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    The Baritone Andrè Schuen Performs at the Salzburg Festival

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    Andrè Schuen stars as Count Almaviva in the Salzburg Festival’s new production of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.”Andrè Schuen, a fast-rising young Italian baritone, brings innate musicality to his performances. Born in La Val, a small village in Südtirol, the mountainous region at the border with Austria, Schuen grew up speaking three languages: Ladin, Italian and German.This summer, Schuen, 38, stars as Count Almaviva in the Salzburg Festival’s new production of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” running from July 27 to Aug. 28. With rehearsals underway in late June, he spoke in a video call about his background and upcoming performance. The following conversation, translated from German, has been edited and condensed.You hail from a remote region and are part of a cultural-linguistic minority, the Ladin people. How did this background influence your musical formation?From childhood onward, music was always the most important thing. That was also the case with my father, who got his love of music from his father.You need to remember that 100 years ago people were very poor where I come from. Before tourism, they were all farmers who lived off their fields and cows.My grandfather acquired a small collection of instruments, which my father passed on to us. That means that we grew up with music, including many folk songs, with my father playing accordion and clarinet, my two sisters on violin, and me on cello.We also made music together as a family and put together a program connected to our Ladin national saga, about the legend of the Kingdom of Fanes. Later, I was in a band and did covers of everything, including punk songs.You weren’t listening to Schubert alone in your room.Not at all! Quite the opposite. For instance, when I was 13, soccer meant everything to me. I was on a team. It’s not like my parents forced me in a musical direction. If I had said I wanted to be a carpenter, then I would have become a carpenter.When did you start playing cello?When I was about 7. I studied cello for 12 years. I knew that I liked to sing, but singing classically would have never occurred to me. One of my sisters told me, “You sing well. Why don’t you give it a shot?”So I auditioned for voice at the Mozarteum [University] in Salzburg. And that’s how it happened. Without ever thinking about it too much, everything pretty much came together harmoniously.What does singing give you that playing the cello doesn’t?I think it has a bit to do with the fact that you are the instrument yourself, that you don’t have to take something in your hand and practice on it. And of course, there’s the added element of text. I think being an opera singer has more parameters. It’s not just about singing.This summer you’ll be appearing as the Count in “Figaro.” You’ve also sung the title character many times. What’s it like being both upstairs and downstairs in this opera?Personally, I prefer singing the Count. He’s not exactly a positive character, but that’s exactly what makes him interesting. He has more layers than Figaro. He has a soft, seductive side, but he’s also aggressive or irascible and you need to switch quickly between emotions.Most recently, you sang the Count in Barrie Kosky’s acclaimed, comically astute Vienna production of “Figaro.” Is Martin Kusej, the director in Salzburg, going to show us a different side of “Figaro”?Definitely. [Kusej] doesn’t want to reproduce the piece the way it was intended in [Mozart’s] time. He’s trying to bring out something relevant that still touches or concerns us nowadays. But I don’t think he’s looking for that through the comedy.You recently sang your first Wolfram in “Tannhäuser.” How was it singing such a meaty Wagner role?I was emotionally transported. As for other Wagner roles, we’ll see where else my voice leads me. But Mozart will probably remain a key part of my repertoire until the end. The Count is not a part I want to retire, because it’s a role you can still sing when you’re 60. More

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      At the Salzburg Festival, Bertolt Brecht Pushes Boundaries

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      Brecht’s 1944 play “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” is set to challenge its performers and audiences, just as a once-banned Brecht would have liked.As a playwright and director, Bertolt Brecht revolutionized theater, dragging 20th-century politics into the room and swapping escapism for urgent and timely themes played out almost in the laps of audience members.He also provoked many theatrical companies — notably the Salzburg Festival. In 1950, Brecht was given Austrian citizenship after agreeing to adapt the 15th-century play “Jedermann” (“Everyman”), a staple of the festival since 1920. But he never did, instead embracing Marxist ideologies and moving to East Berlin, which prompted an official boycott of his work in Austria that lasted 10 years. His works have rarely been performed at the Salzburg Festival since.But now, “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” his 1944 play written during his years in America, will be staged there on Aug. 12-22 (in German with English supertitles). In a theatrical choice that would have no doubt thrilled the ever-inventive Brecht, this “Chalk Circle” will be presented with the Swiss company Theater Hora, made up of actors with learning disabilities, underscoring the power of Brecht’s works to push the boundaries of both performers and audiences. This “Chalk Circle” feels more urgent and well-timed for those involved.“The play takes place during a civil war and is all about empathy,” Bettina Hering, the drama director of the Salzburg Festival, said in a video interview, “but it also shows that society is multilayered.”Like Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” “Chalk Circle” weaves motherhood into politics and the brutality of war. The play is based on a 13th-century Chinese parable, in which two women fight over the custody of a child. During wartime, a governor’s wife has abandoned her child, who is then saved by a servant girl. A judge determines that custody will be granted to the mother who can pull the child safely from a circle of chalk drawn around the child. Brecht used this as a metaphor for a misguided society.Rehearsal for “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” whose cast includes, from left, Remo Beuggert, Simone Gisler and Tiziana Pagliaro.Rimini ProtokollBrecht’s own family story and life in the theater reads like a drama. Born in Bavaria in 1898 and raised in a strict Christian household, he became interested in politics, theater and writing at a young age (he was a fierce critic of the carnage of his generation of young men in World War I and avoided combat as a medic). In Berlin, along with the German director Erwin Piscator, Brecht created what became known as “epic theater,” or “dialectical theater,” which asked audiences to confront sociopolitical issues rather than suspend disbelief and be swept away.This revolution in German theater flourished during the Weimar Republic, but Brecht left Germany when the Nazis gained power, fearing persecution, fleeing to Scandinavia and then America, where he lived in the Los Angeles area and co-wrote the story for one movie (“Hangmen Also Die!”) and many of his most famous plays, including “Chalk Circle.” After World War II, he returned to Europe, and though never officially a member of the Communist Party, his Marxist leanings prompted that boycott of his work in Austria from 1953 to 1963.