Salzburg Festival (1) - Der Prinz von Homburg, 20 August 2026

Felsenreitschule

(concert performance)

Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg - Maximilian Schmitt
The Electress – Tanja Ariane Baumgartner
Princess Natalie of Orange – Kathrin Zukowski
Field Marshal Dörfling – Lauri Vasar
Frederick Arthur, Prince of Homburg – Georg Nigl
Colonel Kottwitz – Anthony Robin Schneider
Count Hohenzollern – Magnus Dietrich
First Officer – Konstantin Igl
Second Officer – Gabriel Rollinson
Third Officer – Philipp Schöllhorn
First Lady of the Court – Hanna Park
Second Lady of the Court – Freya Apffelstaedt
Third Lady of the Court – Brigitta Listra
Sergeant, Second Orderly – Marcel Durka
First Orderly – Johannes Bamberger

ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra

Ingo Metzmacher (conductor)

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

Mention, let alone celebration, of Hans Werner Henze’s centenary has proved surprisingly muted, if not entirely unmarked—at least in continental Europe. Simon Rattle, a longstanding advocate, has given performances of Henze’s oratorio The Raft of the Medusa with his new orchestra in Munich, following on from an outstanding performance here in Salzburg last summer. Munich, long an important centre for Henze performance, saw a new staging of The English Cat by the Bavarian State Opera over the winter of 2025-6, so strictly not a new production this year, although close to being so. El Cimarrón, a scenic music theatre piece rather than an opera, has been given in Rome, Aix-en-Provence, and the composer’s birthplace, the small Westphalian city of Gütersloh. By and large, though, opera and symphonic performances have proved little less frequent than usual over the past decade, which is to say strikingly less frequent than during his lifetime. 

Whilst it was difficult not to feel a certain disappointment at the Salzburg Festival’s decision to give Der Prinz von Homburg in a single concert performance – sold out, be it noted – rather than a full staging, we should still be grateful for this celebration of the twin centenaries of Hans Werner Henze and Ingeborg Bachmann, born but six days apart in 1926. Theirs was a fruitful partnership extending over roughly a decade, beginning in 1955 with the composer’s provision of incidental music for Bachmann’s radio play Die Zikaden, its German narrator having fled to an Italian island. (Both Henze and Bachmann had taken that road south too.) A crucial context for this opera, the first of two, was the 1957 song-cycle Nachtstücke und Arien, with which Henze, with typical theatricality, staged his separation from an avant-garde of which he had never really been part in the first place. (One should be wary of his accounts of what happened, but that in part makes them all the more valuable aesthetically. Yet, as so often with Henze, the more he voiced his dissociation from German art, the more he also found himself drawn to it. Kleist’s play Prinz Friedrich von Homburg had achieved and, in a sense, suffered great popularity during both the Second Reich and the Third, and thus stood potentially as tainted for Henze and Bachmann as German Romantic music, especially when dealing with a German stage and audience. That held, almost irrespective of the aesthetic admiration its recreators both felt. The effort, then, in this opera not to be German is palpable, doomed, and fascinating—which is not to say that it is only German. (What is, or would wish to be? Pfitzner, perhaps, and probably not.) 

The conflicts at work in the score, not only mirroring but extending and intensifying those in the libretto came through strongly in this account from the ORF Symphony Orchestra, Ingo Metzmacher, and a distinguished cast. If I felt occasional passages of softer focus earlier on, I think that was in part a matter of listening my way in and also in part also a reflection of Henze’s writing. After all, in In his own words, ‘Der Prinz von Homburg … sets itself against the blind unimaginative application of laws, in favour of an exaltation of human kindness, an understanding of which reaches into deeper and more complex realms than would be “normal” and which seeks to find a place for a man in this world even though he is a Schwärmer and a dreamer, or perhaps because of that.’ There is a distinctive basic sound-world to the opera, blueish in hue, which takes on and sublimates, even to an extent pacifies the militarism one might expect. There is also certainly a strange dream-world that extends from that, heading the cantata Being Beauteous of a few years later, yet nonetheless shaped in trauma by what has gone before: politically, aesthetically, and perhaps ethically too. 

To present march rhythms on the harp, for instance, rather than trumpets and drums, seemed a statement, an act of hostility towards authorities that had brought the world to war in drama as on earth, and might do so again—heightened by the sense of aesthetic persecution the composer himself undoubtedly, if exaggeratedly, felt for himself: cursed, as it were, to be a German composer, however much he may have wished it otherwise. If the orchestra often seemed driven, perhaps by Metzmacher, to tilt the scales, as did Henze and Bachmann, away from unwanted inheritance, in this case towards Stravinsky, victory ebbed away as soon as it was achieved—just as on the battlefield. If the strangely muted world of interiority took longer to become dramatically compelling, there is arguably point to that, both in work and in performance, Whether there is stylistic resolution or even quite coherence becomes a more pressing issue without staging; eclecticism can be too readily condemned, but also too readily celebrated. When, at its best, stylistic conflict is put to dramatic use, one heard it all the more readily. Registering with ever greater immediacy was Henze’s inner conflict between Schoenberg and Stravinsky – the Symphony in Three Movements and ‘whiter’ ballets sometimes too close for comfort – alleged determinism and freedom, calculation and dreams, depth and beauty, and so on registered with increasing power. 

