Felsenreitschule (Salzburg, Austria, Theater)

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    “The Greek Passion” Takes Center Stage at the Salzburg Festival

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    Bohuslav Martinu’s “Greek Passion” poses a timeless question: when a group of refugees seek protection in a new community, what will the locals do?Bohuslav Martinu’s final opera, “The Greek Passion,” explores a story that was as explosive in the mid-twentieth century as it is today. When a group of refugees seeks protection in the village of Lycovrissi, the community is thrown into upheaval: Will the villagers reaffirm their Christian virtues or indulge in acts of selfishness?This Aug. 13-27, the opera will be performed for the first time at the Salzburg Festival in a production directed by Simon Stone. Maxime Pascal, the 2014 winner of the summertime event’s annual Young Conductors Award, leads — his first fully staged opera here — in the Felsenreitschule.The festival has performed Martinu’s work occasionally since 1950, presenting the world premiere of his orchestral piece “Les Fresques de Piero della Francesca” in 1956. Recent editions have seen mostly chamber music.“The Greek Passion” had personal resonance for Martinu, who was perpetually homesick in his last years. Born in 1890 in Policka — a town in Bohemia just over the Moravian border (in the modern-day Czech Republic) — he came into maturity as a composer in Paris in the 1920s and ’30s. In 1941, as a member of the French Resistance, he fled the Nazis for the United States. Martinu would die in Switzerland, in 1959, unable to return to his native country for political reasons.Bohuslav Martinu in 1948.Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone, via Getty ImagesAfter a long search for a tragic subject matter that he could personally adapt into a libretto, he discovered the novels of Nikos Kazantzakis and won approval to adapt his book “Christ Recrucified.”“I now feel ready for another step,” the composer wrote to the Guggenheim Foundation in 1956, “which is most difficult and entails the greatest responsibility, and that is a musical tragedy.”Martinu collaborated closely with Kazantzakis as he worked through the novel, in an English translation by Jonathan Griffin. The original conflict, involving Turkish rule, was tightened, so that the standoff in Lycovrissi (a town north of Athens) involved only Greeks.Ales Brezina, director of the Bohuslav Martinu Institute, explained that the story line, as such, had particular import to the composer in the context of Cold War politics that pitted people of the same nation against each other. Having taken up American citizenship, Martinu was considered a traitor in his home country. In the United States, he had to face the repercussions of being a Czech native during the anti-communist McCarthy era.“In the context of a bipolar world where everything was suspect,” Mr. Brezina said, “Martinu was moved by the topic of what people were capable of doing to their fellow countrymen.”Mr. Pascal, the conductor, also emphasized the centrality of this dynamic to the work. “A group of Greeks arrives in a Greek village, and they start to chase them away,” he said. “This reveals the viciousness of an angry mob toward another human being and humanity itself.”The score features two choruses — one representing the people of Lycovrissi, another, the refugees — a structure that follows a long tradition of musical settings of the Passion, or the story of the Crucifixion, as told in the Gospels of the Bible. In “The Greek Passion,” art becomes life as the villagers re-enact a Passion play. The shepherd Manolios, who portrays Christ, is ultimately murdered after he challenges his fellow villagers about the authenticity of their values.Mr. Pascal pointed out that Kazantzakis was considered a heretic for reinterpreting the doctrines of faith as they had been handed down by the church. “He saw a revolutionary figure in the figure of Christ but most of all saw in the mystery of Christianity something along the lines of a legend or myth,” he said.Simon Stone is directing the production.Jan Friese/SFMartinu left behind two very different versions of “The Greek Passion” because of an unusual twist of events. He chose the Royal Opera in London as the location for the premiere, although there was also interest from the Vienna State Opera, the Salzburg Festival and La Scala in Milan.Yet the opera was ultimately rejected by external advisers to the theater’s board. The musicologist and conductor Anthony Lewis argued that certain works by the Czech natives Smetana and Janacek had yet to be heard in London, and that the house needed to champion contemporary English composers.Despite the relentless support of the Royal Opera’s music director, the Czech-born Rafael Kubelik, the