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      When Opera Livestreams Became Live Performances

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      This summer, three European productions, previously available to American audiences only online, were at last accessible in person.I should start with a confession: Rarely during the pandemic have I been able to watch an entire livestream through.Work is one thing: If I’m “attending” something for an assignment, I try to bring to it the focus of a before-times performance — phone off, sound system on, ideally in the dark. But nearly all my extracurricular experiences online have been nothing like my old days off. I would never walk in and out of Carnegie Hall during a recital or pull out my phone mid-Schubert to scroll through Instagram or write an email.Yet that’s exactly what the past year and a half has been like. Life and livestreams are inherently incompatible; there is always a dog to walk, a dinner to cook, a meeting to join. I have seen the greatest musical artists in the world in fragments from the seat of a Peloton; in a small window at the corner of a laptop screen; and, more times than I would like to admit, in bed.If anything has been likely to hold my attention from start to finish, it’s opera. That’s partly baked into the form; concerts, for all their recent engineering feats, generally can’t offer the multisensory experience of theater. And, miraculously, there have continued to be new productions during the pandemic — mostly in Europe, where they often premiered to small audiences or empty houses.Three of those — Dmitri Tcherniakov’s staging of Weber’s “Der Freischütz,” Marina Abramovic’s project “7 Deaths of Maria Callas” and a production of Strauss’s “Elektra” by Krzysztof Warlikowski — were at one point available only as online streams for Americans like me, barred from casually traveling to most of Europe.Ausrine Stundyte, front, in the title role of “Elektra” at the Salzburg Festival.Bernd Uhlig/Salzburg FestivalBut this summer, a halcyon time of reopened borders and the return of large-scale productions in full houses, I was able to see all three again, now in person: “Freischütz” and “7 Deaths” at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, and “Elektra” at the Salzburg Festival in Austria.That juxtaposition — livestream and live performance — is worth reflecting on as a wave of opening nights heralds the arrival of a new season; as international travel becomes newly precarious; and as orchestras and opera houses consider whether to weave livestreams into their regular programming.Some projects, it should be said, have emerged independent of any live audience or presentation — even traditional ones, such as the Paris Opera’s new production of Verdi’s “Aida,” which was altered to look better online than in the house (where critics were invited to see it, and mostly panned it). One of the great treasures of the pandemic has been Opera Philadelphia’s digital shorts, with contributions from the likes of Angélica Negrón and Tyshawn Sorey. Boston Lyric Opera developed “Desert In” as a mini-series, bringing the art form into the Netflix era.The productions I saw both onscreen and onstage, though, were conceived for the opera house. Opera just isn’t a filmic medium, even if certain composers anticipated it — such as Richard Wagner, with the immersive theatrical experience he pioneered in Bayreuth, Germany.But not every composer is Wagner, and although the streamed productions I later saw live had flashes of revelation, those moments were few and far between in what was, on balance, limited by the medium: the subjective and inevitably narrow perspective of the camera, the engineered flattening of sound. Virtual opera, unless designed as such, is ultimately just a document.Tcherniakov’s “Freischütz” production splits the stage into two halves: the bottom a set for the actors, and the top a surface for projections.Wilfried HöslEspecially in a staging as acutely dramatic as Tcherniakov’s “Freischütz.” It abandons the work’s fantasy Romanticism, setting it in the corporate penthouse of Kuno, a chief executive who behaves like a Mafia boss.The other roles, too, bear little resemblance to any traditional production. To bridge the gap between libretto and concept, the stage is treated as a split screen, with the set occupying the bottom half and the top serving as a surface for projected text messages — and, during the overture, background information on each character in Tcherniakov’s treatment. (The camera mostly shows either the set or the projection, rarely both, which in the final scene makes for a confusing resolution that is easily legible in the house.)Crucially, the introductions reveal that Kaspar — in the libretto a jealous rival of the protagonist, Max, he wants to marry Kuno’s daughter, Agathe — suffers from a trauma that, we later learn, manifests as a kind of multiple personality disorder. (He also takes on the demonic role of Samiel.)As sung by the bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, Kaspar is the opera’s horrifying black heart. In a crowd of excellent performances — including Golda Schultz’s heavenly Agathe and her character’s Sapphic subplot with Anna Prohaska’s Ännchen — it’s nearly impossible to take your eyes off the fierce and angular intensity of Ketelsen’s face.A viewer of the livestream wouldn’t necessarily get that. The score’s focus in its climax is on Max, and the camera follows, with a close-up of the tenor Pavel Cernoch’s fright and anguish. In the theater, however, I could see that Ketelsen’s scowl was more pronounced than ever — a sign that the opera’s traditionally happy ending would here be anything but.