Bacchanale

A bacchanale is an orgiastic musical composition (Kennedy 2006), often depicting a drunken revel or bacchanal.

Examples include the bacchanales in Camille Saint-Saëns's Samson and Delilah, the Venusburg scene in Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser (Kennedy 2006), "Danse générale (Bacchanale)" from Maurice Ravel's "Daphnis et Chloé," and Tableau 4, the Bacchanale in Alexander Glazunov's The Seasons. John Cage wrote a Bacchanale in 1940, his first work for prepared piano (Pritchett and Kuhn 2001). The French composer Jacques Ibert was commissioned by the BBC for the tenth anniversary of the Third Programme in 1956 (Anon. 1956), for which he wrote a Bacchanale.

In 1939, Salvador Dalí designed the set and wrote the libretto for a ballet entitled Bacchanale, based on Wagner's Tannhäuser and the myth of Leda and the Swan.

Bacchanale (1954) was written by composer Toshiro Mayuzumi, for 5 saxophones (soprano, 2 alto, tenor, baritone), timpani, percussion (4), piano, celesta, harp, strings. The previous year, he had written a Bacchanale for orchestra (Kanazawa 2001).

References

• Anon. 1956. "Third Programme Anniversary: Music Commissioned for the Occasion". The Times, issue 53570 (Friday, Jun 29 June): 11, col C.
• Kanazawa, Masakata. 2001. "Mayuzumi, Toshirō". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
• Kennedy, Michael. 2006. "Bacchanale". The Oxford Dictionary of Music, second edition, revised, Joyce Bourne, associate editor. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198614594.
• Pritchett, James, and Laura Kuhn. 2001. "Cage, John". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.