Salzburg Festival (4) - Saint François d’Assise, 23 August 2026

Felsenreitschule

Images: © SF/Monika Rittershaus

The Angel – Lauranne Oliva
Saint François – Philippe Sly
The Leper – Sean Panikkar
Brother Léon – Russell Braun
Brother Massée – Léo Vermot-Desroches
Brother Élie – Aaron-Casey Gould
Brother Bernard – Willard White
Brother Sylvestre – Marius Aron
Brother Rufin – Ivan Lyvch

Saint Francis’s father – Ingo Arbeiter
Saint Francis’s mother – Ingeborg Haidinger
Leper (actor) – Georg Schwamberger

Angels – Eirck Godoy, Ilaria Quaglia, Nicholas Sambou, Davide Troiani, Lisa Vilret, Sebastian Zamaro
Brothers – Felix Chang, Antoine Effroy, Nikos Fragkou, Emanuele Ospelt, Davide Sportelli, Emile Wendt

Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera (chorus director: Jozef Chabroň)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Maxime Pascal (conductor)

Salzburg’s new Saint François d’Assise, directed by Romeo Castellucci and conducted by Maxime Pascal, with Philippe Sly in the title role, single-handedly justifies the somewhat mixed operatic results of Markus Hinterhäuser’s now concluded intendancy. This was an event, an experience not only of the highest, most challenging artistic order, but extended beyond that, building to a transcendental encounter in the third act that I am sure will remain with those who underwent, no participated in, it for the rest of their lives. That is in large part a matter of the work, of course, Messiaen’s avowed summa; or rather, the work was an indispensable fons et origo for it. But the palpable ambition, commitment and – doubtless in various forms – belief shown from all concerned were equally crucial. Taking steps, as it does, not merely beyond the at-best wonderful, yet also too-often-infuriating aesthetic of opera, but beyond Wagner’s renewal of Attic tragedy and Schoenberg’s theological transformation of Wagnerian music drama, to an opera that arguably belongs less in our opera houses even than Parsifal or Moses und Aron, and yet in its rebuke and challenges alike to them helps justify their continued existence and promise them new life, Saint François may be a one-off, but it is an absolutely necessary one-off. More to the point, it felt and, quite simply, was so here, an inspired contribution to the eight-hundredth anniversary of St Francis’s death, as well as a crucial demonstration of what art, religion, and humanity can and must do if they are to survive—and to be worthy of survival. 

The total commitment of Sly’s performance in its physical extremity as well as its astounding musical range was foremost among the wonders experienced. Call it inspiration, call it faith, call it what you will: here was an artist responding to and creating something extraordinary—in tandem with his fellow artists and the work itself. Lauranne Oliva’s Angel was a voice and presence of radiant clarity, as unanswerable and unknowable as the place from which (s)he had come. Russell Braun’s beautifully sung Brother Leo offered a more attainable or at least approachable example, imploring and certain in faith, ineffably human as, like the rest of the brothers, he sought the way. Willard White’s Brother Bernard imparted a striking, equally touching voice of older faith. All presented voices and faces of a community, a path, that connected us to the world of saints, angels, and divinity. 

The opening of Castellucci’s staging offered a frame closer to more typical contemporary opera as anything we should proceed to see (or hear), but quite rightly one soon forgotten, even discarded. In a museum – yes, our museum of musical works – the young Francis was called to leave all behind: his fine clothes, art, family (his father reappearing briefly in the final scene, but no longer in any sense the focus) himself to begin the route to the beyond: first beyond society, even beyond established monasticism, and ultimately Beyond. Shedding his fine clothes, as did the historical Francis, he was born anew, as were his followers, in a water both of baptism and of, straightforwardly, elemental water, pouring from the ceiling and, in one of many striking images of Castelluccian installation-drama, apparently petrified, water emerging miraculously as if from a fountain. Brothers, singers and dancers alike, joined him, likewise losing all, one shaved onstage, in the promise of gaining all—through a life of obedience, prayer, belief, charity, and art that is heavenly rather than temporal. Such is no easy path, of course, and only Francis could truly take on the ultimate challenge, that of Christ’s Cross, but others would participate as they could: whether in baking bread during Lauds in onstage ovens, its unmistakeable aroma inviting us to the refectory for physical interval sustenance; in receiving the Angel and its questions about predestination; in accepting not only the Leper, but his leprosy as part of God’s creation, a blow against Cathar and other heresy; in wandering, even wallowing in a mud, a filth as far removed from Francis’s fine origins as could be imagined; and of course with the birds and other of God’s creatures (all featured at different points onstage: wolf (of Gubbio), bird, and sacrificial lambs, as well as representations). 

