Perhaps I was too ready fo buy into the wikipedia exegesis that the Theme
of Ariadne auf Naxos is the imperative of change; that we must change and
adapt in order to survive. This morning my memory reminds me forcefully
of the theme of much of Hofmannsthals other ?earlier? ?later? work that
we cannot and do not change: Es bleibt ein jeder der er ist. That each
person remains who he is. And perhaps the paradoxical corollary is that
change returns each person to who he/she is. Significantly Bacchus had
NOT succumbed to Circe's seduction and in that respect remained who he had
been, the son of a mother who ...  and of a father who ... Ariadne's love
for Bacchus is a recapitulation of her jilted love for Theseus whom she had
loved "like a god." (The Lowell House chapter of the Harvard Feminist Watch 
and Ward Society which now rules Harvard must have been asleep - or distracted
by a bacchanalia when it permitted the productiuon of this chauvinistic work
of art whose theme is that a woman is redeemed and made happy (only) by a god 
who loves her.)

I'm interest why the composer to whom the libretto refers as "er" (he) and
"ihn" (him) is cast as soprano. Was it the idea of Hofmannsthal or Strauß?
What (if anything) are they trying to tell us, or each other?