ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT New Henze Opera

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31235, 6 December 1966, Page 12

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT New Henze Opera

A new opera cast In symphonic form will be broadcast from 3YC at 8.16 this evening. It is “The Bassarids,” the latest work of Hans Werner Henze, the most prolific and successful of German opera composers of the post-war era. It will be heard in its premiere performance which was staged at the Salzburg Festival in Austria on August 6. It was a performance that roused considerable interest. Henze, who is 40, has written five full-length operas and five symphonies, which have been widely performed in Europe and occasionally in other places. His income is said to be second among serious composers to that of Stravinsky, and he is in the position of having all the major opera houses and orchestras come to him to ask for new works.

The opera has the form of a four-movement symphony, with no breaks between movements, and plays for two and a half hours.

It is the composer’s first opera on a mythological subject (Henze has remarked that he has “made his peace” with Wagner). With a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kaliman, “The Bassarids” is based on “The Bacchae” of Euripides.

The emphasis has been shifted from chorus to individual characters, who between them represent a whole range of attitudes to the irrational cult of Dionysus that sweeps the city of Thebes and drives it to destruction.

In being given a web of psychological motivation absent from Euripides, the story has been said to gain an essentially contemporary flavour. Although the opera was written to English words, at Salzburg the performance was in German, sung by a cast drawn from the West Berlin Opera so that the performance was of a higher standard than usual at many modern opera premieres.

The “New York Times” critic said the music revealed a deepening of the composer’s expressive powers, an increased technical resourcefulness, and a growing sureness in his handling of dramatic action and timing. It was a work that was likely to confuse those who had hitherto chosen to regard Henze as an agile but superficial eclectic, unable to measure up to a big subject. "Although by the very nature of the action the score is predominately violent and elaborate, it also marks a new restraint in Henze’s music, a growing ability to achieve his ends with simple means, both

in orchestration and in vocal writing,” the critic said.

Jane Marsh, the first American singer to win a first prize in the Tchaikovsky Competition, will be heard in the first of a series of programmes from 3YC on Saturday in which this year’s competition winners perform. She will sing an aria from Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.” According to “Life,” Jane Marsh did not take a singing lesson or sing a note in public until she was 17. Now 24, she has had and declined many offers from the movies, and the Met because she does not think her voice is ready and will not be rushed into things. However, she has been signed up by a record company.