“One critic wrote that it was an atomic bomb scandal,” Ms. Hering said. “It was the equivalent of cancel culture today.”His works are often heavy on politics and religion, from fascism (“The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui”) to the clash between theology and science (“Life of Galileo”). He also wrote “The Threepenny Opera,” which the Salzburg Festival staged in 2015, with the composer Kurt Weill.Brecht died in East Berlin in 1956 at 58, leaving behind an enormous theatrical legacy.“One of his poems refers to the future when he won’t be needed, but we still live in a world he would recognize,” Tom Kuhn, a professor of German literature at Oxford University and one of the translators of Brecht’s “Collected Poems,” said in a video interview. “But we have populists strutting the stage. We have fascism. We have war in Europe. Brecht could comment on those in urgent and insistent ways.”That sense of relevancy is what drew Ms. Hering to “Chalk Circle” and to choose Theater Hora as the company to bring it to life. Brecht’s experimental theatrical style, as both a writer and director, felt perfectly suited to Hora, as did the mother-and-child plot of “Chalk Circle.”“People with disabilities are dependent on others,” Ms. Hering said. “They are like an eternal child in a way.”She invited Helgard Haug, a celebrated German director more associated with interactive theater who had never directed the Hora troupe, nor a Brecht piece, to lead this “Chalk Circle.” For Ms. Haug, it was both a daunting and exciting proposition.“I’m really interested when people really bring their own conditions to the stage where they are open enough to tell their own stories,” Ms. Haug said in a video interview. “It’s more than a discussion between two mothers. Can systems change? Can it be different? It feels special to stage Brecht with a group of performers who have their own approach and their own way to translate text into their own understanding.”The evolving relevance of Brecht’s works speaks to those still devoted to preserving his legacy and acknowledging that he created new possibilities for theater to educate and provoke audiences. And they inspire performers, playwrights and directors who come after him.“‘Chalk’ is a play for the moment, and I see it as a way to observe the difficulty of the world and how it is possible to find a right and honest way through chaos,” said Erdmut Wizisla, head of the Bertolt Brecht Archive in Berlin. “It is an invitation to think. He’s a poet. He’s a political author but not a politician. And that is why Brecht will always have a future.” More

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      Jürgen Flimm, Director of Festivals and Opera Houses, Dies at 81

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      He left his mark in Hamburg, Berlin, Salzburg and elsewhere. He also directed a memorable “Ring” cycle in Bayreuth.Jürgen Flimm, who led some of Europe’s most important theaters, opera houses and performing arts festivals over the last 40 years, died on Feb. 4 at his home in Wischhafen, Germany, northeast of Hamburg. He was 81.His death was announced by the Berlin State Opera, where he had been general manager from 2010 to 2018. His wife, the film producer Susanne Ottersbach Flimm, said the cause was heart failure following pneumonia.Mr. Flimm’s Berlin appointment was his last in a long career that also included directorships at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, the Ruhrtriennale festival in northwestern Germany and the Salzburg Festival in Austria. He also staged Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany in 2000.He directed acclaimed productions outside the German-speaking world as well, including at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.A dress rehearsal for Mr. Flimm’s 2000 production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany. “It is impossible to guess how Wagner might have reacted,” one critic wrote of the production, “but the shock was considerable.”Jürgen Flimm was born in Giessen, Germany, on July 17, 1941, to Werner and Ellen Flimm, who were both doctors. His family had fled there after bombs began falling on Cologne, where they had been living, and where they resettled after the war.In a 2011 interview with the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Mr. Flimm recalled his childhood. His father was a surgeon who, Mr. Flimm said, used the family’s apartment to see patients: “Every morning I put up my bed and our living room became a waiting room: patients everywhere.” His mother was a general practitioner, but like so many German women in the immediate postwar period, a time of general deprivation, she scrounged to bring home butter and meat. As a child, Jürgen sold old newspapers to fishmongers. While his older brother, Dieter, played drums in jazz bands around the city, Jürgen invented dialogue for his puppets in the attic. Dieter Flimm eventually founded an architecture studio and worked as a set designer and a musician. He died in 2002.Their father, who loved theater, would attend performances as a doctor on duty, and Jürgen often accompanied him. “I secretly hoped that an actor would get sick, so I’d be able to go backstage and see what went on there,” he said, although his father disapproved of his sons’ artistic proclivities and would have preferred for them to study medicine.Jürgen enrolled at the University of Cologne, where he studied theater, German literature and sociology. He abandoned his studies to become an assistant director at the Münchner Kammerspiele theater in Munich, where he worked from 1968 to 1972. He received an acting degree from the Theater der Keller in Cologne.In 1969 Mr. Flimm married the actress Inge Jansen, a colleague at the Kammerspiele. The marriage ended in divorce, but Mr. Flimm remained close to Ms. Jansen’s five children from her previous marriage, four of whom are still living. Ms. Jansen died in 2017.Mr. Flimm married Susanne Ottersbach. The couple lived in a two-story thatched house built in 1648. She is his only immediate survivor.He directed his first production at a theater in Wuppertal in 1971 and held positions at theaters in Mannheim and Hamburg in the 1970s, while also building up his résumé as director in Zurich, Munich and Berlin.He directed his first opera in 1978, the German premiere of Luigi Nono’s 1975 “Al Gran Sole Carico d’Amore” in Frankfurt. The work remained dear to Mr. Flimm’s heart: Decades later, he programmed it, in an acclaimed production by the British