board would not reverse its decision. Martinu, for his part, believed that the war for independence in Cyprus — which was affecting diplomatic relations between Britain and Greece — might have tainted the subject matter.He revised and tightened the score for the Zurich Opera, where the show premiered in June 1961, after Martinu’s death, under the baton of his friend and patron, Paul Sacher. The original version, intended to premiere in London, did not hit the stage until 1999 at the Bregenz Festival in Austria.Mr. Brezina, who reconstructed the score for that production, compared the original version to a “dramatic fresco” or a “mosaic in which individual scenes and appearances blaze against each other.” The Zurich version, which will be performed in Salzburg, by contrast resembles “a kind of oratorio with wonderful melodies and choral scenes,” he said.Martinu’s mature works achieve an unprecedented synthesis of Czech and French elements, combining Bohemian rhythms and Moravian cadences with the influences of such composers as Stravinsky and Debussy. His “Greek Passion,” however, is distinct in that he carefully absorbed Greek Orthodox music, only occasionally alluding to his Czech roots. In 1955, Martinu traveled to New York to meet with friends of Kazantzakis and learn about Greek folk music and liturgy.Mr. Brezina explained that Martinu was keen to portray simple people while keeping his distance from the “farmer’s music” that can be found in the works of Janacek, who was the first composer to adapt Moravian speech patterns and melodies to the operatic stage. “He found in Kazantzakis exceptional intelligence, but also a down-to-earth person,” he said. “All the characters in the ‘Greek Passion’ have almost no education. They behave instinctively.”Mr. Pascal noted that the displacement of peoples in Greece echoed developments in Martinu’s native Czechoslovakia. “The oral songs and dances that migrated from region to region must have spoken enormously to him,” he said.The conductor also pointed to the score’s strongly Impressionist character. “There is incredible violence, but at the same time everything seems to be bathed in sunlight,” he said.Mr. Pascal further reflected on the superimposition of time periods that can be typical for a composer’s ultimate statement: “The after-war period, the period of Christ, Greece: There is a continuity between the past and present that is vertiginous.This is also found in Mahler’s ‘Das Lied von der Erde’ — in which 8th-century Chinese texts bifurcate with a text that the composer wrote himself — or Gérard Grisey’s ‘Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil.’”Although it is rarely performed, “The Greek Passion” is considered Martinu’s greatest operatic achievement, alongside his 1938 surrealist masterpiece “Juliette.” “It is the self-proclaimed pinnacle of his work for the stage,” Mr. Brezina said. 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      Review: Salzburg Festival Opens With Operatic Apocalypses

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      Romeo Castellucci directs, and Teodor Currentzis conducts, an unusual double bill of a Bartok classic and an Orff rarity at the Salzburg Festival.SALZBURG, Austria — The public has spoken.Any fears the Salzburg Festival had over whether the conductor Teodor Currentzis’ presence there would attract boos or disruptive protests were dispelled on Tuesday. Since the invasion of Ukraine began, he has attracted controversy over his and his ensemble MusicAeterna’s Russian state support, as well as their silence on the war and ties to associates of that country’s president, Vladimir V. Putin. But at the opening of a new double bill led by Currentzis and featuring members of the MusicAeterna choir, the audience responded only with applause.Whether the evening — a pretentious, overlong yet occasionally illuminating marriage of Bela Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and the Carl Orff rarity “De Temporum Fine Comoedia,” directed by Romeo Castellucci at the expansive Felsenreitschule — could have been divisive on artistic grounds is one thing. Politically, however, it was extremely complicated, worthy of neither cheers nor boos but rather more of a “hmm.”The festival itself was under scrutiny for standing by Currentzis. Unlike, say, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, which has taken a hard line on Russian artists with links to Putin, such as Valery Gergiev and Anna Netrebko, Salzburg has kept a close eye on the European Union’s sanctions list and said in a statement, “We see no foundation for artistic or economic collaboration with institutions or individuals who identify with this war, its instigators or their goals.”Do Currentzis and MusicAeterna fall into that category? Based in St. Petersburg, they are primarily sponsored