Due to his wheelchair, the 70-year-old champion sat on the far right edge and, bowing his unmistakable head, graciously accepted the enthusiastic ovations. Salzburg 2022 is also a three-part music tribute to Wolfgang Rihm’s milestone birthday. Who here anyway, more or less as the other Wolferl – has been a constantly present musical size for decades. Which the new Festival President Krista Hammer survived without any injuries during her first sound encounter.
This Salzach continuity has existed at least since the artistic director Markus Hinterhäuser implanted the “Zeitfluss” festival in the festival 30 years ago. Where even at that time the cross-toner from Germany, who already tended to side with the sublime but curious, art-historically founded conservatism of the new, up to opera performances, became a sonorous Salzburg ostinato.
And Hinterhäuser, unsurpassed as a concert program jigsaw puzzler as well as sound cross-connection maker, did a fine job again this summer. In addition to the wonderfully stimulating spiritual and secular in such a still arch-Catholic place “Ouverture spiritual” and the many soloist, church and chamber concerts, the Vienna Philharmonic series, the guest orchestras and Mozart matinees, in addition to the “Time with Bartók” deserves the “Hommage Wolfgang Rihm”. And between the vocal-heavy “Vigilia” cycle and the instrumental “Chiffre” cycle, there is “Jakob Lenz”, the most famous Rihm music theater, performed in a concentrated concert form under the yellow-and-white Art Nouveau piece in the Great Mozarteum Hall.
It is not without reason that “Jakob Lenz” became one of the most-performed operas in recent history. Premiered in Hamburg in 1978, in the midst of the German terror autumn, only three roles, mini-choir and eleven instrumentalists slim, and just 80 minutes long. That’s the practical side. But also the subject, a disturbingly gripping psychogram of the prevented Sturm-und-Drang genius of the same name from the Goethe environment, made famous by Büchner’s prose text, after almost fifty years, regardless of the circumstances at the time or precisely because of them, it has its sublime , flawless classicism preserved.
Because this is music-historically founded and updated madness, which fits seamlessly into the scene della pazzia of baroque opera and romantic melodrama up to the mental dissolution of boundaries of the 20th century. Believable and gripping in the vocal micro-flickering and whimpering as well as in the vocal outburst. Human theater of the most direct kind. And affecting everyone, in the past as well as today, as eternally true art.
And Lenz is once again the Austrian baritone Georg Nigl, vocally and physically, even without a scene, making the character his own – with wide-eyed eyes, a whispering, shrill, yet beautifully singing voice. A sick existence between reality and delusion, fighting here with a doppelganger and an imaginary dead lover, impressively captured, spread out in 13 images, transposed spellbindingly into splintery, harsh sounds between tonal islands.
In addition to the natural phenomenon of Nigl, others are having a hard time. Damien Pass gives the pietistic pastor Oberlin in a strict fatherly manner, who exudes fatherly reliability. John Daszak sings the friend Kaufmann, who embodies the skeptical outside world, with a clear character tenor. Six vocal soloists and four children join them. And Maxime Pascal, quickly soaked in temperamental fury, chisels precisely, delicately, in many shades, the excitingly vibrant relief of this grippingly plastic score.
It’s amazing how the Salzburg Festival has become a hotbed of modernity and contemporaneity in music, despite the permanent Mozart loop, star theater and great, expected symphony. The constant dripping has hollowed out shell limestone, granite and gneiss, between the Kapuziner-, Mönchs- and Festungsberg the mostly traditional audience dares more and more a fling, far away from familiar sound paths. And knows that it is always guided by the highest quality.
In this way, the place where the first opera beyond the Alps was once performed finally became a present-day scene of current music. Even if the big events like to overshadow that a little. Of course, one would also like to meet younger, unexpected sound finders.