“7 Deaths of Maria Callas” features arias performed by sopranos including Adela Zaharia (bottom left) and campy videos starring Willem Dafoe and Marina Abramovic.Wilfried HöslAlso at the Bavarian State Opera, Abramovic’s “7 Deaths” — which pays homage to Callas through seven arias and a prolonged final scene that imagines that famed soprano’s final day — worked better as a livestream, because it worked so intermittently as a live performance. With in-person singers accompanying big-screen videos of Abramovic and Willem Dafoe artfully acting out death scenes inspired by the arias, the piece relegates opera to mere soundtrack.Abramovic is an undeniably electric presence. But the scale of the opera house — the vast distance it can put between a performer and audience member — negates much of the charged intimacy on which she has built her career as a performance artist. At least the livestream of the work’s premiere allowed for a proper zoom on every facial expression and gesture — while also reducing her to just an image on a screen, less powerful than she can be at her best.In Salzburg, Warlikowski’s “Elektra” — using the breadth of the unusually wide Felsenreitschule stage — was almost defiantly unfilmable, with multiple parts of the set in use nearly all the time. The opening credits of the streamed version doubled as a tour of the whole space: a pool (where Elektra’s father, Agamemnon, was murdered) and showers, as well as a glass box filled with luxurious furniture and the vast rock walls of the theater, a canvas for projections.Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, left, and Stundyte in Krzysztof Warlikowski’s production of “Elektra.”Bernd Uhlig/Salzburg FestivalThese close-ups presage the limits of the filmed production, in which the camera tends to focus on only one thing at a time, with wide shots largely reserved for the eventually blood-splattered, fly-swarmed walls. The stream did catch chilling details I missed in the theater: Klytämnestra, for example, commanding as sung by Tanja Ariane Baumgartner but easy to miss in a silent moment of handling human organs in a bucket inside the glass box. Or Ausrine Stundyte’s Elektra, wide-eyed and wild-haired from the start, yet progressively more so each time she appears onscreen.But “Elektra” is a musically dense, busy opera that Warlikowski matches in his staging, while the camera lacks the restlessness of a spectator’s eye. The only perspective that would accurately reflect the production would be a wide, straight-on view of the stage — something you might find in the research archive of Broadway shows at the New York Library for the Performing Arts.That problem pales, though, in comparison with the sound of the streamed “Elektra.” I like to believe the story that, ahead of the opera’s 1909 premiere, Strauss told the conductor: “Louder, louder! I can still hear the singers!” Franz Welser-Möst led the Vienna Philharmonic in Salzburg as if that were true (if with a little more of a level head). At its best, this score overwhelms and terrifies. On a laptop, however, it was simply too balanced, with singers and instrumentalists favored equally; no one came out better for it.As Europe again considers whether to close its borders to Americans, and as live performances remain more of a delicate triumph than a given, new productions may return to the small screen. If that happens, I’ll tune in. But I’d rather see you at the opera house. Because this “Freischütz,” “7 Deaths” and “Elektra” affirmed what we already knew: Fundamentally, opera is theater. That couldn’t be more obvious, or more essential. More

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      At Two Summer Festivals, Offerings That Are Gloomy and Grim

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      The Salzburg Festival and the Ruhrtriennale host a series of theatrical pieces, both old and new, that seem to reflect our troubled time.ESSEN, Germany — In the constellation of Europe’s performing arts festivals, few make a more contrasting pair than the Salzburg Festival and the Ruhrtriennale.The differences begin with the events’ settings. Salzburg, Mozart’s picturesque hometown, nestled in the Alps, lies at the geographical center of Europe. The Ruhr region, Germany’s rust belt, is comparatively isolated. Salzburg boasts stunning mountain vistas, an old town and a fairy-tale castle. The Ruhr region is a linked network of drab postindustrial cities.The Salzburg Festival usually plays host to well-heeled visitors from over 80 countries, while the Ruhrtriennale caters heavily to locals with subsidized tickets.Yet for all their differences, the two festivals share some DNA.When the Flemish impresario Gerard Mortier founded the Ruhrtriennale in 2002, he was coming off a decade of shaking things up as the Salzburg Festival’s artistic director. Although his time there is now seen as a golden age, Mortier’s attempts to nudge the festival in a more artistically daring direction proved wildly contentious at the time. When Mortier arrived in the Ruhr region, his new festival gave him the opportunity to realize large-format experiments that he could never pull off at Salzburg.Two decades later, the Salzburg Festival’s roster of operas and concerts