Mitchell's spectacular production of Nono's Al Gran Sole Carico d'Amore at Salzburg © Stephen Cummiskey 2009

"Das Spiel der Mächtigen" (The Game of the Powerful) was the motto of this year's Salzburg Festival. "Goodbye to Opera" would have been no less fitting: one of the major productions was so static that it might as well have been an oratorio. Two others weren't operas at all.

The festival opened with Ivor Bolton pacing Christine Schäfer in the title role of Theodora, Handel's penultimate oratorio, which tells the story not of the notorious Byzantine empress but of a Christian martyr, who dies rather than sacrifice to Roman gods. I didn't see Christof Loy's spartan staging, but there were reports that four hours of unrelenting piety were too much for the smart set at the premiere: many left before the end.

Al Gran Sole Carico d'Amore (Under the Great Sun Heavy With Love, seen Aug. 6) preaches the word of another "god" — Karl Marx. Luigi Nono, a devout Communist, called his work, which was first seen in 1975 at the Teatro Lirico in Milan, an azione scenica (scenic action). It's a requiem for the victims of the class struggle. Nono's heroes are women — from Louise Michel, the Pasionaria of the Paris Commune, to Tania Bunke, who fought on the side of Che Guevara in Bolivia and was killed in an ambush. The libretto is a collage of quotations from Marx, Lenin, Brecht and similar sources. Sitting amid class enemies, who paid up to $400 apiece for their tickets, and listening to a large chorus shouting "Arise, comrades, for the revolution — the red flag will triumph!" was not without its irony.

Another irony was that Nono, who died in 1990, was a radical modernist. His music had no chance whatsoever to be performed in the fatherland of Communism, the Soviet Union. Not only did he embrace Schoenberg's serialism (and marry Schoenberg's daughter Nuria, who appeared in Salzburg at a press conference), he also used microtones, clusters and electronic sounds. Ingo Metzmacher shepherded the Vienna Philharmonic — here enlarged by a huge battery of percussionists sitting on a separate platform — through the forbidding score with a mastery worthy of a better cause. In addition, the prerecorded tapes of the 1975 premiere, restored for the occasion, were piped in via loudspeakers. The ten soloists stood on another platform. The sopranos, identified only as Soprano I, II, III, IV, frequently sang — alone or together — above high C, mirroring the shrillness of the message.

Katie Mitchell's production was spectacular. The British director and her set designer, Vicki Mortimer, had divided the vast cavern of the Felsenreitschule into five small rooms on the left side and, on the right, an enormous screen that could have been one of Anselm Kiefer's canvases. On the left, silent actresses in historical costumes were filmed by video cameras and reappeared, magnified, on the right, cleaning a revolver, burning compromising letters or just doing housework. Thanks to the grainy texture of the screen, the images looked like lovely paintings, making the viewer almost forget that those sweet ladies had blood on their hands. It was a fascinating experience. Yet one also understood why Nono stopped writing agitprop after Al Gran Sole, and why the "elephant," as he later called it, never made it into the repertoire.

Alaimo and Abdrazakov in Flimm's minimalist staging of Moïse et Pharaon at Salzburg © Clärchen + Matthias Baus 2009

The mammoth production depleted Salzburg's coffers. When Pier Luigi Pier'Alli, who was to direct the Rossini rarity Moïse et Pharaon, presented his budget, there was not enough money left. When Pier'Alli departed, Jürgen Flimm, the festival's director, stepped into the breach for a symbolic fee of one euro. His minimalist production was certainly not what Rossini had in mind when he reworked, in 1827, his earlier Mosè in Egitto for the demanding Paris audience. To oversee the special effects — the wonders Yahweh works to force Pharaoh to let the Israelites go, their miraculous crossing of the Red Sea and the drowning of their pursuers — the Paris Opera hired a "régisseur de la scène," probably the first full-time stage manager in the history of musical theater.

What we saw in Salzburg on August 8 looked like the bare interior of a nuclear reactor or a gasworks. The only props were four armchairs for the Egyptian royal family. In interviews, Flimm had announced that the biblical story couldn't be told today without mentioning the ongoing conflict between Jews and Arabs. So instead of watching dancers during the ballet music, we had to read quotations from the Bible on the closed curtain, demonstrating the vindictiveness of the Hebrew god. When the "ballet" was over and the curtain rose again, the stage was covered with dead children — probably an allusion to the Gaza war. To balance the message, the Israelites arrived for the finale with suitcases filled with ashes. No Red Sea had to be crossed; they simply disappeared through a back door.

Riccardo Muti seems to be a fan of this opera: six years ago, he conducted it at La Scala. The Vienna Philharmonic proved that it is no less at home in the bel canto repertory than in the most aggressive modernism. Ildar Abdrazakov was a sonorous Moïse, Nicola Alaimo a dryish Pharaon. Eric Cutler, as Aménophis, Pharaon's son who falls in love with a Hebrew girl, had a powerful forte but was almost inaudible when he had to sing piano. Marina Rebeka, as Anaï, his love interest, negotiated her coloratura and passionate outbursts — she eventually decides to follow her god, not her heart — with remarkable aplomb, though not without a touch of harshness.

Boesch and Leonard in Salzburg Così © Monika Rittershaus 2009

At the festival's opening ceremony, Daniel Kehlmann, a bestselling author from Vienna, had attacked the excesses of what the Germans call "Regietheater," or director's theater — much to the delight of the audience and the dismay of the accused, who promptly denounced him as a reactionary. Claus Guth is a case in point. In the past two years, he has directed Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni in Salzburg; this summer, it was Così Fan Tutte (seen Aug. 7). The curtain rose on a chic crowd having a party in an elegant home (set by Christian Schmidt) with a well-stocked bar and African masks on the wall. For a moment, one wondered whether it might be possible to retell the old, not particularly funny story as a cruel, booze-fueled comedy à la Edward Albee or Yasmina Reza. Alas, the moment passed, and soon enough the audience found itself, yet again, in Guth's Own Private Idaho. Neither the two bridegrooms nor Despina, the helpful maid, bothered to hide their identity. At first, the men shielded their faces behind the African masks; then they dropped all pretense and showed their real selves — the only difference being that their impeccably white jackets were now dirty. (Was this an allusion to Polly, the gangster moll in The Threepenny Opera, who confesses that she can't resist men with dirty shirts?) Don Alfonso seemed to suffer from the shivers, and as the intrigue progressed, the living room turned more and more into a forest. Florian Boesch, the winning Guglielmo, admitted in the festival's daily bulletin that he too had trouble understanding what was going on. But, he added, "In modern theater, it is more important to be confronted with an unanswered question than its solution." Unwittingly, the young man may have summed up the credo of director's theater German-style.

Boesch and Isabel Leonard, his Dorabella, were the more convincing of the two couples. Miah Persson was a charmingly confused Fiordiligi, but her voice seemed too light for "Come scoglio." Topi Lehtipuu was a reedy Ferrando. Patricia Petibon, a gifted comédienne, could have been a perfect Despina but wasted her considerable talent on cheap clowning. Bo Skovhus, apart from his tics, was a persuasive Don Alfonso. Adam Fischer's conducting was a model of precision but hardly the last word in Mozartean refinement. The Guth productions of the three da Ponte operas will reappear at next year's festival.

JÖRG VON UTHMANN

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