In 2025, Salzburg goes to Venice
NewsMessage from Cecilia Bartoli:
During the 2025 Salzburg Whitsun Festival, you will hear a selection of music spanning five centuries, featuring works that were either written in Venice, created for Venice or inspired by the city. None other than Friedrich Nietzsche expressed it perfectly: ‘When I seek another word for music, I always find only the word Venice’.
The staged operatic pasticcio Hotel Metamorphosis, to be created by Barrie Kosky with music by Antonio Vivaldi, takes us back to the 18th century. Before copyright was established as a legal concept, before sheet music became widely accessible, and long before recording devices were invented, the reuse of music by different composers in new contexts was not seen as an illicit act of plagiarism, but as a compliment. This was the only way to preserve it, as every piece of music would otherwise disappear from the repertory after only a few performances and not be readily heard again. In taking up this tradition, our project serves as a great homage to Vivaldi the opera composer.
Our benchmark from the 17th century is Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine – a milestone of sacred music. It will be paired with Bruno Mantovani’s composition Venezianischer Morgen, based on Rainer Maria Rilke’s eponymous poem of 1908, to be given its world premiere only a few weeks before our performance.
I have programmed Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La traviata – which was premiered at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice – as a concert performance with a cast of fantastic soloists, representing the music created in or for Venice throughout the 19th century.
This year, I am especially looking forward to a chamber-music matinee conceived by Markus Hinterhäuser, who also performs, which will feature Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder as well as …..sofferte onde serene… by Luigi Nono, the latter providing a reminder that Nono’s native city of Venice also inspired some of the greatest musicians of the 20th century.
John Neumeier was synonymous with the Hamburg Ballet for 50 years: an artistic symbiosis so close that the company now even bears his name. During this time, Neumeier’s dancers performed six times in Venice; at the Teatro La Fenice, of course, but also in the Piazza San Marco. John Neumeier is reviving the ballet Death in Venice for us, as part of an extensive retrospective marking the end of his artistic directorship. In this adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novella, which gained worldwide fame through Visconti’s film, Neumeier draws on music by Bach and Wagner to build the bridges between eras and art forms that are so characteristic of his work.
On Whit Monday, we dedicate a second varied pasticcio to Rossini, whose first opera was premiered in Venice, assembling the most beautiful numbers from those of his operas first performed in Venice – such as La scala di seta, L’italiana in Algeri, Tancredi and Semiramide.”
Die walkure at ROH at the beginning of May. An operatic pastiche in Salzburg at the start of June. Both, no doubt, travesties and opportunities for further access to the drag box. What a busy little body our Barrie is.
Amazing how many classical music professionals don’t know (or, at least, don’t care) that Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine was written neither in nor for Venice. What’s more, there’s no evidence I know of that he ever performed it there. (His audition piece for San Marco was a Mass, and we don’t know which one or even if it has survived.)
Er, someone should care…?
(I’m vaguely getting that impression.)
To quote Ms. Bartoli, “None other than Friedrich Nietzsche expressed it perfectly: ‘When I seek another word for music, I always find only the word Venice’.” To quote Reginald Jeeves, “Nietzsche is unsound.”
She’s never been a good programmer, alas, always drawing together too many elements and willing to deal in incompleteness. But she could learn from her friend Alexander Pereira, the master, while there is time. I still believe she will one day head the Salzburg Festival itself.