Salzburg Festival, Bayreuth Tragedies • NEWS.AT
What the Salzburg Festival has been doing for three summers in dealing with phenomena of a notorious pandemic and epidemic: That reserved the incumbent intention at least two bold footnotes in cultural history. I’m not even referring to the (also mostly successful) artistic aspect, but to the beacon function that art companies with international reputation should have a priori committed themselves to. Unfortunately, there is mostly a lack of how to study the first summer of the pandemic. The restrictions were lifted under certain conditions, but neither Bregenz nor Bayreuth dared to open up. Only in Salzburg did you dare, and August 2020 will not be forgotten by anyone who was lucky enough to be there.
Everyone is playing again this year, but on one side of the disastrous war it is against artists. The already menacingly shrinking culture bubble, to which it is no less important than my life to belong, was also infected from the inside. Former State Opera director Dominique Meyer, who opens the coming season at La Scala in Milan with a premiere of “Boris Godunov”, has to do without two Ukrainian singers who, for their part, have been banned by their government from performing in a Russian opera. In the past five months, this kind of state barbarism has gone into fatal acquaintance with marketing-based baseness: Previously unnoticed fringe members of my industry – “blogger phenomenon”, “whistleblowers” in dwarf format – have chosen the destruction of Russian artists’ existence through denunciation and Internet hate speech as their career model .
Beacons of opportunism – particularly repellent the “Met” in New York, which Anna Netrebko will hopefully have to compensate with millions for outright breach of contract – followed worldwide epigones who are afraid of the “shitstorm” and other irrationalities. In addition to other artists based in Russia, the Greek conductor Teodor Currentzis, who created a continent-spanning peace project with the formation “MusicAeterna”, is particularly affected. The young musicians from 15 nations have recently lost many contracts. In Salzburg, however, both the conductor and the choir and orchestra perform. The fear of demonstrations and international ostracism was enormous. And was there war? Nothing. The poor devils in front of the Festspielhaus have activated their vuvuzelas against Van der Bellen, vaccination and their own misery. But not a honk against Currentzis, who was responsible for the great Bartók Orff premiere indoors. The crowd gave a standing ovation, the reviews were top-notch, and for a minority program, so is the turnout. As in 2020, the strategy against faintheartedness and meanness is given from Salzburg for the second time: ignored, nothing more. Especially since Currentzis has just presented a parallel project independent of Russia.
Salzburg is blooming, the best of the best perform there every day. Meanwhile, Bayreuth is drowning in chaos: the conductor Pietari Inkinen, who was scheduled for the new “Ring”, who demonstrated an iconic degree of incompetence in the “Valkyrie” last year, is absent due to illness. He is represented by the former head of the Vienna ORF Orchestra, who therefore had to pass “Tristan and Isolde” on to the music director in Linz. Advance ticket sales have collapsed.
In order to systematize the devastation, Bayreuth is still writing as much as possible against Thielemann, the outstanding conductor of our time. The allegations – that he disrespected a double bass – are too silly to reply. But the consequences are intoxicating. Thielemann is in the top position when it comes to succeeding Riccardo Muti at the Chicago Symphony. But now there are no more mutual excuses to take him away to Salzburg in the summer. In Milan in 2024 he will create a new “Ring” and how the Philharmonic cling to his hands has just been exemplified in Salzburg with an unforgettable Ninth Bruckner. In the season after next, Thielemann will conduct the new “Lohengrin” and a series of Strauss’s “Frau ohne Schatten” at the State Opera. Maybe something bigger is in the works. With which I gently touch on a topic that will soon be explored in more detail: the contract of the acting State Opera Music Director Philippe Jordan expires in 2025, and the passion of the Philharmoniker for his whereabouts is of an invisibility-reaching manageability.
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