In
the case Gerard Mortier, it has often proved a case of ‘après moi, le déluge’.
I cannot speak so much for La Monnaie, which seems to have continued to prosper
following his departure in 1991, after a decade at the helm. However, even if the
Salzburg Festival has similarly continued to prosper, its direction has been
less clear since Mortier left in 2001, various directors having come and gone,
even Alexander Pereira having fallen victim to extra-musical political
machinations. As for the Opéra national de Paris under Nicolas Joel, Mortier’s
successor having transformed a lively house, with a broad range of interesting
directors and conductors, into an artistic backwater that can present a 2014-15
season in which the most ‘modern’ work is Ariadne
auf Naxos… And then, there were the directorship of the New York City Opera
that never was, and which surely would have saved that now defunct institution,
and the valiant, sadly unappreciated, attempt to turn Madrid’s Teatro Real into
a world-class house.
Mortier
faced a near-impossible task at Salzburg, as successor to Herbert von Karajan.
Yet the Belgian impresario’s decade in charge must now be accounted one of the
Festival’s most successful. It was not that musical standards needed much in the
way of improvement, though one must always be vigilant in such matters, but
rather that Mortier opened the way for a much-needed injection of innovative
stage direction. Reactionaries complained, even screamed, but who cares? Mortier’s
insistence upon offering a world-class platform to twentieth-century operas
which had rarely or never been staged in Salzburg proved perhaps the greatest
of his legacies. I have never forgiven
myself for missing out, on my very first visit, on the opportunity of hearing
Boulez conduct Moses und Aron, but
life is full of such regrets. I have very fond memories indeed, from my next
visit, of Achim Freyer’s Zauberflöte:
a truly magical staging, in which Freyer’s fabled circus ensemble (for once!) made
perfect sense, and which benefited from the move, when I saw it, from the
Felsenreitschule a specially-converted performance space, in an exhibition
hall, where the clowns and the production at large could mingle with the
audience and meaningfully break down the fragile boundaries between performance
and alleged ‘reality’. At last to see Busoni’s Doktor Faust was alone worth the visit alone – a visit made
possible by the Festival’s new scheme of tickets for young people, another
Mortier innovation. It was, moreover, rumoured that Mortier had
used funds secured from someone who had insisted that his or her money go to
fund an ‘Italian opera’, in order to stage Busoni’s masterpiece: not quite what
the squealing plutocrat had in mind, but typical of Mortier’s artistic
conviction.