has recaptured something of the boundary-pushing and avant-garde flair of the “Mortier era.” The festival’s dramatic program, however, has struggled to keep up.A silent chorus of nude male performers in Friedrich Schiller’s “Maria Stuart” in Salzburg.Matthias Horn/Salzburg FestivalSalzburg’s outdoor production of “Jedermann,” a morality play written by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, one of the festival’s founders, is the event’s oldest tradition. In recent years, little of the Austrian poet and dramatist’s other work has been staged there. This summer, however, as part of the festival’s ongoing centenary festivities, Hofmannsthal’s “The Falun Mine” has taken center stage.Written in 1899, though never performed during its author’s lifetime, “The Falun Mine” is a ghost story composed in the pungently lyrical language of Hofmannsthal’s best early work. It tells the story of a miner beset by strange apparitions and swallowed up by a mountain on his wedding day, and is choked with symbolism, much of which remained inscrutable in the dreary production by the Swiss director Jossi Wieler.The actors declaimed their lines in a highly mannered tone from a rotating stage littered with cinder blocks. It often seemed that the play itself was buried alive under the rubble.A theatrical death knell also sounded for Salzburg’s new production of Friedrich Schiller’s “Maria Stuart.” Despite some powerful images, thanks to a silent chorus of 30 nude male performers, or a single swinging light bulb, Martin Kusej’s stripped-down staging, a coproduction with Vienna’s Burgtheater (where Kusej is the artistic director) fell flat, sabotaged by hammy overacting from nearly every member of the cast.The atmosphere of gloom and doom seemed to spread like a fog from Salzburg to the Ruhr, where a number of the region’s “cathedrals of industry” — the disused factories that have been repurposed as theaters — had a haunted quality at the start of the Ruhrtriennale.From left, Annamária Láng, Katharina Lorenz, Deborah Korley, Michael Maertens, Jan Bülow and Markus Scheumann in Barbara Frey’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” part of the Ruhr Triennale.Matthias Horn/Ruhrtriennale This summer’s program is the first of three to be overseen by Barbara Frey, a Swiss director and the second consecutive woman to run the festival after Stefanie Carp, whose troubled tenure was cut short by the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on Frey’s work so far, she seems set on restoring the Ruhrtriennale to the provocative and artistically unpredictable spirit of its founder.In her own production of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the edifice in question was the Maschinenhalle Zweckel, the electrical center of a former coal mine in the city of Gladbeck. In this sinister show, another coproduction with the Burgtheater, a close-knit group of eight performers narrated five of Poe’s spine-tingling tales in German, English and Hungarian. With ritualistic precision, they luxuriated in the American writer’s melancholy prose.This atmosphere of suffocating sadness turned gleefully macabre with “The Feast of the Lambs,” a musical theater work written by the Nobel Prize-winning author Elfriede Jelinek and the composer Olga Neuwirth. Based on a play by the British writer Leonora Carrington, it is, like “Usher,” a tale of madness and familial decay.Elfriede Jelinek’s “The Feast of the Lambs.”Volker Beushausen/Ruhrtriennale The directors Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, of the Dublin-based theater company Dead Center, filled the cavernous Jahrhunderthalle, a former gas power plant in the city of Bochum, with an eye-popping production, complete with trippy video projections, falling snow and a blood-red lake, effectively blurring the boundaries between domestic and outdoor horrors, as well as between human and animal savagery. (You can watch a streamed performance on the festival website).As in “Usher,” the oddball spirit of “Lambs” was tethered to artistic seriousness and skill. Things looked very different for “A Divine Comedy” by Florentina Holzinger. This young Viennese choreographer has gained fame for extreme performances that deconstruct dance history and sexualized representations of the female body.Florentina Holzinger’s “A Divine Comedy” in the city of Duisburg.Katja Illner/RuhrtriennaleHer latest, Dante-inspired outing combines onstage hypnosis, athletic performances, slapstick routines, action painting and pornographic situations to no apparent end. Using the Kraftzentrale, an enormous former power plant in the city of Duisburg, Holzinger and a score of naked female performers ran riot for the better part of two hours, often to seat-rumbling music.Holzinger is part of the incoming artistic team at the Berlin Volksbühne, where “A Divine Comedy” will transfer in late September. It’s a full-on three-ring circus of horrors that was mostly just tedious. I didn’t buy Holzinger’s willfully transgressive spectacle, but apparently I was in the minority: The only thing that truly shocked me about “A Divine Comedy” was how much the audience loved it.I felt there was one artistic work at the Ruhrtriennale that connected to humanity — and it wasn’t in a theater.An installation view of Mats Staub’s “21 — Memories of Growing Up” in a turbine hall in Bochum.Sabrina Less/RuhrtriennaleOver the past decade, the Swiss artist Mats Staub has conducted hundreds of interviews with individuals of