Salzburg Festival Tickets 2008

In the religious drama El Burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de Piedra by Tirso de Molina, the figure of Don Juan first walked the stage in 1613 - however, his origins are uncertain: while some view him as a myth originating in the Spanish folk tradition, other sources cite a real-life model, Don Juan Tenorio from Seville, a careless seducer and man of pleasure from the era of Don Pedro the Cruel, who murdered the governor of Seville and was then lured into a monastery and secretly executed by the monks. Thereafter, a rumor was spread that the statue on the grave of the murdered man had come alive and punished the murderer. For the longest time, the blackguard was justly condemned to hell, to the audiences' delight and satisfaction, but Mozart gave him a new dimension in his opera. Here, the evildoer almost becomes a sympathetic figure, an idea that later poets and thinkers elaborated further. Of course, Mozart would not be Mozart if he had not discovered a spark of godliness even in this being, and thus, the question remains: is Mozart's Don Giovanni perhaps not a myth, not a primal force, similar to Eros or Dionysus? Is he merely a human being like the rest of us, aware of his finite existence on earth, and merely wanting to make the most of his brief life span?

Otello is an intimate drama - a clear-eyed examination of the most destructive and negative of human emotions: jealousy and envy. But these emotions can only exist in relation to society.
The power of Venice was founded entirely on commerce and caste. To ensure that wealth remained concentrated in the noble families rather than dissipating down the generations, it was normal for only one son and one daughter in each family to marry. Others became businessmen or politicians, nuns or maiden aunts. With so many unmarried nobles abroad it is easy to imagine why Venice had an international reputation for sexual permissiveness.

The three main protagonists of the tragedy are all excluded from the centre of this society: Otello is foreign, seen as black, marked out by his cultural, linguistic, religious, and regional origins; Jago is not a nobleman; Desdemona has betrayed her noble family, and cut herself off, by marrying against her father's wishes. Cassio, by contrast, is firmly part of the establishment. Such a society is a fertile breeding-ground for the pernicious virus of jealousy - especially when the subject is a man who is an outsider, and for whom the inner workings of Venetian society remain a mystery, a vortex of nods and winks, while its morality is all too apparent.

Charles Gounod (1818-1893)

ROMÉO ET JULIETTE

Opera in five acts

New production
In French, with German and English surtitles

Yannick Nézet-Séguin , Conductor
Bartlett Sher , Stage director
Michael Yeargan, Sets
Catherine Zuber, Costumes
Jennifer Tipton, Lighting
Jörn H. Andresen, Chorus master
N.N., Juliette
Ailyn Pérez (August 18), Juliette
Rolando Villazón, Roméo
John Osborn (August 19), Roméo
Mikhail Petrenko, Frère Laurent
Russell Braun, Mercutio
Cora Burggraaf, Stéphano
Falk Struckmann (August 2, 9, 12, 15, 25), Le Comte Capulet
In-Sung Sim (August 6, 18, 19, 22), Le Comte Capulet
Juan Francisco Gatell, Tybalt
Susanne Resmark, Gertrude
Mathias Hausmann, Le Comte Paris
Jean-Luc Ballestra, Grégorio
Robert Murray, Benvolio

Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus

Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg

Text by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré based on the tragedy Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

Venue:

Felsenreitschule

Seating plans:

(click on the image to enlarge)

Premiere:
Saturday, 2 August 2008, 8.00 p.m.

Further performances:

Wednesday, 6 August 2008, 8.00 p.m.

Saturday, 9 August 2008, 7.30 p.m.

Tuesday, 12 August 2008, 7.30 p.m.

Friday, 15 August 2008, 7.30 p.m.

Monday, 18 August 2008, 3.00 p.m.

Tuesday, 19 August 2008, 7.30 p.m.

Friday, 22 August 2008, 3.00 p.m.

Monday, 25 August 2008, 7.30 p.m.

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Shakespeare's extraordinary play , Romeo and Juliet, was a radical text in the Renaissance. In it, he took new ideas, popular in court among the neo-Platonists, and dramatized them. The neo-Platonists found a path to engage the world through individual love. Shakespeare expanded this to social tragedy, where love heals the public strife of two warring families.
Gounod, writing 250 years later, is interested in something completely different. Influenced by Wagner (particularly Tristan ), he explores how individual love offers access to the divine, something blasphemous to Shakespeare's audience. His opera is an emotional dreamscape of the play, and placing it amidst the templar walls of the Felsenreitschule creates the opportunity to experience the ecstasy of falling in love through Gounod's music. But he pushes this choice further toward the radical implications of two young people finding meaning not only in love, but in death as a path to the divine.

That experience and its emotional implications for the society in which they live is the dreamlike journey of Gounod's opera, and the course of this production today.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

THE MAGIC FLUTE

German opera in two acts KV. 620

Renewal
In German, with English surtitles
Riccardo Muti , Conductor
Pierre Audi , Director
Saskia Boddeke, Associate Director
Karel Appel , Stage design
Jorge Jara, Costume design
Jean Kalman, Lighting design
Jan Koremans, Lighting design
Min Tanaka, Choreography
Thomas Lang, Chorus master
Franz Josef Selig , Sarastro
Michael Schade , Tamino
Franz Grundheber , Speaker / First Priest
Albina Shagimuratova , Queen of the Night
Genia Kühmeier , Pamina
Inga Kalna, First Lady
Karine Deshayes, Second Lady
Ekaterina Gubanova, Third Lady
Vienna Boys Choir, Three Boys
Markus Werba, Papageno
Irena Bespalovaite, Papagena
Dietmar Kerschbaum, Monostatos
Simon O'Neill, First Man in Armour
Ante Jerkunica, Second Man in Armour
Michael Autenrieth, Priest / Slave
Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus

Vienna Philharmonic

Text by Emanuel Schikaneder

Venue:

Großes Festspielhaus

Seating plans:

(click on the image to enlarge)

Premiere:
Wednesday, 13 August 2008, 7.00 p.m.