by VTB Bank, a Russian state institution that was sanctioned this year, and some prominent Russian officials sit on the board of the ensemble’s foundation. As a collective, it doesn’t have any public stance on the war, though organizations and critics have mostly demanded one from the safety of their Western perches.At the very least, Currentzis seems to have fallen into careerist behavior. Since 2004, he has been building MusicAeterna toward the international standing it enjoys, and as the ensemble went freelance in recent years, it found Russian funding that has since been revealed as untenable. To survive in the West without scandal, it needs a new home, and new sponsors. And the longer this war goes on, the more silence will become as impossible as the group’s current position.Teodor Currentzis leading a rehearsal with the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, the pit ensemble for the production.Alexandra MuravyevaIn an interview on Monday, Markus Hinterhäuser, the Salzburg Festival’s artistic director, said that if people are looking for a statement from Currentzis, “the signs are there.” His work has subtly condemned Russian state beliefs, as well as the country’s troubled 20th-century history; and in 2017 he was outspoken about the arrest of the director Kirill Serebrennikov, which was widely seen as punishment for his theater that was critical of life under Putin.The examples could go on in either direction. But outwardly, Currentzis remains a mystery. If his previous projects have offered signs of his beliefs, there were few if any political revelations in the double bill on Tuesday. All that was left to judge was the art-making itself.And that was something of a sequel to Currentzis’ collaboration with Castellucci last year: a staging of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” here that stretched the score an hour beyond its typical running time, with recitative delivered at the speed of snow melting in the nearby Alps. I remember spending four hours inside the Grosses Festspielhaus trying to understand why an interpretation like this was necessary; I still don’t have an answer.Both men are strong-willed, provocative auteurs. Separately, they have been capable of awe-inspiring work; together, they seem to mutually enable an exasperating self-indulgence. Their Bartok and Orff, then, made for an uneven night, as double bills can be — a “Bluebeard” of misguided tempos and dynamics but committed performances and a “Comoedia,” for all the work’s flaws, more persuasively executed than on Herbert von Karajan’s original recording, in a staging characteristically monumental yet somewhat pompous.Once again, the evening was longer than it needed to be. Each score contains about an hour of music; with an intermission, the double bill ran a little over three and a half hours, in part because of tempo choices, but mostly because the scenes in the Orff were padded with new, atmospheric transitional passages written by Currentzis. This prolonged a piece that few find enjoyable to begin with, and that Castellucci didn’t have much to say about.Members of the MusicAeterna choir and the Bachchor Salzburg in Carl Orff’s “De Temporum Fine Comoedia.”Monika RittershausHis biggest interpretive statement was in bridging the two works, which wouldn’t appear to share much beyond different scales of apocalyptic events. In “Bluebeard,” it’s intimate — the slow-burning drama of a wife unveiling her new husband’s pained world, to the destruction of them both. And in the “Comeodia,” which premiered at Salzburg in 1973, it’s cosmic, with an impersonal, aggressively Christian vision for the end of time.Castellucci has the spoken prologue of “Bluebeard,” a cameo role called the Bard, given with a declamatory grandeur that later matches the musicalized speech of the “Comoedia.” (The Bard is also played by Christian Reiner, who returns at the end of the Orff as Lucifer.) And he threads the action of the first opera with the second: Bluebeard and his wife Judith, Castellucci suggests, are here an established couple in grief over the loss of their child, and in a dreamy, dark void of just water and fire. Peace comes for them at the end of the “Comoedia,” where they return in an act of redemption that renders Judith as a sort of Eve bringing about universal salvation.Elsewhere, visual motifs — masks, costumes and even stains — recur throughout both works, which are otherwise aesthetically distinct. The trouble is that these Easter eggs, along with the more explicit gestures, and stylized movement choreographed by Cindy Van Acker, exist more to justify the double bill than elevate the meaning, and, crucially, the emotional impact of either work. Both the Bartok and the Orff come out feeling less operatic for it.Ausrine Stundyte brought a compelling, fierce humanity to her