Bluebeard’s Castle; De Temporum Fine Comoedia, review: two mighty hellish visions at Salzburg

The Salzburg Festival is currently an artistic powerhouse under intendant Markus Hinterhäuser, but also a site of political controversy. This year’s season has begun with a fierce argument about its support for Russian artists, especially the conductor Teodor Currentzis, who has neither aligned himself with Putin nor spoken out against him. Yet he remained in charge of a powerful double bill to open the festival’s operas, coupling a classic by Bartók, Bluebeard’s Castle, with a rarity, the late oratorio De Temporum Fine Comoedia by Carl Orff (himself a subject of political suspicion for his closeness to the Nazi regime), which was premiered in Salzburg in 1973.

Currentzis conducted the Bartók score with miraculous precision, drawing from the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra eerie textures of frequently unheard detail. The revolutionary nature of the staging by Romeo Castellucci was clear from the outset: a baby’s cry, a woman’s moan of grief, and a pitch-black stage. It abandons the literal depiction of Bluebeard’s castle and becomes instead new wife Judith’s own psychodrama, digging deeper into the well of her pain as a dead child lies beside her.

Almost the only light is shed by a series of fires, one of which, reflected in the water that spreads over the stage, spells out  the German word "ich": this is all a brutal search for self-identity, agonisingly sustained by Ausrine Stundyte as Judith, with Mika Kares impassively supportive as Bluebeard – a radical reversal of roles, superbly sung by both.

Whereas this Bartók opera is about the individual, Orff’s weirdly dated vision of the last days is all about the communal – there are only choruses (the massed choirs of the musicAeterna Choir, the Salzburg Bachchor and the Festspiele und Theatre Kinderchor) from which step out solo voices. The whited Sibylls argue for punishment, with chanted texts and melismatic outbursts; the Anchorite monks counter this with their vision of evil forgiven by God. In the long final scene the floor is broken open as the dead rise up and await judgement with terror.

Castellucci devises some stunning stage pictures for Orff’s thin, repetitively percussive music; he wraps the two works together with the reappearance of Bluebeard and Judith with Lucifer (Christian Reiner) to confess their sin and attain eternal harmony. Yet the idea that all evil might be, in the end, forgiven by an all-seeing God seemed a somewhat hopeful answer to the controversies of the day.

Until Aug 20. Tickets: 00 43 662 8045 500; salzburgerfestspiele.at