director Katie Mitchell, in both Salzburg and Berlin.In 1979, Mr. Flimm returned to Cologne to lead the city’s main theater, the Schauspiel Köln. During his six years as artistic director there, he programmed works by the influential choreographer Pina Bausch and the fanciful French-Argentine director Jérôme Savary.He moved to Hamburg in 1985 to lead the Thalia Theater, which he is widely credited with putting in the international spotlight by inviting avant-garde artists like the American director Robert Wilson.From left, the director Robert Wilson, the author William S. Burroughs and the singer and songwriter Tom Waits at the premiere of their work “The Black Rider” at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. It was the most lauded production during Mr. Flimm’s tenure there.Frederika Hoffmann/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesIn 1990, Mr. Wilson’s “The Black Rider,” a collaboration with the singer and songwriter Tom Waits and the author William Burroughs, became the most lauded production of Mr. Flimm’s tenure in Hamburg. Despite some famously sour reviews (the German magazine Der Spiegel likened it to “a version of ‘Cats’ for intellectuals and snobs”), it was a hit and toured worldwide.Mr. Flimm left the Thalia in 2000. That summer, his “Ring” cycle had its premiere at Bayreuth.“It is impossible to guess how Wagner might have reacted,” the critic Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker, “but the shock was considerable.” While praising some aspects of the cycle, Mr. Ross concluded that it ultimately left a very mixed impression.“The production felt unfinished,” he wrote, “and the flurry of painted curtains during the ‘Götterdämmerung’ apocalypse suggested that in the end it had simply run out of money.”Mr. Flimm made his Metropolitan Opera debut with Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” that October. This time Mr. Ross raved, concluding his review by saying that “Flimm is a smart director, and the Met should give him anything he wants.” The production was revived three times between 2002 and 2017.Mr. Flimm’s follow-up at the Met, a 2004 production of “Salome” that was a vehicle for the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, was more polarizing. In his review for The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini noted that Mr. Flimm received some loud boos on opening night. But, he noted, “the bravos won out, and rightly so.”In 2005, Mr. Flimm became artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale, a multidisciplinary arts festival in the rust belt of Germany. He stayed an extra summer past his three-year contract after his designated successor, the German theater director Marie Zimmermann, took her life in April 2007.His time there dovetailed with the start of his artistic directorship at the Salzburg Festival, where he had previously served as head of drama from 2002 to 2004. During his first summer, he commissioned a new staging of “Jedermann,” the morality play that is the festival’s oldest tradition, from the young Bavarian director Christian Stückl. The production was a hit and remained a festival mainstay for a dozen years.Mr. Flimm ascended to the festival’s leadership in 2007. It was a tumultuous time: Gerard Mortier had taken the festival in a radically new direction throughout the 1990s, and after his departure in 2001, it had struggled to hold on to an artistic director.The four seasons Mr. Flimm spent as Salzburg’s leader were regarded as successful artistically, but he made clear that he was not interested in staying for the long run. In 2008, he announced that he would step down at the end of his term to head the Berlin State Opera.In September 2010, shortly after Mr. Flimm arrived in Berlin, four steamers sailed down the river Spree, conveying 500 members of the opera company westward to the Schiller Theater, where it planned to spend three seasons during renovations to its historic home. Instead, the construction dragged on for seven years.Mr. Flimm imported a number of acclaimed productions to Berlin that had first been seen at Salzburg. One of his original productions in Berlin was a 2016 staging of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice,” which featured an abstract set designed by Frank Gehry that reportedly cost 100,000 euros.In addition to his work in theater, Mr. Flimm taught at the University of Hamburg and was a guest lecturer at Harvard and New York University. Among his many honors was the Bundesverdienstkreuz, the German government’s highest, which he received in 2002. In a 2011 interview with the Bavarian radio station BR, Mr. Flimm was asked what accomplishments he was particularly proud of. Among those he mentioned was his 2000 “Fidelio.”“After the premiere,” he said, “I stood on the balcony of the Met, looked out into Manhattan and thought to myself, ‘Not bad, Jürgen!’” More

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      At the Salzburg Festival, Riches, Retreads and Notes of Caution

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      Classical music’s pre-eminent annual event had more revivals than usual, but also a breathless new staging of Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova.”SALZBURG, Austria — The premiere of a new production of Janacek’s opera “Kat’a Kabanova” had just ended at the Salzburg Festival here last week. When the lights went up, Kristina Hammer, the festival’s new president, was wiping tears off her cheeks.It was hard to blame her for crying. “Kat’a” is a breathless tragedy about a small-town woman trapped in a loveless marriage and driven to suicide after having a brief affair. Janacek’s music stamps out her ethereal fantasies with the brutal fist of reality.Barrie Kosky’s staging was the highlight of a week at Salzburg, classical music’s pre-eminent annual event, which runs through Aug. 31. Kosky has pared down this pared-down work even further, to its core of quivering human beings.The only set is rows of uncannily realistic models of people, standing, wearing street clothes, and facing away from us — and away from Kat’a and her pain. (I admit: I was fooled into thinking these were many dozens of very still extras.) Behind them loom the stone walls of the Felsenreitschule theater, whose vast stage has rarely seemed bigger or lonelier than when the soprano Corinne Winters races across it, running with nowhere to go.David Butt Philip and Winters in “Kat’a.” Behind them are uncannily realistic models of people standing in street clothes.Monika RittershausJittery and balletic, ecstatic and anxious, Winters has a child’s volatile presence, and her live-wire voice conveys Kat’a’s wonder and vulnerability. She is the production’s center, but the entire cast is powerful; Winters’s interactions with Jarmila Balazova’s headstrong Varvara make years of friendship between the characters easy to believe. The conductor Jakub Hrusa confidently paces the work as a bitter, intermission-less single shot, even if the Vienna Philharmonic — the festival’s longtime house band — sounded a bit thin and uncertain in what should be heated unanimity.There is