Bryce Dessner presents Herakles Mad, a major new opera. Together with director and visual artist Ragnar Kjartansson, he explores H of H Playbook by renowned poet Anne Carson: a retelling of Euripides' Heracles tragedy. Carson, Dessner and Kjartansson are long-time artistic comrades interested in testing the boundaries of their individual fields.
H of H Playbook exploits everyday clichés of war and violence – their politics, seductiveness, and sentimentality – to expose the tragic inner cacophony of patriarchy, both ancient and modern. This is an opera of explosive qualities, about a Greek tragedy called Herakles by the 5th Century BC poet Euripides through a contemporary lens. In myth, Herakles is an embodiment of violent masculinity who returns home after years of making war on enemies and monsters (his famous "Labors of Herakles") to find he cannot adapt himself to a life of domestic peace. He goes berserk and murders his whole family. Suicide is his next idea. Amazingly, this does not happen. Due to the intervention of his friend Theseus, Herakles comes to believe he is not, after all, indelibly stained by his own crimes, nor is his life without value. It remains for the viewer to judge this redemptive outcome. It is a two-hour opera staged with grand gestures, painted sets, gilded costumes, soft swords. In it we watch the supreme hero Herakles forced to live, and then outlive, his own myth. That is a fearful thing. We cannot replace him.
Co-commissioned by Theater Basel, LA Philharmonic and Lyric Opera of Chicago, Herakles Mad premieres on May 23, 2027 in Basel conducted by André de Ridder. The cast includes Nicole Chevalier, lfheiður Erla Guðmundsdóttir, Kristinn Sigmundsson, Peter Tantsits, Fleur Barron, and Robert Gleadow in the title role.
Find out more about the premiere run in Basel here.