There was much more, yet nothing was hurried, the production taking its necessary time as did the musical performance. If some of the visual displays might have worked better, ironically, in a museum – a giant picture, for instance, of a child regaining the ability to hear – then many others were deeply touching, not least a confession to which it was difficult not to assent, quasi-heretically, in artistic communion: ‘Je t’aime, Olivier, immense artiste’. The birds in Francis’s sermon took on new, tragic meaning when shown, both onstage as near death and on screen in funerary naming, in reference to the ecological devastation of our age. But for the most part, the preaching was not Castelucci’s, or ours, but that of Francis and perhaps something lying beyond even him. This was not a place for argument, for discussion, but for mystery and for truth. We could recognise that more readily, however strenuous the demand, in the acceptance of the leper (acted by an old man, apparently wasted away, yet sung and doubled already by an angelic Sean Panikkar in white), mirrored towards the close when the latter returned to wash Francis on his way to the beyond. The ravishing beauty of Panikkar’s singing added further levels of theological as well as dramatic understanding, as of course did the Vienna Philharmonic’s celestial invitation (and those of the ondes Martenot, played by Nathalie Forget, Augustin Viard, and Cécile Lartigau). The image of Panikkar as angelic leper emanation, to borrow slightly from Stockhausen, kneading together Francis and physical Leper under a cloth for them to emerge in quasi-communion, even quasi-transubstantiated, as living counterpart to the bread whose baking (and oven steam) similarly pervaded the Felsenreitschule, made perfect liturgical sense in the moment—a key condition, of course, for any form of liturgical acceptance, not necessarily to be expected out of context. Ritual lived, brought to life, and yet, as with Our Lord, ultimately pointed to death—and thereafter resurrection. 

For later, in the stigmata scene, we were unmistakeably in the world of dark mysteries it was and could not be given to us to understand. As with Francis, we must simply submit. A chill orchestral wind summoned by Pascal and the orchestra both formed a foundation for and intensified the dark images onstage, all having changed as we approached the beginning of the end. In dance, image, and music, it might almost have been a black (or better, dark) mass, a reminder that true sacrilege may closer approach – an essential term here – the sacred than so much of our banal, daily lives, ‘religious’ or ‘secular’. Not everything, here as in art and religion more generally, was necessarily to be understood or experienced representationally. Was that apparently sacramental mound from which so much dirt and darkness came anything of the kind? Did it summon the grave later to be dug by skeletal figures, one of them Francis? Or were these the wrong questions to ask, evidence that we had not yet been called? Red may have signalled blood; it may simply, joyously, agonisingly, have been red (to synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes alike). Angel wings were surely, though, on at least one level what they seemed to be: providing, and of Providence, something towards which Francis, once further shorn of strength and submitted to those dark figures (of Hell?) could reach, ultimately to join a company of Heaven that may have been easier, or at least less impossible, for Francis’s mediaeval mind than ours to grasp. 

And yet, this is a work of modernity, a singular version no doubt, but no less modern for that. Messiaen engaged with the newest as well as the oldest music; he instructed many of its composers, as well as writing it himself. Pascal left us in no doubt he head internalised this musical language, its capabilities, and its emotions, to bring it, like Francis – and us – to new life. Birds, for Messiaen God’s finest musicians, sang more clearly than all, uninhibited, acting from their essence, knowing no other. This we heard from all sections of the orchestra, gamelan-percussion in near-surround sound included. Counterpoint and harmony mesmerised as Creation itself returned to life. But there was more to it than that single miracle. There was existential dread, harmonic and timbral; there was radiant, human joy; there was a new sense of time; there was the Angel’s unearthly viol. Ultimately, there was the coming together of all, in orchestral and choral divine encounter, an experience so overwhelming one felt one had actually met God. That did not happen by itself, through mere grace, for this was still art: the work had been prepared, paced, and permitted to speak for itself in its succession of tableaux. Its inevitability, though, was undeniable. In the numinous, astonishing, overwhelming closing bars, instruments, creatures, alleluias, and other songs of praise resounding, we came together as the angels had promised Francis: poetry and music leading us, as with Bach, to God Himself. This is not the only thing opera or art can and should do; but it felt, for many hours after, that it might (yet) be the most important.