various ages and backgrounds for “21 — Memories of Growing Up,” which has been installed in a turbine hall in Bochum. Spread over 50 different stations, the video interviews provide varied reflections on maturity, independence and happiness. The project feels like an archive of human strivings and the possibility for rebirth.Renewal was the watchword at the founding of both the Salzburg Festival and the Ruhrtriennale. In 1920, that meant reclaiming and safeguarding European culture after the Great War and the loss of the Habsburg Empire; at the turn of the millennium, it meant rejuvenating a depressed, postindustrial corner of Germany.If the onstage offerings at both events this year have seemed unrelentingly grim, they have at least reflected the struggles of our time. Yet, as we cautiously adjust to living with a pandemic for the foreseeable future, we could desperately use some renewal, too.The Salzburg Festival continues through Aug. 31.The Ruhrtriennale continues through Sept. 25. More

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      After a Quarter-Century, the Queen of Salzburg Calls It Quits

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      Since 1995, Helga Rabl-Stadler has ruled the Salzburg Festival, classical music’s premier annual event, as its president and public face.SALZBURG, Austria — It was intermission at the Salzburg Festival’s surreal and melancholy new production of “Don Giovanni,” and a small crowd of donors filled the office of Helga Rabl-Stadler, the festival’s president since 1995.Dropping the medical-grade FFP2 masks that have been required indoors at the 101-year-old festival, classical music’s premier annual event, the group sipped champagne and nibbled canapés. After some small talk, Rabl-Stadler gave a short speech about this summer’s program, a continuation of last year’s centennial — which was truncated by the pandemic but, through elaborate planning and force of will, not canceled entirely.“We couldn’t celebrate a hundred years,” she said, “by not doing everything.”As the applause died down, Reinold Geiger, the billionaire who runs the French beauty company L’Occitane en Provence, and whom Rabl-Stadler some time ago recruited to help underwrite the festival’s youth programs, spoke up to suggest a reason Salzburg had been one of the few major performing arts events that went forward during 2020.“Maybe,” he said with a smile, “it is because this festival has a president who is a bit unusual.”The Salzburg Festival returned to almost full strength this summer, including Romeo Castellucci’s surreal, melancholy staging of “Don Giovanni.”Monika Rittershaus/Salzburg FestivalComing from a prominent Austrian family, and with long experience in journalism, politics and business, Rabl-Stadler, 73, has indeed been unusually — perhaps uniquely — suited to the job of Salzburg’s de facto chief networker.This is her final summer after 26 years here, far longer than she or anyone else anticipated — and many would be happy for her to stay on. Her genial but no-nonsense presence has become a reassuring sign of stability, and the festival is bracing for a new leader at a delicate moment, as it faces the ongoing pandemic and looks toward a major renovation of its theaters that will cost hundreds of millions of euros.Salzburg is a massive operation, with a budget of roughly 65 million euros ($76.6 million) for about 200 opera, concert and drama performances in a six-week burst starting every July. Managing it in a triumvirate alongside an intendant (artistic director) and a finance director, the president serves as head fund-raiser, but also as a kind of all-purpose sounding board, tension diffuser, public face and global booster: “the principal host of the festival,” as Lukas Crepaz, the head of finance since 2017, put it.Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, left in red, as Klytämnestra and Ausrine Stundyte in the title role of “Elektra.”Bernd Uhlig/Salzburg Festival“She is incredibly loyal to every intendant,” said Markus Hinterhäuser, a longtime festival administrator who has been artistic director since 2017. “She supports me even if she might not always like what I’m doing. She is loyal; she is helpful; she is empathetic.”Rabl-Stadler and the venerable festival have grown synonymous. Last October, when she agreed to extend her contract for one final year, the governor of the region called her “the living embodiment of the Salzburg Festival.”The pandemic has been among her finest moments. Last summer, when few arts institutions were putting on full-scale productions, Salzburg pressed ahead with a curtailed but robust program, including Strauss’s mighty “Elektra” — with the full forces of the Vienna Philharmonic, the festival’s house band, crowded into the pit. Rabl-Stadler and her team lobbied politicians to make it all possible, rallied governmental and private funding sources to make up for ticket revenue lost because of capacity restrictions, and created an intricate safety plan.Then, this summer, Salzburg returned at nearly full strength. The festival brought back the two operas mounted last year, both set among a contemporary bourgeoisie much like the audience here. “Elektra” was conducted with cool elegance by Franz Welser-Möst and featured a laser-focused Vida Mikneviciute as Chrysothemis. A spare “Così Fan Tutte,” presented in a single, substantially cut act, was tenderly led by Joana Mallwitz and boasted, in Elsa Dreisig and Marianne Crebassa, commandingly