a kind of familial resemblance between Kat’a and Suor Angelica, the agonized young nun at the center of one of Puccini’s three one-acts in “Il Trittico,” directed here by Christof Loy, with the Philharmonic conducted with sensual lightness by Franz Welser-Möst. Like Winters, the soprano Asmik Grigorian, who stars in all three acts, is an intense actress with a voice of shivery directness. (This is the vocal taste at the moment in Salzburg; the days in which Anna Netrebko’s plush tone ruled here seem over.)Spare yet detailed, unified by an airy buff-color space with shifting walls, Loy’s staging reorders the triptych, beginning rather than ending with the comic “Gianni Schicchi,” which now precedes the grim adultery tale “Il Tabarro,” with Roman Burdenko as a firm Michele.In “Suor Angelica,” Asmik Grigorian, left, faces off against Karita Mattila in a blazing confrontation of dueling pains.Barbara Gindl/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Suor Angelica,” the closer, is the reason to see this “Trittico”; it’s the only one of the three roles in which Grigorian’s lack of tonal warmth plays fully to her advantage. Her face-off against the veteran soprano Karita Mattila — not an alto, as the role of Angelica’s aunt really requires, but properly imperious — is a blazing confrontation of dueling pains. And Grigorian’s final scene, which milks the unexpected poignancy of her simply changing in front of us from her habit into a sleek black cocktail dress and letting down her hair, is just as wrenching.A woman is also on the verge of a breakdown, but far more amusingly, in Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville.” Now that the star mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli runs the springtime Whitsun Festival here, every summer includes a production vehicle for her. But there were snickers when it was announced that Bartoli, at 56, planned to play Rosina, usually sung at the start of careers. (Bartoli made her professional stage debut in the role, 35 years ago.)But her voice — and her rapid-fire coloratura — are remarkably well preserved, and her enthusiasm is irresistible. Directed by Rolando Villazón, the show is a love letter to the movies, like “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” which has characters walking on and off screen. Here it’s the silent era that comes to life, with Bartoli as a diva whose experience is winked at in a rundown of her pictures, from Joan of Arc to pirates, projected during the overture. But the concept is not held to so stringently that it detracts from the adorably madcap fun.Cecilia Bartoli, right, as Rosina in “The Barber of Seville,” a role usually sung at the start of careers.Monika RittershausThe ensemble Les Musiciens du Prince-Monaco plays with silky spirit for Gianluca Capuano, who leads a cast as expertly easygoing as Bartoli — including Alessandro Corbelli, Nicola Alaimo and, as a Nosferatu-esque Basilio, Ildebrando D’Arcangelo. And the existence of a rarely performed mezzo version of the climactic aria “Cessa di più resistere” lets Bartoli trade off verses with the agile young tenor Edgardo Rocha.The other opera in the relatively intimate Haus für Mozart this summer also takes a hint from the movies: Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” framed by the director Lydia Steier like “The Princess Bride,” with a grandfather telling the story to a young child — here, three boys. As when this staging was new, in 2018, this is a clever way of super-compressing the work’s extensive spoken dialogue.Four years ago, the production sprawled in the festival’s largest theater; now it’s been smushed into its smallest. Steier has wisely jettisoned a whole strand of steampunk circus imagery and concentrated more on the plot as a parable of the start of World War I, with “Little Nemo” touches. It’s subtle work as the boys gradually become participants in the action, not merely observers. The Philharmonic played under Joana Mallwitz with an ideal mixture of crispness and roundedness.Not every Salzburg Festival includes a revival of a past show; this year there are two. In 2017, the Iranian-born photographer and video artist Shirin Neshat’s staging of Verdi’s “Aida” was that summer’s most eagerly awaited offering, a rare full production conducted by the Verdian giant Riccardo Muti, and Netrebko’s debut in the title role.Rather in the background was Neshat, her first time doing opera — and a pristine, bland effort. Now, with less starry collaborators, her work has come to the fore, still decorous but deeper. To poetic effect, some of her blurry, languid early videos of slow-moving crowds on Middle Eastern streets and coasts have been added; her photographs also now play a part, and some dancers are covered in Arabic calligraphy, a trademark of her art.Directed by Rolando Villazón, “The Barber of Seville” is a love letter to the movies.Monika RittershausThere are some good ideas, like the ominous, violent renderings of the ballet in Amneris’s chamber and the Triumphal Scene. Also some bad ones: Amonasro, Aida’s father, here seems to be a specter, already dead, at the start of Act III, which makes the plot incomprehensible. Alain Altinoglu’s conducting of the Philharmonic is sensibly paced but, compared to the exquisite colors and textures Muti elicited, otherwise ordinary. (The nocturnal beginning of the Nile Scene is one of many passages less evocative this year than in 2017.)Elena Stikhina’s soft-grained Aida and Ève-Maud Hubeaux’s dignified Amneris were impressive, but Piotr Beczala, a shining Radamès, was the only really glamorous singer. And glamour is, like it or not, part and parcel of the ideal Salzburg experience: an extravagance of imagination and achievement that surpasses what you can get at the Met or the Vienna State Opera.There was grumbling among Salzburg watchers about the two revivals and the not-quite-new “Barber,” which premiered in June. An almost $70 million budget for just three truly new stagings?This was clearly a note of caution as the pandemic wears on. “I’m convinced it is the right thing artistically, and from the economic side,” Markus Hinterhäuser, the festival’s artistic director, said when the season was announced last year.But the economic part seems truer than the artistic. “Flute” and “Aida” were improved — the Mozart was tighter, the Verdi more nuanced. The question is whether opera’s most famous and rich summer festival needed repeats of two repertory standards — works that can be seen all over the world during the regular season — in performances that, while solid, weren’t much more distinguished than what you’d get in any major house.It is a telling bit of weakness as Salzburg faces renewed competition, especially from the growing Aix-en-Provence Festival in France — and even from the likes of Santa Fe Opera, which this year presented “Tristan und Isolde,” its first Wagner in decades, and a world premiere (“M. Butterfly”). For all its resources, Salzburg has of late abandoned major commissions in favor of bringing back underappreciated modern works.Aix and Salzburg went head-to-head this summer, both offering productions