From poetry to opera to documentary movie, from
Dionysos - Dithyramben (
the last work of Nietzsche, a collection of poems he created while on the brink of his fatal illness) to
Dionysos (
the opera of Wolfgang Rihm, finished in 2010) to
Ich bin dein Labyrinth! - Wolfgang Rihm: Nietzsche: Dionysos (
the documentary movie of Bettina Ehrhardt, from 2011). From
Nietzsche to
Rihm to
Ehrhardt, exploring the sensual Dyonisiac labyrinth of European culture.
To speak about
Dionysos - Dythyramben would be too daring at this stage, maybe sheer madness - these poems conclude the work of a whole life. What I want is to understand, and to appropriate, the way
Nietzsche described the genesis of European culture by the conflicting unity of
Dionysus and
Apollo.
Here is the text of
Dionysos - Dythyramben: the original German, the English and French renderings.
Dionysos, the opera of
Wolfgang Rihm, uses the verses of
Nietzsche, while trying to emphasize the conflictual unity on which the European culture is built: the two heroes of the opera,
N (short for
Nietzsche) and
Gast, interact through an endless cycle of erotic competition and cooperation, wandering inside the labyrinth, towards the climax, when the plot takes definitely a mythical allure: the two guys are actually human flesh masks hiding
Dionysus and
Apollo (which after all is expected, since the opera builds on the
Welthanschaung of
Nietzsche). As for the music, well, it is atonal (how else?), while sending suggestions to
Mozart (
the women - attendants to the Queen of Night, you know, Die Zauberflöte),
Schubert (
Winterreise),
Wagner (
the Rhinemaidens from Der Ring des Nibelungen, also the Flower Maidens from Parsifal), and
Richard Strauss (
the three nymphs - Naiad, Dryad, and Echo - from Ariadne auf Naxos).
Well, if you ask me more about these suggestions, I will tell you that they come on the musical parts dedicated to the female characters of the opera: besides the two males, there are nymphs (now and then metamorphosing into prostitutes - that's it), and the musical structure of the opera puts some accents that sends to those composers.
Now, the chronicler (
Anthony Tommasini) from
NY Times criticized
Mr. Rihm for not sending suggestions also to
Puccini's
Tosca. I think that, firstly, nobody's perfect (not even
Nietzsche was, by the contrary), and, secondly, the chronicler was maybe too demanding.
Several links:
As for the documentary of
Bettina Ehrhardt, it mixes moments captured from the creation process of
Rihm's opera with some kind of reenactment of the period of life when
Nietzsche created
Dionysos - Dythyramben.
It was not easy for
Bettina Ehrhardt to get the moments from the intimacy of opera creation, as that creation was long and painful, with moments of giving up, with moments of taking the whole process anew. There had been fifteen years of failures, up to December 2009, when
Wolfgang Rihm received a firm commitment from the
Salzburg Festival. The composer made
tabula rasa and started again on the scratch. The libretto was ready in April 2010 and immediately the orchestration and repetitions began. No wonder that the first response
Mr. Rihm gave
Mrs. Ehrhardt was,
how do you want me to talk about something I have not finished yet! She was however able to follow
Wolfgang Rihm to Salzburg, to film repetitions and to take interviews to the interprets. After all, if we look at the painful process of creating the opera, and then the documentary,
Nietzsche proved right: any art work results from a ferocious struggle between Dyonisiac and Apollinic.
As I said, the documentary interweaves the moments captured from the opera creation with a reenactment of some months from
Nietzsche's life: a fictitious story shot in the mountainous surroundings of
Sils-Maria, a place that was special for the philosopher: a place of enlightenment, also where he had the foreboding of his downfall,
for a while I bathed in my own light and now it's over.
I recommend a link where you will find more about this documentary:
Speaking here about the documentary made by
Bettina Ehrhardt gave me the impulse to talk in near future about another movie that uses a similar approach of getting glimpses from the life of a Swedish author mixed with capturing the essence of a place that had been a space of revelation for him: about
Axel Munthe and
San Michele -
Blind Light, the documentary made by
Pola Rapaport.
Here is a trailer of
Ich bin dein Labyrinth! - Wolfgang Rihm: Nietzsche: Dionysos, the documentary of
Bettina Ehrhardt:
(Nietzsche)
(German and Nordic Cinema)
(Rihm)Labels: Nietzsche, Rihm
Siegfried Mauser