sympathetic sister protagonists.Marianne Crebassa and Bogdan Volkov in a spare production of “Così Fan Tutte.”Monika Rittershaus/Salzburg FestivalBut Romeo Castellucci’s hotly anticipated staging of “Don Giovanni” was dreary, an unsatisfying mixture of naturalism with ambiguous symbols like basketballs and a meat slicer. Set in a permanent haze behind a scrim, the production, aided by clever casting and costuming, at least finally made Giovanni and his servant, Leporello, the uncanny doppelgängers they are in the libretto. Teodor Currentzis conducted his ensemble, MusicAeterna, with solemnity verging on somnolence. Handel’s “Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno,” set by the director Robert Carsen in the aftermath of a reality-TV model competition and conceived as a vehicle for Cecilia Bartoli, was unremarkably sung, if sensitively played by Les Musiciens du Prince-Monaco under Gianluca Capuano.But the concerts over a week in the middle of August were superb, including Evgeny Kissin’s pensive reading of Berg’s Piano Sonata, which felt the natural partner of the works by Gershwin and Chopin that joined it on the program. The violinist Isabelle Faust was the soloist in a sparkling “Mozart-Matinee” performance. A rapt audience packed the Kollegienkirche for Morton Feldman’s simmering monodrama “Neither.” MusicAeterna brought vibrancy to a Rameau program, if also a tendency to overdo gimmicks like foot-stomping and dramatic lighting shifts.In a staging inspired by reality TV, Handel’s “Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno” was a vehicle for Cecilia Bartoli.Monika Rittershaus/Salzburg FestivalThe Vienna Philharmonic, which appeared in almost everything, showed off its prodigious range over 12 hours on Aug. 15, including an afternoon “Così” and the evening premiere of a rare staging of Luigi Nono’s “Intolleranza 1960.” A coruscating parable of emigration, discrimination and violence, the work whips between ethereal choral chants and pummeling roars and shrieks, both instrumental and vocal. The director, Jan Lauwers, choreographed an endless danse macabre of bodies rushing around the stage, and Ingo Metzmacher conducted with nearly miraculous delicacy and precision.The Philharmonic had started its day at 11 that morning, playing Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” under Riccardo Muti, a Salzburg fixture for 50 years who was conducting the work this summer for the first time. The performance was the glory of seven days at the festival: radiant, intense, dignified, grand. And there was Rabl-Stadler in her seat on the aisle, leaning forward to chat with friends before the lights dimmed, and perusing the program as she listened.She was born in Salzburg in 1948. Her father, Gerd Bacher, was an influential journalist and media executive who eventually became the head of ORF, the Austrian national broadcaster; her mother was a fashion businesswoman. Rabl-Stadler spent time as a newspaper columnist; working for her mother’s business; as a member of parliament for the conservative ÖVP, or Austrian People’s Party; and as head of Salzburg’s chamber of commerce before coming to the festival in 1995, anticipating she’d stay perhaps 10 years.“She was not always like she is now,” Hinterhäuser said. “She had difficulties at the beginning; real difficulties.”The director Jan Lauwers choreographed an endless danse macabre of bodies rushing around the stage in Luigi Nono’s “Intolleranza 1960.”Maarten Vanden Abeele/Salzburg FestivalFor decades the festival had been ruled — and set firmly in its ways — by the conductor Herbert von Karajan. When he died, in 1989, the brilliant, pugnacious Gerard Mortier was brought in as artistic leader; in his flair for modern provocations, he represented a break with the Karajan era.But for all his artistic coups, Mortier hogged the spotlight and thrived on tensions, alienating conductors, directors and the Vienna Philharmonic, and secretly seeking to sideline Rabl-Stadler. The move backfired, and when he left a few years later, in 2001, the tenure of his replacement, the far more introverted Peter Ruzicka, proved an opportunity for her to come into her own.Her savvy and determination revived a long-stagnant effort to renovate the smallest of the festival’s three opera houses — which she set on track to open in 2006, Mozart’s 250th birthday year, when the festival planned to present all 22 of his operas. The Haus für Mozart, as the theater was called, became informally known as the Haus für Helga.“When you ask me what I did for the festival,” she said, “I can say that without me there would not be a Haus für Mozart.”She proved agile at courting corporate sponsors, and instituted (and starred in) a globe-trotting road show in the off-season to broaden Salzburg’s appeal around the world. She helped heal the raw relations with the Philharmonic.Through the brief tenures of Jürgen Flimm and Alexander Pereira, she was asked to take on more and still more responsibilities — including, for seven years, the combined duties of the president and finance director. On top of all that, for the summers of 2015 and ’16 she filled in as an artistic leader alongside Sven-Eric Bechtolf, to fill the gap before Hinterhäuser’s arrival. She was bruisingly overworked. But with Hinterhäuser and Crepaz, real stability arrived at last — the kind that could survive even the pandemic.While she has left sponsorship deals in place to tide the next president over for a time, that new person will preside over the continuing effects of the coronavirus. Rabl-Stadler’s replacement will be selected by the festival’s board, which is drawn from different levels of Austrian politics.