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27 July – 30 August

In the season of his interim period as Artistic Director, Markus Hinterhäuser placed striking key accents on the repertoire: the first collaboration between Peter Stein and Riccardo Muti produced a great success for Verdi’s Otello. Christian Thielemann cele­brated his acclaimed first performance conducting opera in Salzburg with Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten/The Woman without a Shadow.

With The Makropulos Case Hinterhäuser continued the fostering of works by Janáček at the Festival. Meanwhile, Claus Guth’s Da Ponte cycle was played in its entirety.

Thomas Oberender, too, took farewell with a substantial programme, including not only a Faust marathon but also two world premières: Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Die vier Himmelsrichtungen/The Four Points of the Compass and Peter Handke’s Immer noch Sturm staged by Dimiter Gotscheff. In his play Handke amalgamated the history of his family with that of Carinthian Slovenes and their partisan struggles. In an invocation to his ancestors he has the ‘I’ narrator (Jens Harzer) resurrecting his forebears and imagining himself in their company. ‘For almost five hours greenish paper snippets drift down from the stage sky in chilly, beautiful indifference […]. It rains the passing time, […].’1

1 Thomas Assheuer: Es regnet vergehende Zeit, in: Die Zeit, No. 34/2011, 18 August 2011, https://www.zeit.de/2011/34/Salzburg-Festspiele-Handke