So too did, if less in the guise of a mediating power then humanistic intervention, understanding of the Prince of Homburg as a strange, postwar (even in war) Wozzeck-, even Christ-figure in a heterodox passion of sorts. If a concert performance could less readily convey than full staging quite who the characters on stage all were, more musical patterns could suggest something of that narrative—arguably more strongly than the work itself warrants, mind and ear compensating in unusual ways. Georg Nigl’s Prince took on the contradictions and struggles – the Prince’s and Henze’s – as his own in a performance of dramatic commitment that outweighed ‘mere’ aesthetic considerations. If occasionally he sounded a little stretched, more often Nigel emerged invigorated by the challenge. Magnus Dietrich’s honeyed Hohenzollern and Anthony Robin Schneider’s dark-chocolate Kollwitz particularly caught my ear on the male side, as on the other side of the gender divide did Kathrin Zukowski’s imploring, inwardly strong Princess Natalie and Tanja Ariane Baumgartner’s rich-toned, quasi-contralto Electress. Maximilian Schmitt ensure that, whilst the Elector’s justice might be cold, it had its own tonal allure. If Henze sometimes tilts the scales a little too obviously – Bachmann less so, I think – the cast did much, even in concert, to present a conflict worth agonising over. If the Prince’s celebrated battle-cry, ‘In Staub mit allen Feinden Brandenburgs,’ bidding Brandenburg’s foes return to dust, can no longer offer Kleist’s jubilation, it was all the more notable that ambivalence that also undercut mere tragic inversion emerged at the close. 

Whether so understandably anti-militaristic, anti-Prussian a recreation ultimately quite adds up, given inevitable, nagging comparison with Kleist, remains an open question. A few years later than the opera, Pierre Boulez spoke scathingly of Henze as a ‘lacquered hairdresser, who pays homage to an utterly superficial modernism’, here specifically in ‘an unfortunate rehashing of Verdi’s Don Carlos’. (Henze, it is only fair to add, had made for his part considerably more outrageous claims against Boulez, Stockhausen, and others.) If imaginative staging might have been able to do more to address such claims head on, this concert performance pointed further to the need to find out for ourselves. It also connected us with another centenary, falling as it did 100 years to the day after the Felsenreitschule’s first use as a performance venue by the Festival: for Max Reinhardt’s staging of Goldoni’s Il servitore di due padroni. The riding school has of course been used since for a host of memorable stage and concert performances, most renowned of all a filmed Don Giovanni conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. Should the current encounter point the way to a staging somewhere soon for Der Prinz von Homburg, it will prove still more welcome, but this will remain an important evening in its own right.

Salzburg Mozartwoche (3) - Die Zauberflöte, 23 January 2026

 

Haus für Mozart

Images: Werner Kmetitsch

Sarastro – Franz-Josef Selig
Queen of the Night – Kathryn Lewek
Tamino – Magnus Dietrich
Pamina – Emily Pogorelc
Papageno – Theodore Platt
Papagena – Tamara Ivaniš
Three Ladies – Alice Rossi, Štěpánka Pučálkova, Noa Beinert
Monostatos – Paul Schweinester
Speaker, First Priest – Rupert Grössinger
Priests and Armoured Men – Maximilian Müller, Maximilian Anger
Three Boys – Frederick Derwein, David Platzer, Laurenz Oberfichtner
Mozart – Vitus Denifl
Constanze – Victoria D’Agostino
Carl Thomas Mozart – Paul Tanzer

Director – Rolando Villazón
Set designs – Harold Thor
Costumes – Tanja Hofmann
Choreography – Ramses Sigl
Lighting – Stefan Bolliger
Video – Roland Horvath/rocafilm
Dramaturgy – Ulrich Leisinger
Assistant director – Bettina Gayer
Theatre manager – Kirsten Kimmig

Philharmonia Chor Wien (chorus director: Walter Zeh)
Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra
Roberto González-Monjas (conductor)

It has been a while since Salzburg’s Mozartwoche gave a fully staged version of a mature Mozart opera. The choice of The Magic Flute, directed by Intendant Rolando Villazón, was not arbitrary, but rather a centrepiece to the 70^th anniversary festival’s focus on Mozart’s last year. The opera could hardly be more emblematic of 1791; it was the last, barring fragments, to be completed and first performed, although most of the score was composed before La clemenza di Tito. Moreover, Villazón’s staging is set in that year, on the final night of Mozart’s life, presenting on stage the broader concept of his final-year focus and its motto ‘Lux Aeterna’: that on his death, Mozart was for us truly born. 

