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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

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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