Friedrich Nietzsche’s late cycle of poems Dionysus-Dithyrambs is the inspiration and point of departure for Wolfgang Rihm’s latest music-theater work, which will have its world premiere at the Salzburg Festival. The director Pierre Audi, who has ample experience in working with visual artists, shows how the god of inebriation finds his way into the texts of the philosopher, already marked by madness, how his erotic, traumatized, platonic and pathological relationships with the most important women in his life can be revealed through music, motion and images, how the author himself, racked by illness and yet highly sensitized, becomes a theatrically exuberant event.
For the first time, Audi will collaborate with the visual inspiration of multi-talent Jonathan Meese, who has repeatedly dealt with the subject of Nietzsche before. His opulent and sometimes rigorously structured associations with Nietzsche make him a natural choice for this work. The composer develops a plot without wanting to follow a linear narrative structure – instead, he unfolds a kaleidoscope of images – an almost Dionysian action.

Klaus Bertisch