Strauss and Hofmannsthal deserve better from the Salzburg Festival

The Salzburg Festival’s reputation might largely be one of cultural conservatism, but it made an impressive commitment to new works when it announced in 2011 that it had commissioned four operas, to be unveiled at the rate of one a year between 2013 and 2016.

The first was to have been by György Kurtág, but he failed to deliver on time. And it sounds as though the French composer Marc-André Dalbavie might also have given the Salzburg management a bit of a scare. His Charlotte Salomon made it to the stage on time for this year, but there had been substantial reworking of the piece’s Epilogue by Dalbavie and his director, Luc Bondy, right up until the start of rehearsals. At an earlier stage, a first libretto had been rejected, replaced by a brand new one by the artist and writer Barbara Honigmann.

The end result is a complex work that tells the story of the Berlin-born Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon and draws on the remarkable set of nearly 800 autobiographical gouaches, entitled Leben? oder Theater? (Life? or Theatre?) and filled with jottings and musical allusions, which she produced in the final two years of her life, having fled Germany for France. (She died in Auschwitz, aged just 26.) Honigmann’s libretto reflects its unusual source and uses the fictional names Salomon produced for herself (she becomes Charlotte Kann) and the major players in her life, while Dalbavie’s score weaves in many of the musical references. Salomon herself is present on stage as a sort of narrator of her own story (the actress Johanna Wokalek, speaking in German), while the characters of that story are embodied by singers (communicating in French translation) on the wide, narrow stage of the Felsenreitschule.

Johannes Schütz’s minimal set consists of movable partition walls, doors and a few domestic props, while Bondy’s direction is impressively fluid and sure, with an extra dimension provided by projections of Salomon’s own paintings.