The Bassarids

The setting is ancient Thebes. Prior to the opera, Dionysus has stated that he intends to revenge himself upon Agave and the women of Thebes because they have denied his divinity. At the start of the opera, Cadmus, King of Thebes, has abdicated his throne in favour of his son Pentheus. Pentheus has learned of the cult of Dionysus, which involves wild and irrational rites, and decides to ban the cult in his city. A stranger arrives and entices the women into increasingly abandoned celebrations of Dionysus. Pentheus, still unwilling to acknowledge his own Dionysiac impulses, is seduced by the stranger into disguising himself as a woman and going to Mouth Cytheron to observe the women in their sacred revelries. In their frenzy, Agave his mother and Autone his sister sieze Pentheus and tear him limb from limb. Still delirious and unaware, Agave cradles the severed head of her son in her arms. The stranger is revealed to be Dionysus himself.

 "The Bassarids which today I understand to a far greater degree and hold much dearer than when I was composing the work – a hectic and extraordinarily brief period of less than a year, in a form of protest lacking sufficient theoretical basis and in a state of utter loneliness – today I consider this to be my most important music theatre work…It is interesting and modern and still relevant for us and specifically addresses questions associated with the years around 1968: what is freedom and what is bondage? What is repression, what is revolt and what is revolution? This is all in fact displayed, insinuated and suggested by Euripides. The multiplicity and richness of relationships, the tangible sensual relationships between the ancient civilisation of this Archaic period and our time is created in Auden’s text; Euripides is transposed into our time in a manner which could not have been better achieved with the best possible stage production of the original Greek play: through the constant manifestation of the distance to a different civilisation from a time long past."