Opera Can opera disentangle the mess we are in? Teodor By Paul Feigelfeld Currentzis and Peter Sellars’s production of Mozart’s Idomeneo at the Salzburg Festival performs the con- WHEN THE tradictions of hope in the face of climate catastrophe. CURTAIN

FALLS Jonathan Lemalu (Nettuno/La voce), Russell Thomas (Idomeneo), musicAeterna Choir of Perm Opera

There is no escape, there is only escapism. There is too old-fashioned or that they are trying too hard to no refuge, only refugees. Capitalism has brought be contemporary. The people working in these clas- forth capitulationism: the inescapable idea that it is sical art forms contribute to the problem, too: trans- the system to end all systems, the outer limit of pose classical tropes such as the myth of Medea to imagination, the end of the End of History; that it is the present and you might be scorned as a sell-out, easier to imagine the end of the world than the end or a traitor who’s defected to Team Netflix. of capitalism; that there is not only a moral but a Yet the Salzburg Festival is among the world’s divine and technological law currently driving the most renowned and prestigious events, a place world into the bleakest of all possible futures. where literal kings and queens, heads of state, lead- Everything has become techné. What has deter- ers of industry, and the highest luminaries of art and mined our condition for so long are the false gods culture swarm the strange concrete arena that has of ecological homeostasis, permanent economic seemingly grown out of the bottom of the Mönchs- growth, and a social pseudo-equilibrium purported berg, a protuberance that brings to mind the famous to reflect a Darwinian “natural order” yet firmly held slab of molten corium in Chernobyl – the most radi- in place by an inherently right-wing cyberneticism oactive sculpture in the world, known as the Ele- largely oblivious of itself. phant’s Foot. The latent power here is enormous. We have seen countless biennials, publica- But, of course, most of the elite come here to be tions, conferences, and generously funded research entertained and confirmed in their conservative val- projects dealing with the field that has become ues. What was initially conceived as a democratic, established as “capitalism and the Anthropocene”. public-oriented festival by Max Reinhardt and Hugo Outside the world of intellectual journalism, which von Hofmannsthal nearly a hundred years ago has tends to revolve around its own centre, we tend to long since become a very closed circuit, mimicking

© SF/Ruth Walz ignore theatre, classical music, and opera, or to dis- the old courtly systems of the plebs watching the miss them for their incapacity to reflect the times in gentry watching plays about the plebs watching the All images: Idomeneo, Felsenreitschule, Salzburg, 2019 which we live, either on the grounds that they are gentry. It’s glamorously troubling. 146 Opera Opera 147 © SF/Ruth Walz

Ying Fang (Ilia) Paula Murrihy (Idamante), Russell Thomas (Idomeneo)

Plastic entities come alive as American dominance wanes, illuminated phytoplankton or billowing new alliances with China emerge, climate- jellyfish, only then to die off. change politics succeed.

The Festival’s opening performance this he must cooperate, obey, sacrifice to, identify with, walk the earth”). In a way, it doesn’t seem to occur Sellars clearly means well, and there may be no year was a new production of Mozart’s Idomeneo, and act like one of them to set things straight. Their to Sellars that this is a weird turn, to say the least. better place than the Salzburg Festival to address conducted by Teodor Currentzis and directed by politics are his actions. The representatives of the The end of the opera ushers in a kind of sim- the old elite. Nonetheless, the effect is largely the Peter Sellars, in which the four main characters – new order (the generation of Idamante, Electra, and ulation we could decode like this: American pre- pacified conscience of having sat through three the Cretan leader Idomeneo, who is on his way Ilia) are already, like Mozart himself, the immaculate dominance wanes, new alliances with China emerge, and a half hours of world-class opera and accept- home from the Trojan war; his ill-starred son Ida- child-parents – at once offspring and progenitors – climate-change politics succeed. It is the dawn of a ing the message as part of that. It’s still easier, for mante; the Trojan princess Ilia, the object of Ida- of the Enlightenment. better world where races, genders, organisms, and most, to kill your children than to change politics mante’s love; and Electra, who is, in turn, in love On both these levels, Sellars drives the opera environment sway softly, all – to borrow a phrase – we witness this daily in the attacks against Greta with Idamante – negotiate survival, asylum, desire, onto the rocks of his own solutionism. Civilisation, – watched over by machines of loving grace. The Thunberg and the Fridays for Future protesters. If and sacrifice. The wrathful Neptune and the sea here comprised of two rival armies (both embodied deus ex machina, after all, is a theatrical machine. Idomeneo is troubled by the sacrifice of his son to serpent who is his agent in Mozart’s original are in the choir of Currentzis’s ensemble music Aeterna), In a final shift, Sellars then moves away from words the gods of old, like Abraham in the Old Testa- here climate change and politics itself. slows down to a zombie pace; the esprit de corps/ towards the ritual dances of two performers, one ment, he is perfectly willing to carry it out: it’s The staging and props land us in in a world choir fades, suffocating under the set design; move- from Hawaii and one from Kiribati in Micronesia, tradition, after all. Sellars, I think, is sacrificing of military exclusion zones, plastic debris, and ments and song grind to a halt. Mass extinction takes which in their weirdness evoke the brownface antics something else to the old gods of Salzburg: the plankton, all of which have become indistinguisha- over the stage, corpses strewn everywhere. But in of Sellars’s not-so-distant relative Peter Sellers in The potential of actually handing over the stage to ble strata of existence. Military blockades are contin- the face of all this death, Sellars then suggests, har- Party (1968), especially when you glance at the audi- pressing global issues, their protagonists, and a uously moved around the stage to direct both choir mony and resurrection can be found, both musically ence’s delighted yet horrified reactions. Sellars trajectory with a goal but no end. Instead, all these and protagonists; plastic entities (large, small, and and politically, in the stable constellation of the four strangely mixes up postcolonialism and decolonisa- problems are neatly compressed into two acts, a in-between) come alive as illuminated phytoplank- protagonists once they bring their individual desires tion here: Noble-savage savants and their ancient few soundbites for the press, pictures of plastic ton or billowing jellyfish, only then to die off. What into alignment and subscribe to the restoration of knowledge are at the same time cast as the inventors waste in the program, and tickets sold for a few might have been clearly separated categories of war the natural balance. As nature begins to heal, of the rituals of the future. In the end, a model UN hundred euros apiece. and peace, land and sea, organic and artificial, big humankind – now one giant zombie army, albeit ensemble of soldiers, headscarf-wearing refugees, and small, all become hard to grasp. The deeds of with a beautiful choral voice – rises up again (think gods, kings, princesses, and heroes somehow pulls humans and gods are likewise muddled and indis- of the horror director George A. Romero’s line, it off that restoration, revolution, death, and resur- PAUL FEIGELFELD is a culture and media tinct: For Idomeneo, the old gods clearly exist, and “when there’s no more room in hell, the dead will rection all become one. It can be that easy. scholar living in Vienna. 148 Opera Opera 149