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When God and Man Collide
GIUSEPPE PENNISI visits
the Salzburg Festival to investigate
'the downfall of the myth and the spirit of the music'
This year the Salzburg Festival celebrates its ninetieth birthday: it started on 22 August 1920, on the Dom Platz, with Hugo von Hofmannsthal's religious morality play Jedermann ('The Life and Death of Every One of Us'). Since then, Jedermann has become a standard staple of the Festival: this season, there are twelve performances of the original text in the Dom Platz and an additional ten performances of a 'modernized' version in a different venue (the stadium). With its religious undertones, Jedermann is a good fit for this Festival -- the last to be managed by Jürgen Flimm who has been appointed artistic director of the Berlin Staatsoper Unter den Linden and will be replaced by Markus Hinterhaüser and Alexander Pereira. Flimm has selected the theme for the 2010 Festival a sentence from a Michael Köhlmeier's essay: When God and Man Collide: The Downfall of the Myth from the Spirit of the Music. This theme creates a thread connecting over two hundred performances in six weeks -- opera, concerts and plays...
Copyright © 19 August 2010
Giuseppe Pennisi,
Rome, Italy
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