by the in-demand auteur Romeo Castellucci. It was a showdown that Salzburg soundly lost. Aix got a huge, haunting staging of Mahler’s Second Symphony as the exhumation of a mass grave. Here in Austria, though, as Joshua Barone wrote in The Times, Castellucci’s double bill of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and Orff’s “De Temporum Fine Comoedia” was a grim, murky slog, played sludgily by the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra under Teodor Currentzis.But even an expanding Aix lacks the scope of Salzburg’s concert schedule, which begins with a long Ouverture Spirituelle mini-festival and offers an enviable, overlapping array of often superb orchestral programs and recitals.Though less widely publicized, the weekend Mozart Matinees featuring the Mozarteum Orchestra often present the most joyful, vibrant playing of the festival. Marco BorelliThis year the concerts didn’t all satisfy. The pianist Grigory Sokolov’s pillowy touch was alluring in Beethoven’s “Eroica” Variations and Brahms’s Op. 117 pieces, but smoothed Schumann’s “Kreisleriana” into slumber. The tenor Jonas Kaufmann’s voice rarely came alive in a recital whose halves were dully drawn from his two most recent albums.But it was touching to see the superstar pianist Lang Lang show his respect for Daniel Barenboim by joining that conductor and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra for Manuel de Falla’s “Nights in the Gardens of Spain,” not at all a virtuoso showpiece. And while the Vienna Philharmonic under Andris Nelsons made a muddle of Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with Yefim Bronfman, the orchestra sounded sumptuously ripe in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.More memorable was a less exalted, less widely publicized concert: one of the festival’s 11 a.m. weekend Mozart Matinees featuring the Mozarteum Orchestra. These mornings often have the most joyful, vibrant playing of the festival, and last week’s program was no exception, led with verve by Adam Fischer.The Mozart Matinees are well attended and happily received. But they still feel like a Salzburg secret. More

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      Making Room for Bach in Mozart’s Hometown

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      The Salzburg Festival’s idiosyncratic survey is focused on the timelessness and humanity of Bach’s secular works.SALZBURG, Austria — “For me the Chaconne is one of the most wonderful and most incomprehensible pieces of music that I know,” the composer Johannes Brahms once wrote about the famous final movement of Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D minor for solo violin.“On a single stave and for a small instrument, the man creates a whole world of the deepest thoughts and the most powerful feelings,” he continued in an 1877 letter to the pianist and composer Clara Schumann.In 1926, the Chaconne became the very first work by Bach to be heard at the Salzburg Festival, in a performance by the violinist Johann Koncz. This summer, the piece was performed once again in the first of six musical programs devoted to the towering German composer.For the second consecutive year, and against formidable odds, the Salzburg Festival, one of classical music’s most important events, forged ahead despite the pandemic. Last summer’s offerings were greatly reduced; this year, the festival has come roaring back with a full program of over 100 events, including operas and concerts of every stripe.Prominent in the concert lineup is “Heavenwards — Time With Bach,” an idiosyncratic survey of the German composer in a festival that usually takes a greater interest in Salzburg’s favorite son, Mozart, and the works of Richard Strauss, who was among the event’s founders.The choice to go back to Bach’s music this summer, during the second of two installments that mark the festival’s centenary year, was in part a response to the coronavirus pandemic. According to Florian Wiegand, the Salzburg Festival’s director of concerts and media, “Bach provides us with an unbreakable order in his music, with a clear structure and direction” to counter the loss of balance during these unsettled times.The festival usually reserves the intimate format of the “Time With” series for 20th-century and contemporary figures, including Dmitri Shostakovich, Gérard Grisey and, earlier this month, the American composer Morton Feldman.“Now we’re focusing not on a contemporary composer, but on an entirely timeless composer,” Mr. Wiegand said, adding that “Bach’s music is permeated with deep humanity” perhaps more than any other artist’s body of work.Considering how vast and varied Bach’s output was — he is among the most prolific of all composers — there would have been infinite ways to construct the series.Speaking from a terrace above the festival complex, which abuts the Mönchsberg, a mountain on the edge of Salzburg’s Altstadt, or old town, Mr. Wiegand said the festival chose to sidestep the composer’s best-known sacred works, including his Masses and Passions, many of which have been performed during past installments. (The most recent program of Bach’s music at Salzburg was a 2018 concert of the B minor Mass.)Thomas Zehetmair performing at this year’s Salzburg Festival. In 1997 he made his festival debut at the age of 15.Marco Borrelli/SFInstead, the performances that make up the 2021 Bach program run the gamut from solo recitals to symphony concerts and even a dance production.“In this series we wanted to focus on Bach’s music that is not liturgically bound,” he explained, adding that even the secular works can provide solace during this “challenging and sometimes resigned situation for all of us.” Once the festival’s artistic leadership had settled on Bach, they reached out to leading musicians and artists to find out which works they considered most meaningful right now.The central production in “Heavenwards” is “In the Midst of Life,” a modern dance performance developed by the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker around the Six Cello Suites. Performances are scheduled for Aug. 20 and 21 at the SZENE Salzburg, an event space in a former cinema.The dance-concert, which was first performed in Germany in 2017 and traveled to New York last year, features one of today’s leading Bach interpreters, the French cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras. As he makes his way through the seminal and virtuosic cycle, Ms. De Keersmaeker and four members of her company, Rosas, dance around Mr. Queyras and his instrument, creating an intimate dialogue between music and movement.With the exception of this Wednesday’s concert — the Six Brandenburg Concertos performed by Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, a leading period instrument ensemble — all of the “Heavenwards” programs aim for intimacy.A pair of recitals find master pianists of different generations confronting Bach’s keyboard works. Earlier this week, the Hungarian pianist Andras Schiff, 67, plunged into the complete partitas; in the final concert of the series, on Aug. 23, the Russian prodigy Daniil Trifonov, 