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“Alas, there are innumerable such barren islands among human beings, too …”

Naxos: geographical location and spiritual landscape

Naxos, the largest of the Cyclades islands, still combines today two opposite elements of Greek geological structure, which, as it were, embody archetypal contra-dictions. At its eastern end are the crumbling, precipitous cliffs with their emery deposits. On its western side the island slopes down gently to the sea in rich, arable land that even in antiquity was famous for its viniculture. Little wonder, then, that Naxos became the home and place of worship for two vegetation divinities: Dionysius-Bakchos, patron of the vine and at the same time epitome of spiritual liberation, nay of boundless ecstasy; and Ariadne, originally the “most sacred one” and a vegetation goddess, whom the penchant of later generations for genealogical thinking and systematic classification interpreted as the daughter of the king of Crete. At first she was connected with Bakchos through cultic ties, but in time delight in mythological narration developed the relationship into a pretty, romantic one, and Naxos, originally a centre of age-old religious veneration, became the location of an erotic re-awakening, the scene where an unexpected solution to a knotty problem occurred. The Attic hero Theseus had killed the Minotaur monster on Crete and found his way back out of the labyrinth with the help of Ariadne’s thread. Why the hero, who relieved Athens from having to take human sacrifices to the monster, should have left his helper and lover, Ariadne, behind on Naxos – more exactly, abandoned her as she slept on the shore – was a matter that was open to many interpretations even in antiquity: it was seen as an example of divine will and command, of male faithlessness, of political expediency, or of simply getting rid of an embarrassing accessory to the fact.

Change is life

In the music of the western world since the time of Monteverdi, Ariadne has been seen as the archetype of the abandoned, desperate, death-wishing, emotionally wrecked lover. In the turmoil of her inner feelings she vascillates between happy memories and revengeful thoughts, between vision and distraction. The way the episode ends varies according to taste and style, according to the prevailing zeitgeist and the intention of the author: Ariadne remains engulfed in her sorrow, or she becomes a star in the firmament, or she is redeemed by Bakchos and commences a new cycle of life and love.
In Hugo von Hofmannthal's libretto to Richard Strauss’ opera the dramatic action is an expression of the poet’s ‘allomatic’ weltanschauung, whereas the eponymous heroine Ariadne gives expression to a dialectic of fidelity and change, rigidity and vitality. In his so-called ‘Ariadne letter’ to his musical partner in 1912, Hofmannsthal expresses this succinctly: “Change gives life to living, it is the real mystery of creative nature; inflexibility means rigidity and death. Whoever wants to live must get out of himself, he must change, he must forget. And still all human dignity is connected with insistence, with not forgetting.” In the notion of allomatics, however, the author condenses his conviction that all human interaction is profoundly reciprocal, that even strength is involuntarily influenced by weakness, that joy is also sorrow’s keeper. The symbol of this reciprocal relationship, of this interdependence which even affects the divinity, is Bacchus (the Latin form). “Bacchus epitomises the one thing that is lovable and creates love at the higher level: fate. To draw fate on oneself, to become the fate of others, is the noblest force of life; it is given to the chosen ones, to the young boy or the old man. Bacchus is almost a child and yet a god and more than a man.”

Sergio Morabito (Dramaturgie, links im Bild), Anna Viebrock (Ausstattung) und Josi Wieler (Regie) bei der Bauprobe von „Ariadne auf Naxos“. Photo: Schaffler & Friese

Naxos as spiritual landscape

This dramaturgical theme comes to the fore in the libretto on a number of occasions. It is expressed in the words of the young composer about the horoine in the prelude: “She gives herself up to death – she is no longer here – she is swept away – she plunges into the mystery of change – she is born anew – she comes back to life in his arms! – That makes him a god. What else in the world could create divinity if not this experience?”. And at a point in the opera where the musical inspiration is particularly elevated Bacchus announces emphatically: “You! You are everything! I am different from what I was. The sense of the divine has wakened in me, to wholly possess your splendid being!”. He expresses himself even more clearly in the final song of jubilation: “You I needed above everything else! Now I am not the same as I was, through your sorrow I have become rich, now I move my limbs in divine delight!”. But Naxos, too, the deserted Greek island, mutates in Hofmannsthal from a geographical background to a spiritual landscape. It becomes a symbolic location of loneliness and despair. The richest man in Vienna, in whose palace the new opera was destined to be premiered, naturally had no understanding of the work’s symbolic depth. Rather he was, in the words of his Court Master, “irritated that in such a well-provisioned house as his such a bleak and miserable scene as a barren island should be presented to him”. His Dance Master, pleased at the prospect of his troupe of comedians making an early entry, says in zealous agreement: “I find that perfectly right. There is nothing in poorer taste than a barren island.” The words of the composer as he struggled to defend his opera fell on deaf ears: “Ariadne on Naxos, Sir. She is the symbol of all human loneliness ... Nothing about her but sea, stones, trees, an unsympathetic echo. Should she see a human figure, my music would be meaningless.”
As the history of linguistics shows, what the many words of this dialogue express has long been contained in one single word: Isolation. Together with the corresponding verb, to isolate, it comes from the French and goes back to the Latin word insula. When a person is isolated he lives apart from the world about him, cut off from it like an island from the mainland. But Zerbinetta, the frivolous coquette who in her levity forms the proper counterpart to Ariadne, reinterprets the metaphor in her great aria and sees it as deriving from the experience of all women: “Princess, lisen to me – not you alone, we all – alas, we all – what benumbs your heart: what woman is there who has not suffered the same? Abandoned! In despair! Marooned! Alas, there are innumerabale such barren islands among humans beings, too – I myself have often been cast up there…”. And so there is nothing surprising in this comedienne’s all too human interpretation of the exalted proceedings in the finale: “Comes the new god treading hither, mutely we shall worship him!”.