The Salzburg Festival Reawakens

A new artistic director challenges the European élite.
Peter Sellars’s production of “La Clemenza di Tito” evokes the war on terror.Illustration by Stefano Pietramala

The upward-springing hair, bright polyester shirts, and merry cackle of Peter Sellars, the American director, are once again in evidence at the Salzburg Festival, which means that change is in the air. In recent years, this most sumptuous of classical-music gatherings has reverted to its default identity as a parade of musical celebrities with no clear artistic destination in sight. Last year, though, the progressive-minded Austrian pianist and impresario Markus Hinterhäuser took over as Salzburg’s artistic director, and he is stirring memories of the festival’s most vital period—that of the nineteen-nineties, when Gerard Mortier presided over a superb array of provocations, including an avant-garde series that Hinterhäuser co-curated. Sellars was a star of the Mortier era, staging Olivier Messiaen’s “Saint François d’Assise” in 1992 and the première of Kaija Saariaho’s “L’Amour de Loin” in 2000. Now he is back, with a production of “La Clemenza di Tito,” Mozart’s austere, elusive final opera. Mozart is, of course, Salzburg’s native son, and the festival’s raison d’être. He is also the composer through whom Sellars first won fame as an opera director, with feats of modernization that included a “Marriage of Figaro” set in Trump Tower. Sellars’s belated return to Salzburg is a sign that Hinterhäuser intends to revive the spirit of the Mortier regime, which caused consternation at the time but is now remembered as a golden age.

“Panoply of Power” is the motto of Hinterhäuser’s first season. Such slogans festoon the brochures of European festivals, often amounting to little more than pompous afterthoughts. But Hinterhäuser’s decision to begin with “Clemenza” gave the theme substance: to hear the work in Salzburg is to be confronted with multiple representations of power. First, there is the Roman emperor Titus, who in Mozart’s opera assumes an almost saintly profile but is better remembered for his brutal conduct in the Jewish War. Then there is the Austrian emperor Leopold II, for whom Mozart composed the opera, in 1791, and whose benevolent image went hand in hand with anti-revolutionary propaganda. Finally, there are the listeners among whom one sits—a convocation of European élites who have paid up to four hundred and thirty euros for their tickets.

Sellars is not one to overlook such tensions. His “Clemenza,” which unfolds in the Felsenreitschule, the theatre carved out of a Salzburg mountainside, replicates the imaginative shock of his early productions. In collaboration with the Greek conductor Teodor Currentzis, Sellars has drastically revised Mozart’s score, in a fashion that might offend purists. He has reduced the recitatives and interpolated several movements from the Mass in C Minor and other Mozart pieces, further spiritualizing the drama. These changes work surprisingly well: artful manipulations of the recitatives make transitions to and from the Mass sections seamless. In a way, this hodgepodge might be considered more authentic than the original, which was only partly Mozart’s creation. Pressed for time, the composer turned to an assistant—probably his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr—for help in writing the recitatives.

Mozart’s libretto is based on a famous text by the eighteenth-century poet Pietro Metastasio, which, as of 1791, had been set to music nearly forty times. Tito survives a coup instigated by Vitellia, the disgruntled daughter of a deposed ruler, and led by her lover, Sesto, Tito’s friend. When the conspiracy is exposed, Tito forgives all. Sellars’s Tito is the head of a modern state that faces an influx of refugees. During the overture, he is seen plucking Sesto and his sister, Servilia, from a crowd of migrants; the outsiders are invited into the ruler’s inner circle. But Sesto is led astray by Vitellia, who pushes him toward an act of terrorism. In this version, Tito does not survive the assassination attempt; he spends Act II in a hospital bed, and issues clemency at the point of death.

Sellars makes his moral vision even stronger through his casting. In an essay included in the program, he compares Tito to Nelson Mandela, who, on assuming power in South Africa, forgave those who wished him dead. The African-American tenor Russell Thomas sings Tito, and he is surrounded by nonwhite artists: the South African soprano Golda Schultz, as Vitellia; the Trinidadian soprano Jeanine De Bique, as Sesto’s friend Annio; and the Jamaican-born bass Willard White, a Sellars veteran, as Tito’s military chief, Publio. Marianne Crebassa, in the castrato role of Sesto, and Christina Gansch, as Servilia, seem to constitute a white underclass in a black power structure. This inversion puts the drama in a fresh light and advances Sellars’s long-term campaign against systemic racism in classical music.

