program
Salzburg Festival with a political prelude
According to Markus Hinterhäuser, director of the Salzburg Festival, the policy of the FPÖ is repugnant. photo
© Barbara Gindl/apa/dpa
The director of the Salzburg Festival doesn’t believe in “outrage rituals” against right-wing politics. Instead, he relies on a festival program with attitude and unusual casts.
A dispute about the role of art against the background of conservative right-wing politics has this year Salzburg Festival heralded. While the question of whether and how Russian artists should perform in view of the war of aggression against Ukraine was discussed in 2022, this time local power relations were the focus of a debate about the renowned Austrian festival. The fact that this season’s opera and theater program also poses explosive socio-political questions – not least with a new production of the theater classic “Jedermann”, with which the festival begins on July 21 – receded into the background.
The debate began with a demonstration against the new conservative-right coalition at state level between the ÖVP and FPÖ, at which the former leading actor in “Jedermann” Cornelius Obonya called for a boycott of the festival opening ceremony. Director Markus Hinterhäuser then spoke in an interview with the Viennese newspaper “Der Standard” about the “remarkable intellectual simplicity” of this idea. The policy of the FPÖ was also disgusting to him, but political strategies were needed instead of “these eternally the same rituals of outrage,” said Hinterhäuser. A feuilleton debate followed, in which Hinterhäuser was criticized as an opportunist.
On the theater and opera stages in Salzburg, the audience is not confronted with daily politics, but with broader political issues such as the balance of power between the sexes and persecution. In Michael Sturminger’s new production of “Jedermann”, for example, Valerie Pachner not only plays the love affair of Jedermann (Michael Maertens), which has little text, but also takes on the role of death.
Director Ulrich Rasche goes one step further and cast the title role in Lessing’s tolerance drama “Nathan the Wise” with Valery Tscheplanowa as a female. And Martin Kusej let it be known that in his interpretation of Mozart’s opera “Le nozze di Figaro” he sees women as the focus.
Asmik Grigorian Lady Macbeth
The opera program also includes Bohuslav Martinu’s refugee drama “The Greek Passion”, which premiered in 1961 and which, in view of the mass deaths in the Mediterranean, is becoming increasingly explosive. On the other hand, opera fans can expect a musical rather than a political highlight when soprano Asmik Grigorian makes her role debut as Lady Macbeth in Verdi’s “Macbeth”. Verdi’s “Falstaff”, directed by Christoph Marthaler, also has a top-class cast with Gerald Finley in the leading role.
In the drama program, director Karin Henkel takes the risk of adapting a film that won an Oscar and a Palme d’Or for the stage: she takes on Michael Haneke’s drama “Love” and the question of how society deals with old age, illness and death . In Brecht’s “Caucasian Chalk Circle”, the festival opens up rarely shown perspectives on having and losing children. Because the Swiss ensemble Hora, which consists of actors with cognitive impairments, wants to bring the material to the stage with very personal perspectives.
If all this is still too political for you, you can choose from the 179 performances in the concert program until the end of August. This season’s star soloists include violinist Renaud Capuçon and Igor Levit and Mitsuko Uchida on piano.