The Judgement of Calliope – Das Urteil der Kalliope

The muse Calliope has been summoned by Zeus to adjudicate a dispute between Venus and Proserpina. The object of contention is the attractive youth Adonis. During the course of the hearing, the highly ribald and drastic accounts by both parties reveal the background to this dispute: the King of Cyprus, Kinryas, had boasted to Venus that his daughter Myrrha was more beautiful than the goddess of love. Venus took revenge for this insult and caused Myrrha to fall in love with her father and sleep with him. When King Kinryas subsequently attempted to have her put to death, Venus saved the girl by transforming her into a myrtle. When the trunk of the myrtle was split in two with a sword, a boy fell out – Adonis. To protect him from the machinations of the gods, Venus hid Adonis in a closed casket which she entrusted to Proserpina. Although forbidden to do so, Proserpina opened the casket, fell in love with the youth and took him to her palace as her husband Pluto was no longer able to fulfil his obligations as a husband. Calliope delivers a Solonomic judgement: both Venus and Proserpina have equal rights to Adonis. He will live with each of them respectively for a third of the year and be alone and free for the remaining third of the year. At the conclusion of the hearing, the protagonists, facing the audience, report that this arrangement does not work in practice: Venus undermines the arrangement by binding Adonis to her for the whole year with a magic belt. Proserpina subsequently reveals to Mars that Venus has a mortal as a lover which moves Mars, disguised as a wild boar, to kill Adonis on Mount Lebanon. 

"After the first performance of The Bassarids, Auden and Kallman, the librettists, became unsure about the effect of the long intermezzo, The Judgement of Calliope, that was inserted into the third movement of the opera’s symphonic structure. The intermezzo provides an artificial, farce-like representation of the sexual fantasies and hallucinations of the young Pentheus. In the 1992 score of The Bassarids, the intermezzo has been replaced by a short episode lasting only a few seconds, allowing the intermezzo to be considered as a work in its own right. Its new orchestration requires much smaller forces than those used in the original, so that it can be performed in smaller theatres. In addition, there is an arrangement for singers, mandoline and harpsichord made by Henning Brauel in 1974 for studio theatre performances."