“It’s a political decision,” Hinterhäuser said. “And I’m a little concerned which direction they will go. It will be a very decisive decision for the future of the festival.”It is considered likely that the next president will be a woman, since Crepaz (whose contract lasts until 2027) and Hinterhäuser (until 2026) are both men. But beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess.“A president is not a sponsorship department,” Hinterhäuser said. “This person has to have real empathy for what the festival is, what we do, what we want to achieve. I really believe in a kind of cosmopolitan elegance; it’s the Salzburg Festival, but it’s open to more than 80 countries. And then you need a very remarkable political and economic network — and also the capacity not just to have this network, but to use it in an intelligent way.”The next president will be tasked with advancing a long-simmering renovation plan that is currently budgeted at about 300 million euros (about $350 million). If the person can bring that project over the finish line, it will be a Haus für Helga-style achievement.Next summer, the consummate Salzburger won’t be in town: Rabl-Stadler plans to rent a villa in Tuscany so as not to seem to loom over her successor. During an interview, her voice grew thick with emotion recalling what Riccardo Muti had told her a few minutes before, as he embraced her backstage.“Helga,” he said, “the festival will not be the same without you.” More

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      A Pianist Finds Inspiration to Write Again

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      Evgeny Kissin, who has made a career of performing, was surprised to find himself drawn once more to composing.For the pianist Evgeny Kissin, it was a love story that provided the inspiration to write his own music again. After being reunited with a childhood friend — now his wife — he woke up in the middle of the night and jotted down a “Meditation” that would become the first of his Four Piano Pieces Op. 1.Mr. Kissin is best known as a soloist who began his career as a child prodigy. By age 12 he had performed both Chopin concertos in his native Russia and by 19 he had made headlines with the Berlin Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic.He remains one of today’s most highly regarded pianists for the intensity and sensitivity of his interpretations. He also began writing music as a child, as soon as he had learned notation, but stopped at about age 14, not resuming until just shy of a decade ago.As he approaches his 50th birthday in October, Mr. Kissin maintains an insatiable intellectual curiosity. His solo recital Saturday at the Salzburg Festival features works by Chopin, Gershwin, Alban Berg and Tichon N. Chrennikow (as a child, Mr. Kissin performed works, including ones he had written himself, for this Russian composer).The fall brings a busy concert schedule, in cities as varied as Jerusalem, Seoul and Kaohsiung, Taiwan. At the same time, he is steadily growing his catalog, most recently with “Thanatopsis,” a setting of the William Cullen Bryant poem, for female voice and piano.“The very fact that I started composing again came to me as a surprise,” he admitted in a video call earlier this month from his home in Prague, citing a “hidden potential” that was awakened by his romance with that childhood friend, Karina Arzumanova, whom he married in 2017.In his 2017 autobiography “Memoirs and Reflections,” Mr. Kissin wrote that music “stopped sounding in my head” as his concert career gained momentum. Since 2012, ideas have been flowing back, and he continues in a noncompetitive manner: “Let us see what comes of it,” he wrote, “and how audiences will respond to my music.”Mr. Kissin’s music displays a range of extreme emotions.Milan Bures for The New York TimesThe works that have been published so far reveal the sharp intellect and natural artistry that also characterize his performances. The last of the Four Piano Pieces, the Toccata, revolves around a jazzy, Gershwin-like motif, at first distorted by harsh dissonance, while running across the keyboard with virtuosic arpeggiated textures.His one-movement cello sonata, meanwhile, is lyrical and introspective, with a theme that sounds as if it is based on a 12-tone system but in fact is derived from only eight notes.Mr. Kissin has received the support of Arvo Part, one of the most widely performed contemporary composers, and leading musicians. His String Quartet was recorded by the Kopelman Quartet in 2016, and the cello piece has been championed by the international soloists Steven Isserlis, David Geringas and Renaud Capuçon.In a phone interview from London, Mr. Isserlis noted the range of styles that Mr. Kissin has managed to express in only a handful of works. “He’s such an intense person, and musician,” he said. “He has a very serious view of the world, although he’s not without humor.”Mr. Isserlis placed the “extreme emotions” of Mr. Kissin’s music in a line of pianist-composers ranging from Schuman to Rachmaninoff but also noted a specifically Russian-Jewish tradition. “There’s a darkness,” he said. “But there’s also a love of beauty. It has its roots in the past, like all good music.”Mr. Kissin, who in 2013 became an Israeli