Zaide or The Path of Light
The 2025 Festival summer offers an opportunity to experience two of Mozart’s lesser-known operas in semi-staged productions:
Director Birgit Kajtna-Wönig and conductor Adam Fischer plumb the dramatic depths of Mitridate, Mozart’s early opera seria, while Raphaël Pichon questions what freedom means today in a project focusing on Zaide.
For their new project at the Salzburg Festival, the conductor Raphaël Pichon and his Ensemble Pygmalion have chosen Mozart’s Zaide. This unfinished singspiel was written without a commission in 1780, marking a decisive turning-point in the composer’s development. Presumably, he wrote it with the idea of having it performed at the Viennese court of the “enlightened despot” Joseph II, and the humanist themes it revolves around illuminate the work. A passionate connoisseur of Mozart’s music, Raphaël Pichon revisits this outstanding work, adding excerpts from Davide penitente and Thamos as well as less-known concert arias by Mozart to it.
A staged installation merging concert and opera, Zaide or The Path of Light will explore themes which were important to Mozart and Enlightenment Europe, and which have lost none of their urgency: the quest for freedom, the fight against oppression, the emancipation of humanity, the power of true love and the difficult road to forgiveness.
The evening’s dramaturgy is based on the effective contrast between darkness and light, deception and truth. The lighting designer Bertrand Couderc, a longtime collaborator of Pygmalion, will fill the Felsenreitschule’s space with overwhelming atmospheres. Here, the quest for freedom will also be a search for light – a profound hope for reconciliation.
Raphaëlle Blin, Eddy Garaudel
First published in the Festival insert of Salzburger Nachrichten