Salzburg Festival honors Rihm and Puccini: art has to sting

Giacomo Puccini’s “Trittico” has its belated premiere in Salzburg. Asmik Grigorian triumphs in all three operas, but the intense evening lacks the last escalation.

The Salzburg premiere of Giacomo Puccini’s “Il Trittico” was tailored to her: the soprano Asmik Grigorian, here in the role of Suor Angelica.

Monica Rittershaus

When things are going well, the director of the Salzburg Festival likes to hold a little court at Hofstallgasse in the festival district. Then you see him swinging between the venues with springy steps, addressing a word to sponsors here, discussing it with visitors or journalists there, always ready to wittily explain his own program – and also to question it. Because despite his central position in the world of culture, Markus Hinterhäuser has remained a searching, openly doubting artist who is aware of the constraints and dubiousness that exist even at a festival like Salzburg.

This summer, Hinterhäuser looks particularly thoughtful. No wonder: After the 2020/21 anniversary seasons, which were shaken up by the corona pandemic, this 102nd season of the festival is again a tough affair. In addition to the difficult situation in the cultural world, which first has to struggle to win back its audience, there is the uncertainty resulting from the Ukraine war. In addition, there are political upheavals in Salzburg over appearances by Teodor Currentzis, who does not want to distance himself from his Kremlin-related financiers.

«taken to the extreme»

You always have to think about the meaning and justification of festivals, especially against this contemporary historical background, Hinterhäuser said on Friday in the Festspielhaus, and the sentence, which is meant in principle but sounds somewhat resigned, could have caused concern – if it weren’t in the context of a through and through pleasant event: On this afternoon before the second major new festival production, Puccini’s “Il Trittico”, Wolfgang Rihm was honored with the most important artistic award of the festival.

Rihm, who, among other things, directs the composers’ seminar at the Lucerne Festival, celebrated his 70th birthday in March and has shaped the Salzburg program with his own works for four decades more than only Richard Strauss before him. During an improvised acceptance speech, the composer insisted on answering Hinterhäuser’s question about the meaning of festivals in a humorous and pointed manner: for him, the form of the honor – a golden needle with a ruby ​​– embodies the idea that here the demands placed on art and its performance are “taken to extremes”. Hinterhäuser may only stab courageously.

That caused a lot of amusement – and you took this beautiful definition with you to the premiere in the evening. Who would really stab Puccini’s late triptych, which premiered in New York in 1918? After all, the three fifty-minute one-act operas “Il tabarro”, “Suor Angelica” and “Gianni Schicchi” were a premiere for the festival. The delay in this masterpiece, which has long been established in the canon, has to do with the arrogance that people in Salzburg had long cultivated towards the “shallow” Puccini.

That is nonsense, and Franz Welser-Möst even seems to want to prove the opposite at the podium of the Vienna Philharmonic. He stabs the three very different scores with a dissecting knife, so to speak, working out their extremely plastic orchestration and their surprising modernity. It manifests itself in «Gianni Schicchi» in foreshadowing of Kurt Weill’s song style, which can rarely be heard so clearly, while in the veristic «Tabarro» it is in a similarity to the expressionist film. This is original and well thought out, but the rational attention to detail takes away some of the glowing emotionality of the music.

A cool rationalist is also at work at the director’s desk that evening. Christof Loy even thinks he is smarter than the composer and moves the inheritance-hugging comedy «Gianni Schicchi», intended as a satyr play after the tragedy, from the end to the beginning. Once again, the reasoning behind it is correct: it wants to put the central piece “Suor Angelica”, which Puccini considered the best of the three operas, which has long been suspected of being sentimental, in the final light of attention. The drama about the fallen nun, from whom her child and family were taken, should release you into the evening appropriately shaken.

cheated out of life

That could work if Loy really avoided all sentimentality and would dissect the piece as glassy and relentless as Welser-Möst composed with the bittersweet, but not sweet grace vision of the end does. Instead, one still sees too much monastery kitsch in Étienne Pluss’ design, when the empty stage otherwise appreciated by Loy would have been enough. Because Asmik Grigorian, who sings all three main soprano parts of “Trittico”, would be the great tragedian who knew how to credibly embody the suffering of this woman who was cheated of her life and motherhood even without all the scenery.

Growing apart after the death of their child: Giorgetta (Asmik Grigorian) and the skipper Michele (Roman Burdenko) in «Il tabarro».

Growing apart after the death of their child: Giorgetta (Asmik Grigorian) and the skipper Michele (Roman Burdenko) in «Il tabarro».

Monica Rittershaus

Her confrontation with Karita Mattila’s Zia Principessa shows what could be possible, and when she performs, a breath of ice wafts through the Festspielhaus: this scene, audibly trained on the «Götterdämmerung», will drive Angelica to suicide – and it’s really great festival cinema! There is a lot of dying in the three raven-black plays. For example in the classic jealousy drama of “Tabarro”: Grigorian as Giorgetta and Roman Burdenko as the darkly melancholic skipper Michele show that there are still chances for their love, which has grown cold after the death of a child together. The murder of the rival Luigi (Joshua Guerrero) looks like an absurd accident.

Unfortunately, Loy and Pluss also fill the stage with useless furniture instead of working out the piece’s sparse, naturalistic heaviness. On the other hand, Loy succeeds in virtuoso comedy in the farce about the forger of wills Gianni Schicchi, whom Dante left to stew in the inferno of his “Divine Comedy”. The lovingly exaggerated ensemble around Misha Kiria in the title role provides macabre fun. Only this would have belonged to the end of the intense evening, as Puccini intended, to really sting. One shouldn’t want to be smarter than the composer.

In «Gianni Schicchi», the fine Florentine clan of the Donatis awaits the imminent death of their rich padrone.  However, his will will give the clean clan a nasty surprise.

In «Gianni Schicchi», the fine Florentine clan of the Donatis awaits the imminent death of their rich padrone. However, his will will give the clean clan a nasty surprise.

Monica Rittershaus

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