Judith.Monika RittershausNot that emotion was absent from the performance. As Judith, the soprano Ausrine Stundyte made a bizarre treatment of the character — constantly on the verge of self-immolation — at least compelling, with a fierce humanity largely absent in the staging. (Her counterpart, the bass Mika Kares, was a resonant but wooden Bluebeard, a passive presence where he should have outdone her unraveling.) The Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra played with organic unpredictability yet skilled precision, and brought animalistic intensity to the Orff.Where they took a wrong step, they were following Currentzis’ baton, which was less reliable than when he and the orchestra performed a moving, sweeping account of Shostakovich’s “Babi Yar” Symphony during the festival’s Ouverture Spirituelle last week. His reading of “Bluebeard,” an opera of accumulative power, was one of luxuriant tempos and high emotional temperature with nowhere to go but occasional crests that drowned out the singers, despite the hair-raising power of Stundyte’s voice.Currentzis’ take on the Orff, though — realized by the orchestra with a game combination of the MusicAeterna choir, the Bachchor Salzburg and the Salzburger Festspiele und Theater Kinderchor — was a triumph that reveled in the primitive, ritualistic nature of the work and rose to rattling clashes that you could feel deep within your ears.In an evening of looking for signs in Currentzis’ work, it was difficult to miss that his podium sat empty during the final, prerecorded moments of the “Comoedia” score. So he was nowhere to be seen as a single sentence spread over supertitle screens above the stage: Pater, peccavi. Father, I have sinned.Bluebeard’s Castle and De Temporum Fine ComoediaThrough Aug. 20 at the Felsenreitschule, Salzburg, Austria; salzburgerfestspiele.at. More

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      An Opera Screams for Human Dignity

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      Luigi Nono’s furiously political and prophetic “Intolleranza 1960” arrives at the Salzburg Festival.SALZBURG, Austria — “Intolleranza 1960,” Luigi Nono’s furious work of music theater, is a scream for dignity in the face of oppression, racism toward migrants and merciless ecological disaster. And that was 60 years ago.“Unfortunately things are still just as bad,” Nuria Schoenberg Nono, the composer’s widow and a daughter of the work’s dedicatee, Arnold Schoenberg, recently said with a weary laugh.Indeed, decades after its premiere — at a time when floods have ravaged parts of Europe and the pandemic has been seized upon by xenophobic authoritarians around the world — the piece could just as easily be presented as “Intolleranza 2021.”Its original title, which belies the work’s timelessness, will remain when it arrives at the Salzburg Festival here on Sunday. The production, directed by Jan Lauwers and conducted by the Nono veteran Ingo Metzmacher, may be the most terrifying, brash and cathartic operatic offering of the summer.Nono — an idealistic Italian composer who lived from 1924 to 1990 and was a chief midcentury musical innovator alongside his Darmstadt School colleagues Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez — has been a fixture in Salzburg for three decades now. This is largely because of the efforts of Metzmacher and Markus Hinterhäuser, the festival’s artistic director; in 1993, they staged the Nono masterpiece “Prometeo,” which he considered a “tragedy of listening,” and other works of his have steadily followed.“I regard Luigi Nono as one of the most important, significant, enriching figures in musical history,” Hinterhäuser said in an interview in his office, sitting under a portrait of the composer. “The figure of Nono is the artist who is not doing ‘l’art pour l’art.’ It is always related to our existence, to our life, to our human condition.”The set of Lauwers’s staging is minimal, featuring projections on the stone backdrop of the Felsenreitschule theater and the word “INTOLLERANZA” written across the stage.Maarten Vanden Abeele/SF“Intolleranza,” Nono’s first theatrical work, was written in response to political and social upheaval and premiered as part of the Venice Biennale in 1961. It has elements of opera yet rebels against the form — in part, Nuria Nono said, “because he was aware that he was writing in the country of Verdi and Puccini.”Instead, the “azione scenica,” or “stage action,” as Nono called it, has more in common with the “epic theater” of Bertolt Brecht. It unfolds — with at times whiplash momentum — as a series of episodes about a migrant seeking work in Italy and finding political demonstrations, torture, concentration-camp cruelty and societal absurdities, along with a lifesaving human connection in the form of a female companion and, at last, a life-ending flood.The scenes were inspired by current events, but Hinterhäuser said the sum of their parts transcended the particular situation of Italy circa 1960.