30, will dedicate himself to “The Art of Fugue,” a work left incomplete at the time of Bach’s death.Mr. Trifonov performed the hourlong cycle at Alice Tully Hall in March 2020 in one of New York’s final concerts before lockdown. Reviewing the performance in The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini wrote that Mr. Trifonov “played with a focus and concentration that radiated throughout the hall. The performances abounded in scintillating grace, wondrous shadings, even touches of impetuousness.”For his Salzburg appearance, Mr. Trifonov will start the program with Brahms’s left-handed arrangement of the Chaconne from the D minor Partita.At the end of July, the Chaconne also featured in the opening concert of “Heavenwards”: a recital by the Austrian violinist Thomas Zehetmair performing the complete sonatas and partitas, which are considered the pinnacle of the solo violin repertoire. Alone on the stage of the Great Hall of the Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation, where Mr. Koncz played 95 years ago, Mr. Zehetmair held the audience transfixed during the performance, which ran three and a half hours (with two intermissions).Of the musicians featured in the series, perhaps none has as deep a history with both this city and its signature musical event as Mr. Zehetmair, a Salzburg native who has been a familiar face at the festival since his 1977 debut here, at the age of 15.“It is ambitious,” he admitted in an interview before the concert. He had recorded the cycles twice but never before performed them in full in a single evening. “It’s quite a challenge for the audience as well,” he added.“The cycles are so fantastic in their whole conception,” he said, noting that he was excited about playing them in the order they appear in the catalog of Bach’s work. For instance, he said he relished the opportunity to finish the concert with the light and buoyant Partita No. 3 in E major.“It’s so wonderful to have a lighter end after the whole concentration of artistic and intellectual challenges,” he said. “The audience can go out on the street with a light feeling.”“There has never been a series dedicated to Bach like this,” Markus Hinterhäuser, the Salzburg Festival’s artistic director, said in a video introduction to the festival program, which runs through Aug. 30. By showcasing Bach during Salzburg’s anniversary, “Heavenwards” allows the festival to “connect to the original inspiration behind everything musical,” he continued.“It takes us straight to heaven even though they are earthly works,” Mr. Hinterhäuser said. In his words, one can hear an echo of a dictum by the 20th-century composer Mauricio Kagel. “It could well be that not all musicians believe in God,” he famously said, “but they all believe in Bach.” More

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      The Thorny History of the Salzburg Festival’s Logo

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      For its centennial, the venerable festival dug into the story of its defining image — and had to reckon with what it found.SALZBURG, Austria — The logo of the venerable Salzburg Festival is impossible to miss here during the summer months. It is attached to buses and flanks the busy sidewalks on the Staatsbrücke bridge. It’s on wristbands, workers’ uniforms and windows, in tourist pamphlets and hotel lobbies.The logo — featuring the silhouette of the Hohensalzburg Fortress; Salzburg’s regional flag; and a Greek theater mask, all layered over a golden background — has had remarkable staying power. First seen on a poster for the 1928 iteration, it was soon adopted as the festival’s permanent symbol, with the exception of the Nazi era. Yet its history, and particularly the story of its designer, hasn’t been thoroughly known until recently.The Salzburg Festival commissioned a report on the logo’s origins for its centennial last year, a jubilee that has stretched into this summer because of the pandemic. The research revealed new information about the life of its creator, the artist Leopoldine Wojtek, who began as a modernist but whose work took a conservative, Nazi-sympathetic turn in the 1930s, and who was married to one of the party’s most prolific art looters and schemers.It’s a story that raises questions about cultural memory in a country that has been slow to account for its history in the years leading up to and following the Anschluss — Austria’s annexation by Germany — in 1938. But the Salzburg Festival, in some sense, has been here before, reckoning with the fraught Nazi-era legacies of some of its most prominent artists, including the conductors Karl Böhm and Herbert von Karajan.Helga Rabl-Stadler, the festival’s longtime president, conceived the report — which is made up of an investigative account by the University of Vienna professor Oliver Rathkolb and an artistic appraisal by the designer Anita Kern — a decade ago, during the festival’s 90th anniversary celebrations, as she learned some of the troubling details of Wojtek’s biography.“I would have had a bad conscience if we only showed the bright sides of our past,” she said in an interview. “We really are interested in unveiling our history, because in reality the Salzburg Festival is not only a hundred years of festival but a hundred years’ cultural history of Europe.”It is a history that bears retelling amid far-right responses to the pandemic and the global rise of anti-government, populist movements. “We have to remind people that we have already had this history,” Rathkolb said. “This period before 1938 is even more interesting than the Nazi period, because it shows how quickly a parliamentary democracy can change.”Leopoldine Wojtek, left, and colleagues in front of the tapestry “Adam and Eve” in Salzburg in 1926.Collection and Archive, University of Applied Arts ViennaTHE REPORT BEGINS with straightforward biography. Wojtek, known as Poldi, was born in 1903 in Brno, Moravia. Her father was vocally German nationalist, and later, as a resident of Salzburg, greeted Nazi encroachment with an opportunistic spirit. So did her sister — but not her brother, Wilhelm, who refused to join the party yet was drafted into military service and died a bitter, disabled war veteran.Wojtek attended a girls’ school in Salzburg before studying at a vocational school in Czechoslovakia and then at the Kunstgewerbeschule, or Arts Vocational School, in Vienna, where her professors included the design luminary Josef Hoffmann. Kern said that during this time she “was surrounded by real edgy, avant-garde people,” but that, compared with her colleagues, “she was a very conservative modernist.”She returned to Salzburg, and in her early 20s was already taking on local projects such as frescoes and exhibition posters in the modernist mode that she eventually brought to a design contest for the 1928 edition of the Salzburg Festival.The history of the contest is hazy — and suspicious, likely involving interference by Kajetan Mühlmann, Wojtek’s eventual husband, though it’s not clear whether they had any relationship at the time. What is known is that the contest, which was open to students of the Kunstgewerbeschule, was expanded to include three recent graduates, including Wojtek. She didn’t initially place first, but for some reason several designs were sent back to the artists for “certain alterations.” When the new posters were brought before the jury, Wojtek was named the winner.