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Henze’s ‘The Bassarids’ Will Return to the Salzburg Festival

The festival will be the second under Markus Hinterhäuser, who became its artistic director this year.Credit...Franz Neumayr for The New York Times

Hans Werner Henze’s “The Bassarids” — a retelling of Euripides’s “The Bacchae” with a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman — will return to the Salzburg Festival next summer, the site of its premiere in 1966, festival officials announced on Wednesday.

Salzburg, one of classical music’s most important festivals, will continue to plumb the works of its hometown composer-made-good, Mozart: It will mount a new, reimagined production of “Die Zauberflöte” directed by Lydia Steier that will star the German baritone Matthias Goerne as Sarastro — and feature the actor Bruno Ganz, who played Hitler in “Downfall,” in a new speaking role. Constantinos Carydis will conduct the Vienna Philharmonic.

The festival, which will run from July 20 through Aug. 30, will also feature new productions of Tchaikovsky’s “Pique Dame” conducted by Mariss Jansons and directed by Hans Neuenfels; Strauss’s “Salome” conducted by Franz Welser-Möst and directed by Romeo Castellucci; Monteverdi’s “L’incoronazione di Poppea” with William Christie leading Les Arts Florissants and starring Sonya Yoncheva; and a reprise of Rossini’s “L’Italiana in Algeri” starring Cecilia Bartoli, which will first be performed in May at the Salzburg Whitsun Festival.

It will be the second Salzburg Festival under the leadership of Markus Hinterhäuser, the pianist and impresario who became its artistic director this year. Next summer a pair of mini-festivals within the festival will explore the music of Galina Ustvolskaja, the Russian composer who died in 2006, and Beat Furrer, the Swiss-born composer.

The festival’s house band, the Vienna Philharmonic, will give concerts under the batons of Andris Nelsons, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Riccardo Muti, Herbert Blomstedt and Mr. Welser-Möst. Pianists including Evgeny Kissin, Igor Levit, Grigory Sokolov, Yuja Wang, Maurizio Pollini, András Schiff and Daniil Trifonov will play. Jonas Kaufmann is scheduled to give a lieder recital, Plácido Domingo to sing in a concert performance of Bizet’s “Les Pêcheurs de Perles,” and Anna Netrebko to sing Verdi and Giordano in concert with her husband, the tenor Yusif Eyvazov.

The intense “The Bassarids” may not be well-known to many operagoers today, and produced something of a crisis in Henze after its premiere, but the Salzburg Festival argues that it is “one of the most important operas of the second half of the 20th century.” Its new production, conducted by Kent Nagano and directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski, will restore the intermezzo “The Judgement of Calliope,” which has often been cut in subsequent performances of the work.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Bassarids’ to Return To the Salzburg Festival. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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