program
Salzburg Festival brings the 1920s back to life
Back in Salzburg: Lars Eidinger (Jedermann, l) and Verena Altenberger (Buhlschaft). Photo: Barbara Gindl / APA / dpa
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The famous music and theater festival is planning its third pandemic season. In doing so, Salzburg is reflecting on a time that, like today, had fallen apart.
The time of global conflicts and upheavals at the beginning of the 20th century characterizes the program of the Salzburg Festival in summer 2022. Three of the new opera productions originally date from around 1920.
“So from a time that was politically, socially and economically completely out of joint,” as Artistic Director Markus Hinterhäuser said on Friday. Asmik Grigorian will sing the three different leading roles in Giacomo Puccini’s “Il Trittico”. The Bayreuth and Salzburg proven director Barrie Kosky takes on Leoš Janáček’s “Kata Kabanova”. And finally, Teodor Currentzis will conduct Béla Bartók’s work “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle”, which will be performed together with Carl Orff’s “Game from the End of Times” from the 1970s.
Lars Eidinger as everyone
The center of the theater program in Salzburg is traditionally Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Jedermann”, with whom the festival will open on July 18th. After their successful role debuts last summer, Lars Eidinger and Verena Altenberger will be back on stage as Jedermann and Buhlschaft in 2022. The next season also brings a completely new version of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Reigen”. The ten scenes of the relationship drama, which premiered in 1920, were overwritten by ten authors – including Leïla Slimani and Lukas Bärfuss.
According to Hinterhäuser, the programmatic bracket for the 2022 season is provided by an epic that was created 600 years before the 1920s: Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy”. The epic, which leads through hell, purgatory and paradise and tells of despair, hope and redemption, is performed in a marathon reading in Salzburg. Among the speakers are Altenberger and Devid Striesow, who will be making his festival debut in Salzburg next year. The busy German TV, film and stage actor can also be seen in Thorsten Lensing’s new theater work “Crazy for Consolation”.
The concert program includes the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonic orchestras. The list of soloists who will perform in Mozart’s city next summer is considerable: it ranges from Lang Lang, Evgeny Kissin and Igor Levit at the piano to the violinists Anne-Sophie Mutter and Patricia Kopatschinskaja. The musical focus is on Bartók and the contemporary German composer Wolfgang Rihm.
«Corona, have mercy on us»
As in the previous two years, the coming season with 174 performances and almost 225,000 tickets is subject to change due to the corona pandemic. “It’s still a situation that doesn’t make it easy for us to say what will ultimately be feasible,” said Hinterhäuser. With its strict health concept, the festival wants to continue to avoid infections on stage and in the auditorium.
“Corona, have mercy on us,” said the long-time festival president Helga Rabl-Stadler when she presented her last festival program on Friday. In January, the Karlsruhe-born marketing expert Kristina Hammer took on the task of organizing sponsorship funds and representing the festival as a brand.