“The competition had a clear No. 1: Hanns Köhler,” Rathkolb said. “He was a shooting star. Then you can see from the records that Mühlmann was very tricky in having a second round.”In her report, Kern describes the poster as simply “typical for its time.” Rathkolb guesses that the jury favored Wojtek for being a local artist whose family had an established reputation.With some modifications, the poster became the festival’s logo. The white bands at the top — used in 1928 to list festival leaders Max Reinhardt, Franz Schalk and Bruno Walter — were made bare, and the dates at the bottom were removed, but otherwise the original design has remained in use, far longer than most logos.It is the most lasting evidence of Wojtek’s modernism, which waned over the following decade. In 1932 she married Mühlmann, who had worked for the association supporting the Salzburg Festival and the Austrian Publicity Bureau — whose meeting records reveal incidents of lavish and irregular expenses. He resigned from that office in 1934, by which time he had begun to ingratiate himself with the Nazi party.Wojtek’s winning poster design for the 1928 festival, before it was adapted into a logo.Archive of the Salzburg Festival; Salzburg MuseumAfter the Anschluss in 1938, Wojtek’s poster was replaced with one that better reflected Nazi aesthetics.Archive of the Salzburg Festival; Salzburg MuseumBefore 1938, though, Nazi ideology was illegal in Austria — which got Mühlmann into trouble, and kept Wojtek from putting her name on the illustrated children’s biography of Adolf Hitler she created in 1936. At this point, her work became “stale,” Kern concludes in her report, adding that additional drawings from this time were “more static and compact than her free and easy illustrations from the 1920s.”Why Wojtek’s work took such a turn isn’t clear. It could be because of Mühlmann, who rose to become a friend of Hermann Göring, for whom he plundered art throughout Europe. But there is evidence that Wojtek wasn’t simply changing under the influence of her husband.In 1941, she was directly involved in the so-called aryanization of a house in nearby Anif confiscated from the Jewish artist Helene von Taussig, who later died at the Izbica transit camp in German-occupied Poland. At the time, the practice of aryanization had been put on hold until the end of the war, but Wojtek, Rathkolb said, “wanted that house at any price.”“Here, she was the driving force,” he added. “She more or less used Mühlmann to make it happen. She had no ethical shame.”Wojtek was involved in the so-called aryanization of this house confiscated from the Jewish artist Helene von Taussig.Salzburg MuseumIt is, then, ironic that Wojtek’s Salzburg Festival poster was quickly removed after the Anschluss; it wasn’t degenerate, but it was uncomfortably modern for the Nazis. It was replaced with something more in line with the party’s aesthetics, what Kern describes as “a portrayal of Mozart as a naked Apollo figure with a lyre.”Wojtek’s design wouldn’t return until after the war. By then, she and Mühlmann had divorced; he had begun to build a second family with a woman in the late 1930s. Wojtek was forced to vacate the house she stole, and the United States returned it to Taussig’s heirs in 1945.Yet Wojtek eluded denazification. Despite her closeness to the party, her membership was never processed; Rathkolb was unable to find her in the party’s card index in Berlin. She was classified as “less incriminated” and was able to vote again by 1949. She found a new partner in the artist Karl Schatzer, and in their shared workshop they hosted courses in painting, illustration and ceramics.She received local honors over the years — including the Max Reinhardt Medal, named for the Salzburg Festival founder who, as a Jewish artist, was forced into exile — and died in 1978.WOJTEK’S BIOGRAPHY has been overlooked in the decades since. This, Rathkolb said, is in keeping with Austria’s broader reluctance to reckon with its Nazi-era history, as the country long hid behind the popular “victim theory” to exempt it from responsibility.The logo has changed little. At one point, a fifth white band was added to the top so it would resemble a musical stave — but that was removed soon after. Kern, for her part, isn’t even sure the logo could be described as good, or that its mask imagery still fits a festival that has come to be known more for music than theater. “Most of all,” she said, “it works because it’s so well known.”But its future is secure.“We talked about it, and our opinion was always: This logo isn’t Nazi propaganda,” Rabl-Stadler said. “It’s a logo out of the spirit of the best time in Austrian graphics. If there had been the slightest doubt that you could misinterpret it, we would have removed it.”Instead, Wojtek joins the crowd of festival artists whose names now come with caveats. Her story is included in the current exhibition “Everyman’s Jews: 100 Years Salzburg Festival,” at the Jewish Museum in Vienna. That show was prompted by Rabl-Stadler, said Marcus Patka, one of its curators, who added that it was a positive sign considering that “there is still lots of silence” in Salzburg on the subject of the Nazi era.Wojtek’s grave, at the Petersfriedhof in Salzburg, is today in disrepair. It was discovered by the festival only while the report was being researched.Laetitia Vancon for The New York TimesHere in town, Wojtek doesn’t have a street or plaza named after her. As someone of no artistic influence, she isn’t talked about. Her burial site was discovered by the festival only while the report was being researched — even though it’s at the Petersfriedhof cemetery, just steps away from its venues.The grave is difficult to find: between two paths, on uneven ground that becomes dangerous in the rain. With no known surviving family members, the stone has fallen into disrepair. Only with effort can you make out the faded carving of her name.At the cemetery’s exit on the Toscaninihof, however, the Salzburg Festival’s logo is once again impossible to miss. And there, under the white of its flag, the name couldn’t be clearer: “WOJTEK.” 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

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      After a Winter of Discontent, a Glorious Summer in Salzburg

