Keele Research Repository

Wolfgang Rihm’s Dionysos: Szenen und Dithyramben—eine Opernphantasie received its world premiere in 2010. Based on Nietzsche’s poetry collection Dithyrambs of Dionysus, the libretto combines elements of Nietzsche’s biography with mythology relating to Dionysus, the god of wine and revelry, who was so pivotal to the philosopher’s thinking. The opera also mixes historical allusions, to Wagner, for example, with reworked pre-existing music by Rihm. Dionysos extends beyond traditional operatic drama by the deployment of a number of genres and processes, including ritual theatre, symphonic transformation, expressionism, the Lied, the chorale and the aria. In doing so, the opera articulates the dual strands of individual feeling and collective emotion that have been such defining features of modernism.