citizen, qualified any strict categorization by saying that he identifies with “a small minority of the Russian population, namely, the liberal Russian intelligentsia — a significant part of which consists of Jews like me.”For many years he has recited Yiddish poetry onstage and is himself a poet and writer, with work published in the Yiddish edition of The Forward and in a 2019 book, “A Yiddisher Sheygets.”Mr. Kissin at his home in Prague.Milan Bures for The New York TimesThe pianist is passionate about raising awareness toward the historic and aesthetic value of Yiddish, a Germanic language spoken by Ashkenazi Jews since the ninth century.Yiddish, Mr. Kissin writes in his memoir, belongs “to the highest achievements of world culture.” He notes its “rich and expressive” quality and an “inner strength” that “is capable of conveying the subtlest thoughts and feelings.”He and the writer and editor Boris Sandler joined forces for the Yiddish-language musical “The Bird Alef From the Old Gramophone,” which was performed two years ago in Birobidzhan, the center of the Jewish Autonomous Region in Eastern Russia. Although Jews account for less than 2 percent of the region’s population, Yiddish is still the official language.The musical’s creators hope to have it staged in Moscow next summer to mark the 70th anniversary of the Night of the Murdered Poets, when 13 Jewish intellectuals — including Yiddish poets — were executed by firing squads under orders from Stalin.Mr. Kissin is also working on a vocal cycle for baritone and piano based on the work of the Russian poet Alexander Blok. Ideas for the work emerged as early as 1986, he said, but he began writing down the music only in recent years.Mr. Kissin again emphasized that “it’s a matter of inspiration. And of course also of time. I only compose sporadically because it requires blocks of concentration,” he said, “which my main occupation as concert pianist allows very seldom.”Asked what repertoire he would like to explore in coming years, he rattled off a list of solo and chamber work with encyclopedic precision: the solo works of Bach and Shostakovich, which he has never played in public; Brahms’s Third Violin Sonata, one of his “favorite pieces of music ever written,” which he has played only once; Haydn, Mozart, Ravel, Scriabin.But he will also return to Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, which he has not played since 1996, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth in 2023. Also that year, he plans to take on the Piano Concerto of Rimsky-Korsakov.Despite his renewed activities as a composer, Mr. Kissin remains humble: “I would never dare to compose myself knowing that I would never be able to write something approaching the level of the great music already written.“Playing music,” he continued, “is how I can express myself best.” 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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      Robert Carsen Is Opera’s Most Reliably Excellent Director

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      If you’re an opera fan, chances are you’ve seen one of his productions. The latest, a Handel oratorio, is running at the Salzburg Festival.SALZBURG, Austria — “I personally don’t like the word ‘reliable,’” Robert Carsen said in an interview here recently. “It sounds so boring.”I had approached Carsen with a theory: that he might be the most, well, reliable director in opera. I meant it as high praise: His work is by no means repetitive, cautious or dull. But in more than 125 productions over three decades in the field, he has been peerlessly dependable.You can expect Carsen productions to be sophisticated, intelligently conceived and conceptually airtight. They connect with newcomers, while also leaving room for mystery and provocation. They are elegantly designed, even strikingly beautiful, yet not superficial. And always — reliably, you could say — their confidence reflects Carsen’s mastery of the material at hand.All this is evident in his staging of Handel’s oratorio “Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno,” which is running at the Salzburg Festival through Aug. 17. But it also can be clearly seen in the 10 more of his productions that I revisited on video this summer.If you’re an opera fan, chances are you’ve seen at least one of them. Carsen’s career has been varied — also including theater, exhibition design and fashion — but about 75 percent of it, he estimated, has been in opera. Carsen, 67, who was born in Canada but trained as an actor in London and made a home there until Brexit prompted him to move to Portugal, had his breakthrough in 1988 with a staging of the Boito rarity “Mefistofele,” an unwieldy and ironic take on “Faust,” for the Geneva Opera.It was no modest entrance: Carsen greeted the piece’s messiness with a spectacle of smoothly shifting registers of sincerity and sarcasm. The production traveled far beyond Geneva, and was revived by the Metropolitan Opera as recently as 2018.Christian Van Horn, center, in the title role of “Mefistofele,” revived at the Metropolitan Opera in 2018 after Carsen first staged it in 1988.