W. H. Auden submitted a new libretto based on Euripides' The Bacchae to German Composer Hans Werner Henze. "I read it with great admiration," Henze recalls, "but I had a feeling that I had to grow up to this work." He was then 37, and just "making the important discovery of great 19th century musical forms." So Henze brooded about the libretto, and continued meanwhile to write and conduct, rediscovering other composers and staking out for himself a path "not fully traversed--the distance from Tristan to Mahler and Schoenberg." In Austria last week, Henze finished his "growing-up." His new opera, titled The Bassarids, was performed at the Salzburg Festival.

The libretto, co-authored by Chester Kallman, sang with a good deal of noble language as it told the story of the death of King Pentheus of Thebes, who tried brutally to suppress the cult of Dionysus. What was more significant was Henze's contribution. He scored the opera for a huge orchestra, mixing styles that rang of Rameau, Smetana, Wagner, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Puccini, Offenbach--even Gilbert & Sullivan. The music thundered with massive, clanging polyphony, and at times sang with great lyrical sonorities, marking it as his most ambitious work to date.

Henze would not describe the score as derivative, despite the familiar touches. He is merely an eclectic, he suggests, paraphrasing Goethe: "An eclectic is one who, out of what surrounds him, out of what goes on about him, applies to himself that which conforms to his own nature." Adds Henze: "If you wish, you can then call Bach, Mozart, Verdi, Mahler and Stravinsky eclectics, and I would most willingly believe I belonged in such company." So would his followers at Salzburg.

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