Further performances:

Wednesday, 20 August 2008, 7.00 p.m.

Friday, 22 August 2008, 7.00 p.m.

Tuesday, 26 August 2008, 7.00 p.m.

Thursday, 28 August 2008, 7.00 p.m.

Saturday, 30 August 2008, 7.00 p.m.

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Fairy-tale and deeper meaning: The Magic Flute is Mozart's most popular and also his most mysterious opera. Just as Schikaneder's libretto combines the symbolism of the Freemasons and a fashion for all things Egyptian with the influence of Vienna's popular theater and "machine comedies", musically the opera is marked by its heterogeneity: the Queen of the Night's pathos stands beside Papageno's folksiness, touching moments next to sacred ones, exalted scenes next to buffoonery. Mozart puts both the "higher" and the "lower" elements of style to work in characterizing his protagonists, without judging them. He is not interested in cut-outs, but in people, and he portrays them in all their contradictory thoughts and feelings. Thus, the enlightened "ideologue" Sarastro appears as a highly ambivalent personality. If one is willing to accept "sublimation towards a pure humanity" (Stefan Kunze) as the central idea of the Magic Flute , then one must also ask which figure comes closest to this humanity: Sarastro or Tamino or Pamina. ?

Pierre Audi's production, which places the action within the brilliantly colorful sets by the great Dutch painter Karel Appel (1921-2006), sees the Magic Flute mainly in the context of its tradition as a magical and fairy-tale opera: a visual spectacle full of exuberant imagination and vitality.

Antonín Dvorák (1841-1904)

RUSALKA

Lyric fairy-tale in three acts

New production
In Czech, with German and English surtitles

Franz Welser-Möst , Conductor
Jossi Wieler , Stage director
Sergio Morabito , Stage director
Barbara Ehnes, Stage design
Anja Rabes, Costumes
Olaf Freese, Lighting design
Chris Kondek, Video
Jörn H. Andresen, Chorus master
Piotr Beczala , Prince
Emily Magee , Foreign Princess
Camilla Nylund , Rusalka, a water nymph
Alan Held, Vodník, a water gnome
Birgit Remmert, Jezibaba, a witch
Adam Plachetka, Gamekeeper
Eva Liebau, Turnspit
Elena Tsallagova, First Wood Nymph
Stephanie Atanasov, Second Wood Nymph
Hannah Esther Minutillo, Third Wood Nymph

Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus

The Cleveland Orchestra

Text by Jaroslav Kvapil after Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's tale Undine, Hans Christian Andersen's fairy-tale The Little Mermaid, Gerhart Hauptmann's drama Die versunkene Glocke, and motives from Karel Jaromír Erben's A Garland of National Tales

Venue:

Haus für Mozart

Seating plans:

(click on the image to enlarge)

Premiere:
Sunday, 17 August 2008, 7.30 p.m.

Further performances:

Wednesday, 20 August 2008, 7.30 p.m.

Saturday, 23 August 2008, 3.00 p.m.

Tuesday, 26 August 2008, 7.30 p.m.

Thursday, 28 August 2008, 7.30 p.m.

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Rusalka shows Dvorák at the summit of his composer's art at the age of sixty: in it, he melds song, arioso and highly dramatic moments with the incredible richness of a symphonic orchestra score.

The opera tells the horrible and deeply sad fairy-tale of the water nymph Rusalka who longs for a soul, so that she may win the love of a prince. She is one of those spirits of the elements which were demonized with the chilly advent of Christendom, along with most of nature. From her exile in the Bohemian forest, which she haunts along with the other tree and spring nymphs, the water sprite who used to be a river god, and the witch Jezibaba, formerly the benign goddess Hekate, Rusalka longs to become human. For this to happen, she must agree to appear "mute to the world". Only when the fickle prince betrays her does she realize that this condition means she is cut off from exactly the element that defines human beings: the gift of speech. Her loss of speech, her inability to take up her story as it is constituted in words directed at someone else make Rusalka one of the traumatized female figures of the fin de siècle during which Freud invented psychoanalysis.

Mnozil Brass / Bernd Jeschek

IRMINGARD

A weird music theater project by Mnozil Brass
and Bernd Jeschek

Bernd Jeschek, Script and stage direction

Mnozil Brass, Music, actors, singers, dancers, chorus and orchestra

Co-production with the RuhrTriennale

Venue:

republic

Premiere:
Sunday, 24 August 2008, 8.00 p.m.

Further performances:

Tuesday, 26 August 2008, 8.00 p.m.

Wednesday, 27 August 2008, 8.00 p.m.

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After the smashing success of their operetta The Trojan Boat at the RuhrTriennale 2005, Mnozil Brass and Bernd Jeschek have now written their first music theater project.

Bertl, a beautiful prince from Melk, is struck by Cupid's arrow and falls in love with Irmingard, the emperor's granddaughter. However, she disdains the handsome prince, which makes the emperor, who is longing to retire, so angry that he throws her into the darkest dungeon of his prison.

Bertl is consumed by longing for her, and she also suspects that she might not have made the smartest move.

May we hope for a happy end, or will the power of fate tear both of them into the abyss?