Streams of refugees are passing. Yet again. Still. This time they end up at the Felsenreitschule with Bohuslav Martinů’s outsider opera “The Greek Passion” – and let no one say that the Salzburg Festival, as an amusing tourist spectacle, isolates their desire for art from reality. On the other hand, they don’t get along with the sometimes gloomy everyday news out there and insist on their own aesthetic standards in the protected sphere of the stage.
After four more meaning-busting attempts at opera interpretation yesterday with Loy, Kušej, Warlikowski, Marthaler, the 38-year-old Australian-Swiss theater, film and opera director, author and actor Simon Stone is the youngest in the male director quintet. It’s also here for the third time, but has left its sometimes annoying attributes, overwriting, revolving stage and many, many videos at home.
also read
Lizzie Clachan got him into the sometimes difficult, sometimes overwhelming Salzburger Felsenreitschule high, unadorned grey-white walls and floor built into it. A monstrous space of neutrality. In the end, of course, he was injured. Because then, in the name of the majority, three painters lowered by ropes wrote “Refugees out!” on the walls.
That’s what it says there, in orange, as a bad beacon. And underneath lies the risen Christ in his blood, murdered by Judas on the orders of the priest. His head is held by two women, his former bride who has just married someone else and his lover Mary Magdalene.
It looks a bit like Oberammergau, and that’s how it should be. The assembled congregation of perpetrators and victims sang conciliatory church hymns. The homeless are now leaving this place where they were not welcome. And the light goes out. Big applause.
Scene from Simon Stone’s modern Passion Festival play
Source: dpa
It’s okay. And it’s that simple. After a long Salzburg summer of operatic displeasure with abstruse, clichéd concepts and non-functioning improvements to make things worse, the repertoire there finally turns into the home straight with a highly successful production. In which an authoritarian director, who is quite willing to interpret, simply indulges in humility (“forget the ego” is his slogan), does without exaggeration, alienation, commentary and apparent updating. Instead, he concentrates on his skills and his imagination – and a piece that is not exactly well-known, but played at exactly the right moment, just as it is. And everyone is as moved as they are enthusiastic.
Bohuslav Martinů, himself repeatedly a refugee due to the political conditions of the 20th century as a Czech, had written a music theater for London’s Royal Opera House Covent Garden based on a novel by “Alexis Sorbas” author Nikos Kazantzakis: “The Greek Passion”. In 1957 the first version, which had its premiere in a reconstruction in Bregenz in 1999, was rejected; a completely revised version was only played by Paul Sacher in Zurich after the composer’s death in 1961. In German.
In Salzburg – in the original English – one hears and sees this second version as a transversal opera, committed, competent and gripping, but also at times difficult to grasp due to its polystylistics and intentionally strangely naive. Always on the verge of do-gooder kitsch, but not tipping over. Virtues and mistakes, from which the immensely successful scenic and musical implementation by Stone and the animating conductor Maxime Pascal does not distract for a second but humbly embraces them.
Jesus is killed again
Kazantzakis, who above all denounces the often inhuman atavism of Greek village communities, and Martinů describe a ritualized, inevitable event. The power-conscious village priest assigns the roles for next year’s passion play. The chosen ones deal with their characters. Jesus, John, Peter, Mary Magdalene and Judas stealthily take possession of their naïve players.
At the same time, a Greek village community, also driven out by the Turks, appears, also led by their priest. When the Jesus actor Manolios sympathizes too much with these elements that threaten the pastor’s sphere of influence, the church leader has him killed. On Christmas Eve, the refugees move on.
also read
The eternal emigrant Bohuslav Martinů, whose musical work repeatedly identifies him as a chameleon that can never be defined in terms of sound, embellishes this quickly understood accusation about the central concept of “charity”, with music that stands between times and styles, sometimes tonal, sometimes atonal . The often hard-edited, juxtaposed scenes in four acts have cinematic pace, but then they drag on at a steady pace.
A fragmentary, at times radio play-like, strangely unbalanced work that does not always get a dramatic grip on its touching message. Women hardly play a role. A modern passion; sometimes more as a folkloric tumult between the angular tragedy that the score chisels harshly. There are scraps of Stravinsky, echoes of Orff, also Messiaen, Gregorian mysticism, impressionism, simplicity and complexity. Apparently light, clear elements repeatedly turn into harmoniously surprising elements in gentle transitions.
The spiritual narrowness of a village
Simon Stone stages it so simply and without surprises. Mel Page has covered the chorus of villagers, slowly coming in like a sonorous sculpture and remaining frontally, in iridescent grey, timeless fabrics. His room breathes width, but the two narrow entrances and exits give an idea of the mental narrowness of the village in which the priest (harsh: Gábor Bretz rules everyone). Behind small windows, like genre pictures, bell strikers and an accordion player appear.
The refugees, on the other hand, led by their more eloquent priest Fotis (with a colorful bass-baritone: Lukasz Golinski) keep trudging in single file over the third arcade, carved out of the Mönchsbergstein, visible like a skywalk above the stage wall. They wear colorful functional clothing and have backpacks and tents with them. They are the others, the outsiders.
Killer in the Sign of the Cross
What: AFP
Slowly the individuals emerge from the crowd: the quick-witted trader Yannakos as Petrus (a nice role for the tenor veteran Charles Workman), coffee house owner Konstandis as Jakobus (Alejandro Baliñas Vieites), the landowner’s son Michelis as Johannes (Matthäus Schmidlechner), Panais as an unwilling one Judas (loud: Julian Hubbard), Katerina, who likes to flirt as Maria Magdalena (Sara Jakubiak draws her soprano strong in her brief moments), Lenio (Christina Gansch, very touching simplicity).
And of course the shepherd Manolios, who doesn’t know himself to be worthy of Jesus, but also visually merges more and more with this role model. The clear tenor Sebastian Kohlhepp manages the feat of sounding Nazarene-like sweet and yet distantly neutral, playing this extremely simple character convincingly and still standing next to him.
also read
Wagner’s great-granddaughter Katharina
Everything here is actually direct, clear and predictable. But Simon Stone, the grandiosely atavistic Vienna State Opera Choir and the Vienna Philharmonic, who tirelessly swayed their arms with long arm swings and were not only decoratively animated, highly plastic and spirited, make the beautiful sound and rich in nuances an exciting listening experience. There was no need for pink confetti or delicate butterfly projections.
And it is part of Salzburg’s sometimes delightful double dramaturgy that the morning before Martinů’s piece in the Philharmoniker concert under the majestic Riccardo Muti, there were already two passions that were beautifully and soberly performed – two of the late sacred pieces by Giuseppe Verdi and Anton Bruckner dedicated to the memory of Wagner 7th Symphony.
Their message, like that of Martinů’s opera, is clear, and it could not be better placed: they moved in as strangers, they are moving out again as strangers. And in Russia, the churches support the war. Festivals cannot prevent that. But they can reflect it through art. They finally did that in Salzburg on this long-lasting evening.