The Salzburg Festival Reawakens
A new director challenges the European élite.
Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance Distinguished Professor Peter Sellars is the director of the 2017 Salzburg Festival, and this review in the New Yorker applauds Sellars for his confrontation of complex issues. As stated by reviewer Alex Ross, "Artistic ambitions match social ones."
"The upward-springing hair, bright polyester shirts, and merry cackle of Peter Sellars, the American director, are once again in evidence at the Salzburg Festival, which means that change is in the air. In recent years, this most sumptuous of classical-music gatherings has reverted to its default identity as a parade of musical celebrities with no clear artistic destination in sight. Last year, though, the progressive-minded Austrian pianist and impresario Markus Hinterhäuser took over as Salzburg’s artistic director, and he is stirring memories of the festival’s most vital period—that of the nineteen-nineties, when Gerard Mortier presided over a superb array of provocations, including an avant-garde series that Hinterhäuser co-curated. Sellars was a star of the Mortier era, staging Olivier Messiaen’s “Saint François d’Assise” in 1992 and the première of Kaija Saariaho’s “L’Amour de Loin” in 2000. Now he is back, with a production of “La Clemenza di Tito,” Mozart’s austere, elusive final opera. Mozart is, of course, Salzburg’s native son, and the festival’s raison d’être. He is also the composer through whom Sellars first won fame as an opera director, with feats of modernization that included a “Marriage of Figaro” set in Trump Tower. Sellars’s belated return to Salzburg is a sign that Hinterhäuser intends to revive the spirit of the Mortier regime, which caused consternation at the time but is now remembered as a golden age.
“Panoply of Power” is the motto of Hinterhäuser’s first season. Such slogans festoon the brochures of European festivals, often amounting to little more than pompous afterthoughts. But Hinterhäuser’s decision to begin with “Clemenza” gave the theme substance: to hear the work in Salzburg is to be confronted with multiple representations of power. First, there is the Roman emperor Titus, who in Mozart’s opera assumes an almost saintly profile but is better remembered for his brutal conduct in the Jewish War. Then there is the Austrian emperor Leopold II, for whom Mozart composed the opera, in 1791, and whose benevolent image went hand in hand with anti-revolutionary propaganda. Finally, there are the listeners among whom one sits—a convocation of European élites who have paid up to four hundred and thirty euros for their tickets.
Sellars is not one to overlook such tensions. His “Clemenza,” which unfolds in the Felsenreitschule, the theatre carved out of a Salzburg mountainside, replicates the imaginative shock of his early productions. In collaboration with the Greek conductor Teodor Currentzis, Sellars has drastically revised Mozart’s score, in a fashion that might offend purists. He has reduced the recitatives and interpolated several movements from the Mass in C Minor and other Mozart pieces, further spiritualizing the drama. These changes work surprisingly well: artful manipulations of the recitatives make transitions to and from the Mass sections seamless. In a way, this hodgepodge might be considered more authentic than the original, which was only partly Mozart’s creation. Pressed for time, the composer turned to an assistant—probably his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr—for help in writing the recitatives." — Alex Ross, Jun. 21, 2017 Issue
Read the full article at the New Yorker website.