Salzburg Festival Commissions

Last month, in a great gesture towards the support of contemporary music, the Salzburg Festival, under the leadership of its new artistic director Alexander Pereira, announced that it would be commissioning four new operas for the upcoming seasons. The four chosen composers were Gyorgy Kurtag, Marc-André Dalbavie, Thomas Adès and Jorg Widmann. Each of these four new operas will be premiered at the summer opera festival starting in 2013.

Pereira, the festival’s new music director who will be leading the festival for the first time in the summer of 2012, has had a prominent career as an arts manager and in all of his various positions has been a promoter of contemporary music and young talent. In his early position as the Secretary General of the Vienna Konzerthaus, he worked towards modernizing the concert scene and drawing in younger audiences. Just prior to his appointment to the Salzburg Festival in 2009, Pereira served as the Manager and Artistic Director of the Zurich Opera. There he built up the company’s repertoire and indroduced more adventurous programming from commissioning new operas to reviving neglected composers and opera from the past.

The Salzburg Festival itself has not been a stranger to commissioning opera in the past either. The festival’s first organized performances occurred  in 1920, growing out of several attempts at establishing a festival dedicated to the operas of Mozart. Since the early years of the festival, the programs have included modern operas (despite a long conservative run during Herbert von Karajan’s leadership), including (the then modern) Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne auf Naxos by Strauss, Luciano Berio’s Un re in ascolto, Krzysztof Penderecki’s Die schwarze Maske, and Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin. In 1997 the festival performed Ligeti’s newly revised opera Le Grand Macabre in a new production directed by Peter Sellars. Not only does the festival present productions of modern opera, but in recent decades it has been the commissioner of them too. So, the continued support of contemporary music by way of this announcement of four new operas is in right in step with the festival’s history.

Though the specifics of each new opera hasn’t been announced officially, some details are known. Kurtag (who, despite his long and distinguished career, has yet to write an opera) has chosen for his subject Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. Beckett’s one-act four-character absurdist play is considered one of theater’s most important works of the past century. It will be staged at the opening of the 2013 season.

Marc-André Dalbavie, a French composer who teaches at the Conservatoire de Paris, is set to provide an opera based on a 2003 novel by Richard Powers titled The Time of Our Singing.  The story follows an interracial couple through mid-20th-century America as they and their children fight for acceptance and racial equality in prejudiced America. Dalbavie’s first opera was premiered at the Zurich Opera while Pereira was serving as the General D

irector. Dalbavie’s opera will begin the 2014 festival.

The British composer Thomas Adès has not yet announced the details of his project for the opening of the 2015 season. Adès has several operatic successes already under his belt with Powder Her Face, a scandalous chamber opera from 1995, and an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in 2004.

The final opera of the commissioned quadrumvirate will be by German composer Jorg Widmann. Widmann’s other operatic work is The Face in the Mirror (“Gesicht im Spiegel”), a 2006 score. Widmann’s new score will debut in 2016.