Salzburg Festival doesn’t mess about. The offerings this year include an adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain in Lithuanian, a Soviet-era operatic treatment of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and Igor Levit tackling one of the Himalayan peaks of the piano rep. Kiddies, meanwhile, could enjoy the children’s opera Die Kluge (brilliantly done), a Nazi-era allegory on the rise of Hitler by Carl Orff, a composer they love here but whose politics are shall we say, um, complicated. (Pleasingly, I’m not sure the festival understands the concept of cancellation.) People always think Salzburg is pretty and fun. It’s not. It’s dark and primal, with a festival that is far more uncompromising and exhilarating than a global-elite bun-fight in provincial Austria has any right to be.
To play one of these works is to throw yourself off a cliff. To risk it all
The set-up is rather like at Mecca, with the daily worship taking place before a massive rock.
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