Salzburg Pocket Opera Festival 2025 at the Odeïon Salzburg
This year’s Salzburg Pocket Opera Festival 2025 will feature neither ‘pocket-sized opera’ nor musical theatre in which interdisciplinary and media experiments are tried out. No. In this biennial event, the SWR Vocal Ensemble from Stuttgart replaces an instrumental ensemble performing in the orchestra pit and is both at the same time: an ‘orchestral-vocal sound force’ and representative of a mass that radiates its effect both from a distance from the stage action and within the scene. Nikolaus Brass, Bernd Richard Deutsch, Elena Mendoza and Vito Žuraj wrote the music for this. Compositions whose tension and drama have developed not from thematic guidelines, but from stage-independent, inner-musical decisions. Nevertheless, they make themselves available for what is played, narrated and conjured up on stage by the actors and the director’s interpretation. The vocal music thus dramatises, colours and comments on the action on stage. Just as film music does for the action in a film. MENSCH MASSE MACHT (Man, Mass, Power) is the overarching theme. It is the basis for a combination of four vocal works and the stage action of the play MASKEN DES BÖSEN (Masks of Evil), which was written for this purpose by the festival’s dramaturge Hans-Peter Jahn.
Thomas Mann, Elias Canetti (Crowds and Power) and Hannah Arendt (Crowds and Violence) provide the material. Direct reference is made to Mann’s story Mario and the Magician, in which the magician and hypnotist Cipolla uses his diabolical powers to overwhelm and manipulate the local audience and tourists in the Italian seaside resort of Torre di Venere. He selects two victims who play a central role in the play: Mario, a melancholic, rebellious bar waiter, and Luigi, a cunning, mafia-like speculator. Both resist Cipolla’s hypnotic powers… with dramatic consequences. The three men are not friends, on the contrary: they fight with fundamentally different ideas about the future of the small Ligurian village, which has long been dependent on mass tourism. Skyscrapers or fish. Investment or a return to the idyll of natural beauty. One thing is certain: the sun is blazing.
Thierry Bruehl, director and artistic director of the festival, stages the singing and scenes in two large tableaux. But again and again, the scent of Italian opera earworms spreads, which, through the ‘Salzburg Festival and Theatre Children’s Choir’, know how to assert themselves against the power play of the three men in a carefree, sweet, but also threatening and powerful way. And a girl and her young singing troupe tell their very own story in this intriguing, conflict-laden present.