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      The theater offering at the Alpine festival features reworked classics by Shakespeare and one of the event’s founders.SALZBURG, Austria — “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York.” Those lines, perhaps the most famous opening in all of English drama, go unspoken in the Salzburg Festival’s new production “Richard the Kid and the King,” a cradle-to-grave chronicle of the Bard’s most ruthless monarch. Yet the monologue was ringing in my ears as I left the theater after four hours of greed, betrayal, hypocrisy, infanticide, decapitation and disembowelment.As Salzburg warmed up in late July, the arrival of “Richard” was an electrifying theatrical jolt to jump-start the event’s second pandemic-era installment, which features four new dramatic productions, six fully staged operas and scores of concerts. Forsooth, the winter of our discontent has been made glorious summer by the Salzburg Festival.The acclaimed German theatermaker Karin Henkel was originally onboard to direct “Richard III” in 2020. Postponed a year by the coronavirus pandemic, the production has been enlarged and expanded for this year’s edition. Henkel and her creative team have incorporated portions from “Slaughter!,” a 12-hour compression of Shakespeare’s eight War of the Roses plays that was first performed in Salzburg in 1999.In the evening’s first half, “Richard the Kid,” which largely deals with the adolescent sons of York, the production uses the “Slaughter!” mix of German and profanity-laden English gangster slang.Much of the colorful patois is rendered with vulgar hilarity by Kate Strong, a British actress and dancer who has been a fixture in German-language theater for the past 25 years. She is one of only four actors onstage before intermission, who divide nine roles among themselves. The heroic Bettina Stucky (as Clarence and Elizabeth) and the fearless Kristof Van Boven (as the entire house of Lancaster) show similar nimble dexterity in bringing this most dysfunctional and tragic of royal families to life.Kristof Van Boven and Lina Beckmann in “Richard the Kid and the King,” directed by Karin Henkel.Monika RittershausEven if the show’s busier and more populous second half, “Richard the King,” is less riveting than the beginning, the glue that holds the grim production together is Lina Beckmann’s astounding performance as Richard. It is as much an interpretation of the charming psychopath as it is a treatise on the nature of acting itself, as Beckmann slips into Richard’s misshapen body and mind, allowing us to watch with uncanny intimacy the dissembling, scheming and feral ambition that animate the arch-villain.Witnessing Beckmann’s brazen performance put me in mind of another captivating Richard III of recent memory: Lars Eidinger.In 2015, the prolific Berlin-born stage and screen actor — best known internationally for his role in the hit TV series “Babylon Berlin” — first performed the conscienceless king at the Berlin Schaubühne, where he has worked since 1999. Thomas Ostermeier’s shattering production, which bored inside the murderous monarch’s blood-soaked brain with upsetting perversity, has been performed everywhere from Avignon, France, to Adelaide, Australia, and came to New York in 2017.Now Eidinger, 45, has become the latest in a long line of German and Austrian acting greats to tackle the main role in “Jedermann,” Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s 1911 version of a medieval morality play that is the festival’s oldest tradition and possibly its strangest.In August 1920, the first Salzburg Festival opened with an outdoor performance of this “Play About the Death of the Rich Man” in a production by Max Reinhardt, who, along with Hofmannsthal, was one of the event’s founders. It has been performed almost every summer since, with the likes of Maximilian Schell, Klaus Maria Brandauer and, most recently, Tobias Moretti in the title role of a hedonistic rich man visited by death, who offers his victim a last shot at salvation.The local enthusiasm for the play is difficult to explain to outsiders. To say that “Jedermann” lacks the popular appeal of “The Sound of Music,” another famous Salzburg cultural export, is putting it mildly.For a tradition as deeply entrenched as “Jedermann,” productions here tend to be, well, traditional. Given this fact, the new production, by the director Michael Sturminger, is practically avant-garde, or at least tries to be: There is a largely abstract set and eclectic costumes, comic-surreal moments, including an expertly choreographed boxing match, and interpolated texts and songs. But the production fails to establish a consistent tone, and Sturminger’s varied theatrical effects are ill suited to Hofmannsthal’s lofty and archaic rhyming couplets.I don’t mean to suggest that a ritualized parable like “Jedermann” resists daring approaches, just that many of this production’s ideas seem tentative or not fully thought through.“Richard the Kid and the King” delivered an electrifying jolt to the Salzburg Festival.Monika RittershausEidinger approaches the lengthy role with focused sobriety that seemed intended to invest the character with unexpected psychological shadings, but the performance seemed to ignore, rather than engage with, the inherent naïveté of Hofmannsthal’s text and the archetypical nature of its protagonist. (It seems misguided to treat Jedermann as a character as richly drawn as Richard III or Hamlet.)The “Jedermann” premiere was supposed to take place outside, but persistent rain forced the show indoors, to the Grosses Festspielhaus, the festival’s largest opera house, which is where I saw the third of 14 planned performances. That cavernous venue seemed to have something to do with the loss of up-close-and-personal immediacy: I found myself wondering how different my experience of the show would have been from the stadium-style bleachers set up on Cathedral Square, watching the performers strut and fret their hour on a stage whose vastness did not threaten to dwarf them.Eidinger is a distinctive actor whose ferocity and intensity come through in performances that are as grippingly psychological as they are dazzlingly physical. His pugilistic and choreographic feats notwithstanding, much of his Jedermann had a note of studied, at times ironic, understatement. From my seat in Row 15, 100 or so feet from the stage, I felt that the subtlety of his performance failed to transmit.Initially, Salzburg Festival organizers said they would leave it up to the audience whether to wear masks during the performances, as was the policy last year, during the festival’s socially distanced installment. Last year, the festival venues were filled at half capacity. In 2021, I sat elbow to elbow with my fellow theatergoers.The new production of “Jedermann,” a medieval morality play that is the festival’s oldest tradition.Matthias HornBut after one of the 2,179 audience members who had attended the “Jedermann” premiere tested positive for the coronavirus, the organizers reversed course and mandated face coverings for all indoor performances. (My impression from the opening week is that festivalgoers are mostly complying, although I’ve seen unusual ways to wear a mask: A bald man sitting in front of me at “Richard” wore his mask on his head like a birthday hat.)The “Jedermann” infection, and the festival’s swift response, was a sobering reminder for Salzburg, which has now successfully opened not one but two pandemic-era installments against staggering odds, of the health emergency that continues to ravage the world outside this sheltered oasis in the Alps.The Salzburg Festival continues through Aug. 30. More