Heavy funerary iconography, Rossellini lighting and an unflinching gaze at la famiglia places Krzysztof Warlikowski’s staging of The Bassarids somewhere near Rome in the 1930s, at a sufficient distance not to frighten the Salzburg audience, near enough to elucidate parallels between past and present. Williard White enters as Cadmus, godfather of Thebes, but his time has passed. His kingdom has passed to Pentheus, beautifully sung and acted with wounded dignity by Russell Braun as a chubby young dictator whose edict of anathema against the mysterious foreign visitor echoes the motto of fascist Italy, ‘Mussolini always knows best’.

But tomorrow belongs to Dionysus, who wreaks unsparing vengeance on Pentheus and all his earthly family, though Warlikowski’s elegantly ambivalent ending does not suggest a happy ending for him more than for the wretched inhabitants of Thebes, in thrall to their careless new god. Sean Panikkar stole the headlines in Salzburg, and rightly so, for a performance of astonishing vocal assurance, but the supporting cast is no less strong than at the celebrated Salzburg premiere in 1966 (Orfeo, 1/04). Anna Maria Dur raises the old-nurse part of Beroe above stereotype, especially in her fervent but hopeless plea that Dionysus draw back from visiting ruin on his repressed cousin.

Henze accounted for The Bassarids as his most Mahlerian score, but, more subtly than Christoph von Dohnányi back in 1966, Kent Nagano prevents it from lapsing into one expressionist hammer-blow after another, aided by the multi-miked recording and a video direction that ventures above and behind the Felsenreitschule proscenium to dig deep into the opera’s psyche. Within two years of the premiere Henze had sacrificed the lengthy, ironising intermezzo in the third scene on the altar of dramatic continuity. In restoring it, neither Warlikowski and Nagano nor Barry Kosky and Vladimir Jurowski in Berlin (a 2019 Komische Oper production available to stream at operavision.eu) persuade me he was wrong to do so: there is a tired ennui about Warlikowski’s S&M staging of it, as Pentheus sees his Dionysian fantasies come to disturbing life, that mirrors Henze’s heavy-handed treatment of Auden and Kallman’s archly sprung text and puts a brake on the momentum of nemesis.

It’s a minor personal reservation in the face of a remarkable achievement, one that lends clarity and humanity to a piece that sometimes staggers under the weight of its own ambitions, and draws it closer to the jewelled perfection of Henze’s previous collaboration with Auden and Kallman, Elegy for Young Lovers: now there’s a post-war classic of the lyric stage deserving revival on film.