Not the baroque cathedral, but Mozart’s birthplace is the Salzburg place of pilgrimage in the narrow Getreidegasse, so loved by tourists. But bad enough: Mozart, the wonder of the world of music, learned to hate beautiful Salzburg. Because archbishop and prince Colloredo shoe-laced his music servant like a footman and drove him to Vienna. Imperial religiosity of this kind was repugnant to Mozart.
It has a Mozart-bitter aftertaste that the Salzburg Festival apparently devoutly calls its week-long “Ouverture” “spiritual” in order to duly celebrate the fraternization of musical secularism and spirituality. Markus Hinterhäuser, the artistic director of the program who was born in Italy, makes it anything but a submissive foreplay. In view of Dante Alighieri’s recently celebrated “Divina Commedia”, the “leading and suffering motifs of this festival summer” are for him the eternal stations of life “heaven, hell and purgatory”. Hofmannsthal’s Salzburg Great World Theater, the mystery play of blessed memory, sends its greetings in all modesty.
War and violence remain present in the imposing baroque collegiate church
stood for the claim at the start the great 13th symphony “Babi Yar” by Dmitri Shostakovich. However, the right place for the Ouverture spiritual is the imposing baroque Collegiate Church, right across from Mozart’s birthplace. War and violence are still present there, too. In commemoration of the genocide of his people in 1915/16, the Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian composed his Latin Requiem, a bulky-soft, even beautiful music of elegiac protest, played with severe sympathy by the Arnold-Schönberg-Choir and strings of the Camerata Salzburg, conducted by Titus Engel.
Mansurian’s Requiem followed the ardent Poème “Guai ai gelidi mostri” by the Venetian Luigi Nono, secretly the overture’s section leader. Two alto voices, accompanied by four wind instruments and three low strings from Klangforum Wien under Sylvain Cambreling, make it clear in live electronic intensification what the horror title is all about: “Woe to the cold monsters”, in blazing heat. Text fragments by Nietzsche, Lucretius, Ovid, Rilke or Gottfried Benn haunt the sacred space. Pale pianissimo brooding soundscapes, sharpened by instrumental signals, only really make you shudder when suddenly, and only twice, the sharpest flashes of sound and brutal tutti thunder intervene. Fear and terror can spread in the fully occupied Kollegienkirche. Komitas Vardapet was the name of the priest and composer around a hundred years ago who renewed the monophonic chants of the old Armenian liturgy. Soprano and conductor Anahit Papayan led the Geghard Vocal Ensemble. “In Tyrannos” was written above the concert.
“Job” was the name of the next. Gija Kanscheli, the Tbilisi-born composer, wrote the five-movement song cycle “Exil” for soprano, instruments and tape in 1994 – combining a Jewish psalm from the Old Testament with the lyrics of two poets persecuted by the National Socialists. The composer experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union far from Georgia, in Berlin; he only returned there occasionally. The soprano Anna Prohaska succeeded in presenting the 23rd Psalm “Der Herr ist mein Hirte” (“The Lord is my shepherd”) with long vocalises in an extremely calm tempo, with lengthened pauses, the stillness of Kancheli’s imaginations. The instrumental sextet, including the flutes by Roy Amotz, the viola by Amihai Grosz, the cello by Nicolas Altstaedt and the violin by Patricia Kopatchinskaja, added halting sounds in the style of minimalism.
Anna Prohaska and her instrumentalists heightened the statements of abandonment and exclusion with three poems set to music by Paul Celan, the traumatized German-Jewish poet from Chernivtsi in Bukovina, today’s Ukraine, who later committed suicide in Paris. Prohaska’s vocal artistry and her power of internalization made a deep impression here. There was a long “postlude” to this: the performance of the “Sacrae lectiones ex propheta Iob” by the old master Orlando di Lasso, written more than 400 years earlier, performed by The Tallis Scholars under Peter Phillips.
Putting programs together in such a way that insights result is a great art
Completely different reminiscences were added to the “spiritual” overture atmosphere designed by Markus Hinterhäuser, for example the oratorio “Abramo ed Isacco” by the Bohemian composer and Mozart contemporary Josef Myslivecek, realized by the Collegium Vocale and Collegium 1704 under Vaclav Luks. The SWR Symphony Orchestra under Maxime Pascal was involved in Artur Honegger’s dramatic oratorio “Jeanne d’Arc au bucher” at the Felsenreitschule, where Irène Jacob and Jerome Kircher replaced the originally popular speaking soloists Isabelle Huppert and André Jung.
Putting together programs and their music, mixing composers and their pieces, their forms and statements, their styles and epochs with the best interpreters in such a way that harmonies create areas of friction, insights, surprises, moments of happiness – that is great art. Markus Hinterhäuser tested it in Salzburg three decades ago with the “Zeitfluss” concert portal. Has now, for example, connected the composers Wolfgang Rihm and Joseph Haydn. “Vigilia” for six voices and ensemble, Rihm’s one-hour Holy Week cycle in a succession of seven motets and sonatas, with a long “Miserere” as the crowning conclusion, is eminently constructive music charged with polyphonic density and spiritual significance. It is reminiscent of Gesualdo’s vocal and adventurous high tension, it demands radical alertness from the listener. With success: Cantando Admont and Klangforum Wien under Sylvain Cambreling mastered “Vigilia” with flying colours. The Hagen Quartet then played Joseph Haydn’s “Seven Last Words of Our Redeemer on the Cross”, the monumentally profound seven Adagio Confessions. Wolfgang Rihm, not defeated by a serious illness, was celebrated with devotion in the Collegiate Church.