“We could also be talking about ‘Fidelio,’” he said. “Great artworks have something prophetic, and there is something prophetic that liberates this piece. I’m not interested in daily politics and art; I’m interested in politics and art. And while art is not free from political elements, it needs to have another level of reflection.”Nono’s score is often, a bit unfairly, described as strident. The piece calls for a massive orchestra — in Salzburg, the Vienna Philharmonic, filling the pit of the Felsenreitschule theater and also flanking its stage with a battery of percussion. The cast is no smaller in scale: a full chorus, unaccompanied in the first and last scenes, and principal singers who perform at extremes of pitch and volume.“It’s an opera about a collective,” Hinterhäuser said. “It has to do with muscles — the choir, the cast, the 26 dancers we have in this production — and the rising up of the masses.”To reflect that, he brought in Lauwers, who directed Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” at Salzburg in 2018. In an interview, Lauwers described his work this summer as a continuation of his broader preoccupation over the past decade with theater focused almost entirely on people. This is why the set is virtually nonexistent here, and is mostly just projections on the towering stone backdrop of the Felsenreitschule, the word “INTOLLERANZA” written across its broad stage.Within that space, a cast of nearly 100 singers and dancers is almost always in motion and onstage for the work’s 75-minute running time. The tenor Sean Panikkar, who plays the emigrant protagonist, said that Lauwers has conducted rehearsals with an improvisational style, “which allows for freedom and play,” before arriving at a more narrowed focus.Lauwers’s approach has also involved conversations with the cast about how to comfortably portray, for example, a scene of prolonged torture that is nearly impossible to watch and hardly less difficult to perform.The tenor Sean Panikkar, left, as the emigrant protagonist.Maarten Vanden Abeele/SF“In the score, there are 22 minutes where Nono just says, ‘There is torture and screaming,’” Lauwers said. “At a certain point in rehearsals, some performers said: ‘We can’t do this. It’s emotionally too heavy for me.’ But we have to make it unbearable. This is the reality.”Yet some cast members saw that scene as an opportunity to build on the libretto. “Musa Ngqungwana, one of the soloists, wanted to shout, ‘I can’t breathe,’” Lauwers said. “The others were like, ‘Wow, are we going there?’ But in the libretto, it says, ‘I hear the noise of the tortured people.’ So I said, ‘Yes, it’s your freedom there if you want to say that, and I as a director am not going to say you can’t.”Compared with the improvisatory spirit of the staging, Metzmacher has been exacting with the score’s thorny rhythms and textures — which are foundational, he said, to the work’s emotional power. “The music is like thunder,” he added. “What interests me, though, is that Nono also has this hope and vision of love. I think it’s good that the music shocks, but on the other side, it has these incredible tender moments. It’s very suspended, delicate and ‘dolcissimo.’”Panikkar described the score as initially almost impossible to comprehend; when he first looked at it, he counted the number of high C’s, each requiring a different sound, and “thought it was insane.”“From the rhythmic structure, the brutal vocal passages and the physical demands of the staging,” he said, “it’s like a tornado that ravages everything in its path and then dissipates.”The premiere of “Intolleranza” was less a tornado than a battlefield. Far-right “agitators,” as they were called by The New York Times, disrupted the performance with shouts, whistles and stench bombs — and were met with equally passionate boos and cries — until they were removed by police.“They were also throwing down little pieces of paper,” Nuria Nono recalled. “I think I still actually have some of them.”A few years ago, she said, she was giving a tour of the Nono archive in Venice. When she arrived at the models and recordings of the “Intolleranza” premiere, one of the visitors said: “I was there! My father” — a right-wing fascist — “paid us to make a lot of noise.”But the show went on. And it ended, as the Times report noted, in “a triumph.” That’s because in “Intolleranza,” Nuria Nono said, “all the negative emotions and positive ones balance out.”“My husband cared very much about people dying and being tortured,” she added. “But in spite of all the ugly things that are happening, there are human relationships, and there is hope. In all his works, there is hope.” More