Though the sun was shining, locals and veteran festivalgoers continued to warn me to expect rain, lots of it. A bin of red golf umbrellas stood at the ready for hotel guests trekking twenty minutes to the concert hall or opera house, but apart from the occasional afternoon shower, I suffered only one seriously rainy evening. I spent it drinking a fancily-dressed coffee in a clean café, looking out onto a cobbled square and wondering if Mozart, over two and a quarter centuries ago, had strode through that same square on a similarly rainy evening, pondering when he would be able to escape his provincial hometown for Vienna. It was a beautiful week in Salzburg.
“Picturesque” is an easy word to use in the presence of any mountain, lake or beach largely devoid of litter, but Salzburg, Austria — which Mozart once claimed to be “no place for my talent” — is nestled in the foothills of the Alps by the German border and really earns the descriptor. I spent any concert-free afternoon wandering around Salzburg’s Old Town, hiking up to Hohensalzburg Castle Si lvia Lel l i (3x ) and looking out at snow-capped peaks, and, of course, mentally checking off Sound of Music sites as they appeared, often in unexpected places.
The Salzburg Festival presents opera, classical music and theater for five weeks starting in late July and has the reputation of offering music of the highest caliber. Indeed, nearly every opera and concert I heard in Salzburg bested season highlights from The
Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall. (Of course, it helps when the house band is the
Vienna Philharmonic.)
Concert-hall elegance is not taken lightly here, and anything less than a sharp dark suit and tie will earn you a sneer worthy of Captain von Trapp; permissible exceptions to the dress code include Lederhosen and Dirndls, the traditional Bavarian and Austrian outfits that listeners sport side-by-side those wearing tuxedos and evening gowns. The juxtaposition at first seems comical but quickly grows on you — it’s all part of the scene, and all is congruous.
There is an unaccommodating and longstanding debate in the opera community over nontraditional productions, sometimes dubbed Regietheater (German for “director’s theater”) by detractors. This debate predictably degenerates into “conservative” and “liberal” camps, with conservatives standing up for purity and composer-intent and liberals standing up for opera-as-living-art. But for my money (or my press ticket), there are only two kinds of opera productions: good ones and bad ones. If a director is able to defend his production, which is to say, if he is able to render a convincing telling of the opera, then it’s successful, or good. If not, it’s unsuccessful: bad. The same criterion holds in instrumental music. Musicians must be able to sell their interpretations. Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations: idiomatic, wacky, but convincing — good! Herbert Blomstedt conducting Staatskapelle Dresden in Beethoven’s Seventh: great pacing, mighty brass, conservative and convincing — also good!
The two staged opera productions I witnessed at Salzburg could not have been further
apart from the standpoint of their adherence to tradition — and both were spectacular. First, director Peter Stein delivered a very traditional production of Verdi’s Macbeth, with an eye to brutal realism. There were knights in full chain mail, three gruesomely haggard witches you would expect to encounter on the Scottish heath, armies literally springing from the trees, and a cast of hundreds. Stein made great natural use of Salzburg’s Felsenreitschule theater, exposing its wide stage and natural stone tiers to create a grim, expansive castle. Stein’s production also lifts our gaze higher than the story’s usual concerns of ambition, vengeance, misread prophecies and just desserts — and offers a tale about liberation from tyranny, with Macbeth as dictator: when Malcolm is at last crowned king, it is taken as a victory for the people. Indeed, the production seems always conscious of the human scale of the tragedy. The body count is bloodily noted, as when Macduff holds the gory bodies of his children and wife in his arms. More striking still, an endless line of downtrodden peasants parades across the stage during an overture, a visual testament to the violence of poverty. The production also did nothing to hamper the superb Riccardo Muti and the Vienna Philharmonic — and the music, as it always should, held sway. The orchestra played vividly and Muti, while focused on detail, avoided any mechanical pitfalls, delivering warm and sensitive phrasing throughout this four-and-a half- hour production.