Don Giovanni, Vienna State Opera, 3 February 2023

Don Giovanni – Kyle Ketelsen
Commendatore – Ain Anger
Donna Anna – Hanna-Elisabeth Müller
Don Ottavio – Dmitry Korchak
Donna Elvira – Kate Lindsey
Leporello – Philippe Sly
Zerlina – Isabel Signoret
Masetto – Martin Häßler

Barrie Kosky (director)
Katrin Lea Tag (designs)
Franck Evin (lighting)
Theresa Gregor (costumes)
Sergio Morabito, Nikolaus Stenitzer (dramaturgy)

Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus director: Thomas Lang)

Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera

Antonello Manacorda (conductor)

Images: © Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn
Donna Anna (Hanna-Elisabeth Müller) and the Commendatore (Ain Anger)

One of Barrie Kosky’s great virtues as a director is that he does not impose a one-size-fits-all approach, or aesthetic, to his work with opera. There will sometimes, of course, be visual similarities – doubtless in part his, in part his design team’s – but they are intermittent and rarely, if ever, determining factors for the conceptual framework. (An especially vexing misconception of the AMOP crowd is that designs ‘are’ the production. No wonder they fail to understand anything they see.) And that framework, like it or otherwise—I have regularly fallen into either camp—is usually pretty clear. 

What puzzled me most about this Don Giovanni was a relative lack of clarity—whether in my perception or intrinsic. I think I managed to piece a bit more together afterwards, but much of it seemed, at least to me, a little undercooked: not a characteristic I readily associate with the director. Is that perhaps a by-product of its first outing having been at the height of the pandemic, when restrictions may have inhibited certain types of action? Characters certainly seem to spend a good deal of time, though far from all of it, some distance apart on a large stage. It is a rocky, rather grim landscape, many miles (literally, I suspect, as well as conceptually) from early-modern Seville (or the Venice Da Ponte’s libretto often seems fundamentally to suggest). Nothing is hidden, or concealed, in a wasteland that is anything but labyrinthine. It sprouts flora in the final scene of the first act, as do the chorus (who, whatever I said earlier on, resemble strikingly the chorus in Kosky’s Komische Oper Monteverdi Orpheus). But then it is back to the grey, rocky landscape—and latterly, a pool of water. 

That literal flowering seems to suggest some sort of Bacchic ritual, it would seem, albeit curiously shortlived. Perhaps that is the point: what does Giovanni do when things are not flowering, when the wine is not flowing—which does not even seem to happen at his feast, nor indeed ‘Finch’ han del vino’? He waits, it seems: a curious undermining of the kinetic energy that makes up his dramatic – in music and words alike – persona. Again, I imagine that is the point. Indeed, after, though only after, the performance, I sensed that, especially later on, this had been for Don Giovanni and Leporello, perhaps for the others too, a performance of Waiting for the Commendatore. Or had it? The idea of a Beckettian Don Giovanni is intriguing, but not very much more seems to be done with it. 

Don Giovanni (Kyle Ketelsen) and Masetto (Martin Hässler)

The other principal theme, perhaps related, is a centring of Leporello, who seems (not unreasonably, I suppose, given a standpoint of psychological realism) quite traumatised by his experiences with Don Giovanni. Is there a sense of abuse there? One might argue that that is intrinsic to the master-slave dialectic, though I am not sure that is quite how Mozart and Da Ponte see it. I think so, but more strong, again especially towards the end, is a sense of an ersatz father-and-son relationship. Perhaps, according to standpoint, that is intrinsically abusive. One might, truthfully yet not necessarily revealingly, observe that all of Don Giovanni’s relationships, if one may call them that at all, qualify as such. I sensed, though, that Kosky is saying more than that, without being quite clear (in my mind) what that ‘more’ is. Donna Elvira seems to be behaving rather unusually too. 