Artistic ambitions match social ones. At the second performance in the run, the singers formed an ensemble of rare cohesion: Thomas’s penetrating tenor, which has lately acquired richness and heft, anchored the evening, and Crebassa complemented him with nimble technique and sensuous vocal colors. Currentzis drew vivid playing, on period instruments, from the musicAeterna orchestra, which is based at the Perm Opera, in central Russia, where Currentzis serves as artistic director. He is a restless, interventionist conductor; his recordings of “Figaro,” “Don Giovanni,” and “Così Fan Tutte,” for Sony, have biting clarity but seldom leave the music to unfurl freely. Still, his fanatic intensity sustains the hybrid “Tito” score that he and Sellars have devised. The set designer George Tsypin contributes a tableau of columnar Plexiglas forms; James Ingalls’s lighting lends sombre majesty to the cavernous space of the Felsenreitschule.

One scene elicited an explosion of applause, even from listeners who were initially inclined to be skeptical. (The woman sitting next to me tut-tutted when gun-toting soldiers appeared onstage.) This was Sesto’s great aria “Parto, parto,” in which he swears vengeance under the sway of love. The aria includes a solo part for basset clarinet; in a bewitching coup de théâtre, the clarinettist Florian Schüle stepped from behind one of Tsypin’s sculptures and performed a slow dance with Crebassa, at one point playing while lying down beside her. Such theatricalizations of instrumental music have become a Sellars signature, notably in his stagings of the Bach Passions. After Sesto sings, “Guardami” (“Look at me”), the clarinettist offers lilting phrases amid expectant pauses; it seems that the object of Sesto’s love has become music itself. And when Sesto sings, “Oh gods, what power you have given to beauty,” a line is drawn between the beauty of the music and the violence that ensues. The proximity of art and power remains unsettling.

Other novelties at Salzburg this summer include a revival of Aribert Reimann’s 1978 opera, “Lear”; Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”; a survey of the late Spectralist master Gérard Grisey; and a new production of Berg’s “Wozzeck,” by William Kentridge, which will travel to the Met in the 2019-20 season. Festivalgoers who enjoy paying large sums to see familiar faces should not feel shortchanged. Before the summer is out, they will have encountered Domingo, Netrebko, Flórez, Bartoli, Argerich, Trifonov, Mutter, Schiff, Uchida, Muti, Rattle, Barenboim, Haitink, and much of the rest of what is thought to be the classical-music A-list.

A cultish, worshipful atmosphere can prevail in Salzburg, to sometimes irritating effect. A case in point was an evening of Mozart and Beethoven sonatas with the enigmatic Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov, who avoids travel to the United States but has an avid European following. He has an extraordinarily sensitive touch, and specializes in the surgical separation and articulation of voices: when he plays a crisp, marcato line with his left hand and a flowing legato with his right, the parts are so distinct that it sounds as though two different people were at the instrument. He is also deeply eccentric. His accounts of Mozart’s Sonata in C, K. 545, and the Fantasia and Sonata in C Minor, rendered without pause, veered from porcelain prettiness to turbulent Romantic gesturing and back again, neither manner suitable to the music at hand. In Beethoven’s Opus 111, Sokolov’s interpretive meanderings matched the saturnine magnificence of the score: endless even-toned trills and ethereal figuration cast a spell. Still, a humorless self-indulgence prevailed. The crowd roared and stamped; I went away perplexed.

On another night, the German baritone Christian Gerhaher gave an all-Schumann program, with Gerold Huber at the piano. Here I happily joined the cult. Gerhaher is one of the great vocal artists of the day, although he is not an interpreter of vast expressive range. His characteristic mode is that of ironic intelligence masking strong feeling, and he seldom varies his approach. But his voice is so singular in aura that nothing appears to be missing. At the core of his art is an artlessness akin to conversational speech: time and again, he colors a line by breaking the honeyed tone and letting a folkish directness steal in. He hints at the style of a balladeer, or even of a cabaret singer—an effect accentuated by the pointed use of rolled “r”s. In “Mädchen-Schwermut” (“A Girl’s Melancholy”), Gerhaher begins with a white, wan sound, evoking a lost spirit that finds only sadness in dewdrops and spring breezes. When he reaches the words “freudenlose Welt” (“joyless world”), a slight roughness intrudes, as if he had lost faith in the illusion of song. This quality of contingent beauty imparts immense emotional weight to Gerhaher’s work.

In Heine’s poem “Mit Myrten und Rosen,” which Schumann set in his Liederkreis Opus 24, the narrator speaks of his songs as mute and lifeless, waiting for the “spirit of love” that will rekindle them. Gerhaher has the power to give the repertory a present-tense immediacy. Such sorcery is, however, far from routine at Salzburg, which, despite Hinterhäuser’s efforts, features few new pieces and remains captive to the conservative taste of its élite audience. In a prospectus for the festival, issued a century ago, Max Reinhardt wrote, “The arts are not merely a luxury for the rich and sated, but food for the needy.” That idea has yet to take root in Salzburg. ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated the figure compared to Nelson Mandela in the essay.