Bassarids, The

One-act opera with intermezzo by Hans Werner Henze (libretto by W H Auden and Chester Kallman after The Bacchae of Euripides), first produced in Salzburg, Austria, on 6 August 1966. It had its first British stage performance at the London Coliseum on 10 October 1974, conducted by Henze. The plot describes how Pentheus, in attempting to establish monotheism, incurs the wrath of Dionysus and his followers, who eventually kill him.