In that, we saw the production’s most arresting image, shortly after having heard its most arresting, if doubtless controversial, musical surprise. The Queen of the Night and Monostatos (here spelled ‘Manostatos’ after Mozart’s autograph) having threatened to destroy the temple and so on, Mozart finally expires, having been with us all along (on which more anon); the orchestra cuts to the Requiem’s ‘Lacrimosa’. I could have done without a man behind me loudly exclaiming ‘Requiem! Requiem! Requiem!’ (Thank you for your musicological input; we should never have known otherwise.) Nevertheless, the assembled company joining to sing the composer’s final music, beyond the point at which the autograph stops yet not until its close, proved surprisingly moving. The lurch back to Sarastro’s announcement of victory initially jarred, yet such musical difficulties on my part were more or less effaced by the composer’s apotheosis. In a likeable, post-Amadeus portrayal by Vitus Denifl he was transformed into a Kugel-version of Mozart, laughing and somersaulting above. Like the best of those chocolates – hint: buy them only from Fürst – it was an unexpected delight, not least to serious clowning on Denifl’s part and a strong musical account. 

How we got there, scenically, had its moments. The idea of presenting Mozart’s hallucinations from his last days  unable to attend a performance at the Freihaus-Theater an der Wieden, yet imagining it in his head, was a good one, especially in this specific setting, part commemorating and part celebrating Mozart having become ‘Mozart’. It combines two accounts: the first from Stendhal via the 1798 Allgemeine Zeitung (possibly from Constanze herself) following the performances at home, looking at the clock and imagining what must be on stage; the other from an 1840 letter from the composer Ignaz von Seyfried to the theatre director Georg Friedrich Treitschke telling of Mozart on the evening of 4 December 1791 hearing his sister-in-law sing the Queen of the Night’s aria in the theatre. And so, the clock bore a particular role in demarcating certain moments—rather brightly, I could not help but think, although I suppose that was the point. It also offered a place to hide; indeed, Harold Thor’s set designs proved resourceful throughout in use and reuse. 

That, I think, was to be applauded, not least since a notable,  welcome feature of the Mozartwoche as a whole is its grounding in Mozart scholarship: not a Beckmesserish (at best) school of ‘performance practice’, perhaps now at last waning, that loves nothing more than to condemn something as ‘inauthentic’, but rather respect for far broader and more interesting historical grounding that will enable and enrich modern performance of various kinds. Some of that one might like, some one might not, but it enters into dialogue rather than assertion of either fundamentalist domination or lazy solipsism. The problem more was that it did not become much more than a frame for what otherwise was a rather conventional portrayal of the actual dramatic action. Mozart interacted a little with the characters. He also instructed his son a little. More tenuously, Constanze became enraged at the misogyny of the priests, hitting them and her husband, suggesting their remarks were to be taken seriously, Mozart’s own music suggesting otherwise. In terms of a view about what the work ‘itself’ might be, what it might have to offer, and indeed how it might thus have ultimately come to participate in the creation of ‘Mozart’, I struggled to divine anything very much. 

Moreover, further character references seemed to me obscure. Without reading in the programme that Villazón intended the Three Ladies as three female artists – a poet, sculptor, and painter – I am not sure I should have noticed. Even if I had, nothing much was done with the idea. Presenting Tamino as a musician was fair enough; he plays the flute after all. Beyond that, it seemed another missed opportunity, soon more or less forgotten; likewise Monostatos/Manostatos as commercialisation of art, and so on. In encounters between multiple concepts, some fared better than others, though those of Mozart and Emanuel Schikaneder rarely so well.

To return, though, to what made that final scene – and much else – worthwhile, Roberto González-Monjas’s conducting of the Mozarteum Orchestra marked him out as that rarest of things, a musician who could draw from an orchestra a true sense of the breadth and depth of Mozart’s score, without imposing himself on it and subjecting it to strange eccentricities. One will almost always find differences between what one hears in one’s head – watching the clock, like Mozart, or otherwise – but what matters is whether one can make sense of what is put before one, whether it animates the drama, whether it enables the singers and actors to flourish. In all of those respects and more, González-Monjas’s account scored. So too did the warm, sympathetic playing of the orchestra. This ought not to be so rare as it is, but the demands of Mozart and ‘Mozart’ alike are never to be underestimated.

 

There was, moreover, a good sense of a troupe more than the sum of its parts among those singers and actors. Magnus Dietrich’s Tamino and Emily Pogorelc’s an alluring young pair vocally. Their arias touched and ennobled without contrivance. Franz-Josef Selig’s Sarastro is a known quantity to many of us, yet proved no less welcome in reasoned compassion for that. Kathryn Lewek’s Queen of the Night offered accuracy and bite, also reminding us that a flesh-and-blood woman lay behind the costume and coloratura. Hearing more dialogue than often one does – especially outside German lands gave a more proper sense of Papagena, as did a spirited performance by Tamara Ivaniš. Theodore Platt’s Papageno stole the show, as many do, and deservedly so, sheer theatrical presence married to innate musicality, a winning tribute to Schikaneder. Indeed, the thought occurred to me that that might have been an obvious personification for the production. But there will be other Flutes, and this offered magic enough, heightened by the experience of an afternoon visit to an exhibition at the Rupertinum, showing materials from earlier stagings, including that of Oskar Kokoschka, invited by Furtwängler, who alas died before they could collaborate. As Villazón’s concept for the festival as a whole reminds us, birth and death have always stood in a complex relationship, not least in the case of Mozart.