Don Giovanni and Leporello
(Philippe Sly)

Another Kosky virtue is that he knows his music. As with any director, indeed any musician, one might disagree with his response, but it would be unfair to claim that he has not considered it. A case in point here would be the concatenation of dances Mozart presents as a society of orders stands on the libertine – perhaps even revolutionary – precipice. For once, not only do we have the different bands of musicians on stage; the characters dance the appropriate dance, lending visual realisation of an extraordinary moment whose import may not always be recognised by a twenty-first-century audience. Too often, directors impose trademark silly dancing for all-comers. (There is a bit of that too, but not here.) I could not help, though, but wish that Kosky had interpreted the music, or at least how I hear it, a little more. It is not that music need always be doubled on stage, any more than the libretto need, but in the absence of a stronger conceptual lead, it might have helped. Herbert Graf’s Salzburg Felsenreitschule ipproduction for Furtwängler continues to score here. 

I am wary, as anyone should be, of saying it would have been better to have done x than y. It seems more fruitful in general to concentrate on y, though consideration of x may have some heuristic use in sharpening critique of y. For me—surely also for Mozart and Da Ponte—Don Giovanni is unquestionably a religious, indeed a Catholic, work, profoundly concerned with sin and damnation. That does not mean it must be presented as such, but it suggests performance would do well at least to find a satisfactory alternative to doing so, rather than simply ignoring the issue. That may be why, assuming God rather than Nietzsche to be dead, Kosky steps, surprisingly tentatively, toward the Theatre of the Absurd and, perhaps, beyond it to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, though neither comes across so starkly as it might. But then, perhaps neither is supposed to; if something is a context, it is not necessarily for me to say that it should become something more than that. Is it, though, for an audience member to voice bemusement concerning what, if anything, the message might be? Surely it is; for if not, not only criticism but theatre itself must be dead. And, whatever Kosky’s message may be, whatever the strange intermittent lack of theatricality to a production that yet strains hard to be theatrical, I strongly doubt he would wish to propose that particular death. 

As it was, a strong cast of singers worked hard to bring theatrical as well as musical values to the stage. Kyle Ketelsen was an energetic, charismatic Don Giovanni, owning the stage when he needed to, yet not without a sense of the chameleon when musically as well as dramatically called for. Philippe Sly’s wounded yet spirited Leporello offered a tour de force in the service of Kosky’s strangely compelling conception. Hanna-Elisabeth Müller, an initial announcement notwithstanding, and Dmitry Korchak both shone as the unambiguously seria pair, Donna Anna and Don Ottavio. They understood how coloratura works dramatically—and made us feel that. Kosky’s Donna Anna is certainly no unwilling participant: a more controversial idea now than it might have been twenty or even ten years ago, but certainly not without warrant in the score, let alone Romantic tradition. Kate Lindsey’s ‘Mì tradi’ was worth the price of admission alone; not that the rest of this captivating artist’s performance was not similarly excellent. If I were unsure quite what Kosky was trying to suggest here, there was no doubting Lindsey’s dramatic and musical capabilities of doing so. Ain Anger’s Commendatore was intelligently sung, paying commendable attention to the words as well as to overall aura. Isabel Signoret and Martin Häβler’s spirited Zerlina and Masetto likewise made much, though never too much, of their words, marrying them with sweet satisfaction to melody and overall characterisation. 

Antonello Manacorda and the Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera (to all intents and purposes the Vienna Philharmonic) seemed neither at odds, nor completely of one mind. There was no discernible attempt made to stymie the Vienna sound, commendably full on occasion, and anything but puritanical. (Imagine: puritanism in this of all works!) Yet whilst generally choosing sensible tempi – I still cannot come on board with the fashionable alla breve for Overture and Stone Guest, however ‘correct’ it is held to be – Manacorda often seemed to remain somewhat on the surface: more, perhaps, of orchestra than score. He was supportive of the cast, though, and I cannot imagine anyone being seriously disappointed. I doubt use of the all-too-familiar conflation of Prague and Vienna versions was his doing. Whoever made that decision really should have known better, but no one ever does (well, hardly ever). The outcome, save in the most blistering, powerful of performances, is always dramatically unsatisfactory; this was no exception. Prague is, of course, the answer; it would be a good start were someone occasionally to ask the question.