Little Heroes on the Big Stage
Courage, friendship with extraterrestrials and whispering mountains: the colourful programme of jung&jede*r.
“To expose young people to the best from the very beginning,” that is the goal of the Salzburg Festival. The youth programme jung&jede*r offers 58 performances of three productions, as well as school workshops and education formats. 6,000 tickets have been reserved for young audience members. Furthermore, there are Festival mentorships and Opera Camps to attract the audience of the future.
The opera production is Musketiere!. David Bösch, who also wrote the libretto, directs a modern version of the familiar story of the three musketeers, in which the motto is “one for all and all for one”, but the constellation is different than usual. “The foundation is the old epos, and certain characters will be recognizable, but in a new way – for example, D’Artagnan is a girl,” says Ursula Gessat, manager of jung&jede*r. The fearless child bearing the name of the famous fighter joins forces with a cheeky horse and the clumsy Portos – all three of them self-declared musketeers – to fight a female Cardinal Richelieu and the narcissistic King. The message of Musketiere!, says Gessat, is “that everyone can do something to help the group as a whole, that people stick together in a community and fight together against injustice – and that courage pays off.”
A different perspective. Sebastian Schwab composed the children’s opera, which will have its world premiere on 25 July at the Schauspielhaus Salzburg, as a commission for the Salzburg Festival and the Vienna State Opera. It calls for a twelve-piece orchestra. The world premiere will be performed by participants in the Young Singers Project and the Angelika Prokopp Summer Academy of the Vienna Philharmonic. The conductor is Yura Yang, and she is enthusiastic about “a new sound world with many colours and great rhythms”. She loves the fact that children’s thinking “is less complicated than ours regarding today’s music. They don’t care whether we are performing a contemporary opera or one by Mozart. They view it from a different perspective – and I admire that.” She is certain that “the piece will speak to children”. The co-production with the Vienna State Opera will subsequently be performed in the Austrian capital.
Overcoming loneliness. Community is also the theme of the children’s play Mein ziemlich seltsamer Freund Walter by Sibylle Berg, which premieres in August. The piece, in which a lonely child makes friends with an extraterrestrial, is also about “starting to grow up”. And, as the dramaturge Maria Leitgab says, it is about finding “ways and means to overcome loneliness”. The point is to “recount the realities of children’s and teenagers’ lives”.
The goal, however, is to involve young people not only in the topics, but also in the development of the pieces. Berge flüstern laut is the title of the premiere in which Salzburg’s legends and myths are staged – with recorders, violin and voice. The piece “explores the issue of forging identity through old stories and a possible new interpretation”, as the Festival has declared. “We wanted to know whether young people are still familiar at all with these legends and customs, so we held workshops to find out what these might still mean to the students,” says director Elli Neubert. Berge flüstern laut is meant to convey “how legends tried to explain life phenomena by observing nature. The idea of animated nature also lends it a magical aspect. And it teaches us to respect our environment.” Retelling and rewriting “will give us a handle on how to tell these ancient, and occasionally violent, stories in a good way.” Then there is the music by Matteo Haitzmann, which “unfolds an atmospheric world”, as dramaturge Maria Leitgab says. The performers on stage are Franca Luisa Burandt, Haitzmann himself and Anne-Suse Enßle.
Text: Theresa Steininger
Translation: Alexa Nieschlag
First published on 31.05.2025 in Die Presse Kultur Spezial: Salzburger Festspiele