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSince “Mefistofele,” Carsen said, he has never had a real plan for his career, but he has always been attracted to opera for its basic ingredients: concrete text and abstract music. “When the two come in harmony, you get this amazing experience,” he said. “Your head and your heart are engaged, satisfied and in dialogue with each other.”Carsen has his preferences. Of Rossini, he said, “I have no emotional response”; his favorites are Janacek and Handel, “because they’re so honest.” And for 25 years he has wanted to stage Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress.”If Carsen did take on that piece, he would likely start with Auden’s libretto. Because of his training as an actor, he studies text obsessively, which explains the thoroughness of his concepts.“If the thing doesn’t work all the way through, you have to throw it out,” he said. “A thing has to work from beginning to end for me to be satisfied, and sometimes it’s only in the end that people realize why you made a certain choice.”At opera’s best, Carsen says, “your head and your heart are engaged, satisfied and in dialogue with each other.”Oscar Gonzalez/NurPhoto, via Getty ImagesIn a “Tannhäuser” he staged in Barcelona, for example, he transported Wagner’s tale of a singing knight to the studio of a contemporary painter. Rather than succumbing to a struggle between the sacred and profane, the artist reconciles them into a new kind of art that is initially rejected, but in the opera’s final moments joins a gallery of masterpieces that were misunderstood in their own time.It’s a bittersweet ending, one that may not seem to follow the libretto. But it makes sense: Tannhäuser’s redemption is ultimately out of his hands, whether in medieval Germany or the pantheon of Western art.At times, Carsen has found that a libretto speaks well enough for itself, as in his minimalist production of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” at the Met, first seen in 1997 (and available on demand in a film from 2007). It is an arrestingly spare actors’ playground, surrounded by towering white walls, the stage covered in autumnal fallen leaves. Late in the opera, Carsen breaks from tradition, ending Act II before Onegin’s fatal duel with his best friend.Renée Fleming in Carsen’s “Eugene Onegin” at the Metropolitan Opera.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOnce that moment finally arrives, after intermission, it leads directly into the joyous polonaise that opens the third act, now shatteringly ironic: Onegin doesn’t miss a beat after killing his friend, remaining in place as his servants spritz him with perfume and dress him for a ball. It is echt Carsen: loyal to, yet building on, the opera.The Tatyana in that “Onegin” was Renée Fleming, who reunited with Carsen for Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Royal Opera in London, a staging that came to the Met in 2017. This may be the quintessential Carsen production: gorgeous, sensual and smartly considered, with an affecting coup de théâtre at the close.He moved the opera’s action to the time and place of its premiere: Vienna on the brink of World War I. He was inspired by Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s small but telling changes to the libretto, which made the Marschallin the wife of an army leader and Faninal a nouveau riche arms dealer. There are other touches drawn from throwaway moments in the text; Carsen has the Marschallin exit the opera arm-in-arm with another young soldier, based on a story she begins to tell her lover, Octavian, in Act I before abruptly changing the subject. The opera may be about one affair, but it is neither her first nor last.Carsen’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” which moved the opera’s action to the time of its premiere.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe production was unexpectedly resonant when it arrived at the Met, in the early months of the Trump presidency, when the country felt, after the abrupt end of the Obama era, on the edge of an uncertain future. The early scenes reflect the unsustainable excess of prewar life; the walls of the Marschallin’s bedroom seem barely able to hold the weight of all the portraits, the history, of her family. And the set literally bursts open in the opera’s final measures, revealing the haze of cannon fire and soldiers on the front — a rude awakening from the dream of the opera’s romance.For “Il Trionfo” in Salzburg, things may appear more contemporary: The character Bellezza (Beauty) is presented as the winner of “The World’s Next Top Model,” and is then wooed into a life of celebrity by one of the judges, Piacere (Pleasure) — while the other two, Tempo (Time) and Disinganno (Insight), engage in something of a battle for her soul. But as it goes on, the production becomes increasingly abstract.The first half is a parade of glamorously hedonistic tableaux, whose use of video — unusual in a Carsen production — is more of a dramatic device than a gimmick. At one point the videos are invasively focused on Bellezza, who is subjected to the relentless scrutiny of fame despite its visible toll on her mental health; you could imagine her as Britney Spears or Naomi Osaka.But as Tempo and Disinganno raise the curtain on the theater of truth, as they say in the second half, the stage becomes shallow, filled with a mirror that eventually gives way to the absence of any set: just an exposed backstage whose rear door Bellezza opens, exiting to the street. At the end of this oratorio there is no longer theater — only reality.It’s a powerful closing image for a work that wasn’t even originally meant to be staged. Yet Carsen fashions it into sustained drama, with the excellence that he can be, yes, relied upon to deliver. More