Dionysus unbound : Ingmar Bergman stages "The Bacchae" by Daniel Börtz

The paper deals with the opera The Bacchae from 1991, a collaboration between Swedish composer Daniel Börtz and Ingmar Bergman. It was one of the three operas Bergman ever directed. The paper examines The Bacchae in a broad context of modernist reception of Greek tragedy and mythology – an especially important frame of reference is the Dionysian, post-Wagnerian opera – and against the backdrop of Bergman’s other film and theatre productions that deal with his highly ambiguous relation to religion. Bergman incorporated some major themes of European Modernism in his staging. The Bacchae can be read as a part of the "invented tradition" of the black, antilogocentric, violent, obscene antiquity, created around 1900 as an opposition to the bright Winckelmann – inspired version of the past. This dark vision of the archaic roots of human culture corresponds with other modernist topics such as the crisis of language and the attempt to create alternative, body-­-based modes of expression, the blurring of gender identities, the transgressive nature of art and religion and the conception of music as a representation of the "oceanic" unconscious.