Salzburg Festival 2022 – Highlights of the Salzburg Festival 2022: Last rites, first kisses
The opera program with Carl Orff’s “De temporum fine comoedia” offers a reminder of the great Salzburg Festival seasons. At that time, at the premiere in 1973, Orff had long since left the “Carmina burana” times behind. In his endgame, corroborated by early Christian philosophers, Satan begs forgiveness and God forgets all guilt.
Herbert von Karajan conducted the premiere, and the preparations were not without quarrels between the composer and the conductor. In 2022, Teodor Currentzis will direct the performance. He performed the work in Moscow in 2007, the only production of the complex piece outside of the German-speaking world. At this year’s Salzburg Festival, the hour-long work will be combined with Béla Bartók’s two-person psychological thriller Bluebeard’s Castle, both works will be directed by Romeo Castellucci. If the recourse to one of the legendary Salzburg premieres is as understandable as it is welcome, the meaning of the program is not necessarily clear: Wolfgang Rihm’s subtle chamber opera “Jakob Lenz”, for example, probably a birthday gift for his 70th, is given away as a one-off concert performance.
Playful Rossini
Whether Gioachino Rossini’s “Il barbiere di Siviglia” really needs Salzburg Festival conditions seems highly questionable – it’s just a takeover from the Whitsun Festival, staged by audience favorite Rolando Villazón, who prescribed Dracula, rubber ducks and his own exuberance for the play. “A playful evening in two senses”, stated the “Wiener Zeitung”. Anyway: sold out.
Things are different with “Kát’a Kabanová” by Leoš Janáček. This is indeed a work worthy of a festival – only: the audience doesn’t like it. That was already the case in 1998 when Christoph Marthaler directed. Now it’s Barrie Kosky – and as of today, even the August 7 premiere isn’t sold out. Is it because the festival superstars are missing from the cast? Or does the almost 101-year-old work still have the odium that it is “New Music” that is difficult to understand? You can’t really make sense of it.
Since Herbert von Karajan’s time, Italian opera has had a firm foothold, also as a summer festival premiere. Does it always lead to the sniffing fundamental question: should the external production conditions of festivals really serve to perform works that have long been in the repertoire of every opera house worldwide?
After all, one can argue in this special case that Giacomo Puccini’s late “Il Trittico”, consisting of three one-act plays, the gloomy “Mantel”, the seraphic “Angelica Sister” and the grandiose farce “Gianni Schicchi”, is rarely shown in its entirety. As a rule, one plays either just the “Mantel” or “Gianni Schicchi” in combination with a one-act play by another composer, or one combines the tragedy and the comedy and omits the lyrical intermezzo of the “Angelica”. Conductor Franz Welser-Möst and director Christof Loy present the three works in the form desired by the composer, which represents a certain challenge under normal repertoire conditions. The celebrated Salzburg Salome Asmik Grigorian can be seen in three leading female roles – which makes this production undoubtedly worthy of a festival.
Giuseppe Verdi’s “Aida”, on the other hand, is really part of the normal repertoire and only made sense in Salzburg when Anna Netrebko played the title role. The fact that the star soprano is not taking part in Shirin Neshat’s production this year has nothing to do with Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine, from which the Russian-Austrian dual citizen first half-heartedly distanced herself and only credibly distanced herself after long-term concerns. The Russian Elena Stikhina, who, like Netrebko, comes from Valery Gergiev’s St. Petersburg star factory, the Mariinsky Theater, was already cast in 2021.
Local posse “Magic Flute”
And then there was Mozart’s “Magic Flute”, which almost has the status of a local farce in Salzburg – good and justified, acknowledgments. The 15th production of the work since its reopening in 1955 is firmly in the hands of women: Lydia Steier directs, Joana Mallwitz conducts. A conceivable reputation precedes the German musician: she was the youngest general music director in Germany and is currently general music director in Nuremberg. In 2019 she was Conductor of the Year in the critics’ survey of the specialist magazine “Opernwelt”, and her recording of Franz Lehár’s “The Merry Widow” is brilliant. Steier already presented her “Magic Flute” in Salzburg in 2018 (at that time with Constantinos Carydis conducting the Vienna Philharmonic): The concept with an upper-class family and Papageno as a kitchen help, all told by a fairy-tale grandfather to avoid the pathetic speaking scenes, was entertaining shiny but not mature. After the premiere in the Grosses Festspielhaus, artistic director Markus Hinterhäuser is now giving the director a second try at the Haus für Mozart, for which this “Magic Flute” was originally planned.
What is missing is the music theater premiere: no matter how justified references to Salzburg premieres of past decades may be, especially when it comes to unusual works such as Orff’s “De temporum fine comoedia”, it must not be overlooked that the music theater premiere is an important one is part of the original Salzburg Festival Thought War. You can still blame the corona pandemic. Still.
The acting season of the Salzburg Festival traditionally opens with “Jedermann”. Lars Eidinger and Verena Altenberger, last season’s dream team, can be seen in the lead roles from July 18th.
Reinterpretations of old masters
What do the following four premieres bring? New encounters with well-known material from world theater and even a world premiere were rare in Salzburg. In addition, drama director Bettina Hering once again proves that she has a good grip on theater makers who are among the outstanding representatives of their craft but have never been engaged in this country.
One after the other: On July 27, the Marieluise Fleißer double hit “Ingolstadt” will premiere on Perner Island in Hallein. Koen Tachelet combines Fleißer’s well-known dramas “Purgatory in Ingolstadt” and “Pioniere in Ingolstadt”. In both texts, the playwright deals with her hometown and draws a multi-layered portrait of society. Ivo van Hove is directing, with young Burgtheater stars Marie-Luise Stockinger and Jan Bülow taking on the leading roles. The production can be seen at the Burgtheater from September 4th.
From July 28, the “Reigen” is on the program in the Salzburg scene. Schnitzler’s farewell to love is being rewritten by ten authors, including the Austrian brute dramatist Lydia Haider, the scandal author Leïla Slimani and the established Lukas Bärfuss. Director Yana Ross, who caused a sensation last year with her hearty Zurich production of “Short Interviews with Fiesen Men”, is making her Austrian debut at the festival.
Director Ewa Marciniak was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen with her feminist title “Johanna von Orleans”, and now she is producing in Austria for the first time. With her dramaturge Johanna Bednarczyk, she takes on the “Iphigenia” myth, and in this confrontation with Euripides and Goethe no stone will be left unturned. Premiere is on August 18th.
Thorsten Lensing, a well-known theater maker from the independent scene, is bringing out his latest play “Crazy for Consolation” at the Salzburg Mozarteum with stars like Ursina Lardi and Devid Striesow. Except for “Reigen” there are still tickets for all drama productions. Let the games begin.