Well, my dears, if you thought Frank Castorf‘s Ring and Stefan Herheim‘s Meistersinger were outré, then wait until you get a load of the radical take on Don Carlos by Peter Stein for the Salzburg Festival!  

Remember how Herheim imposed a “framing story” on Wagner’s tale, positing the whole thing as a dream creation by Sachs himself? Well, Stein goes one better: this Don Carlos is framed as a revival of the Verdi masterpiece in a German theater in the 1950s, with sets of flimsy rectilinear flats and glitzy “fancy dress” costumes denoting the artificiality of the Spanish court. The singers stand about casually or indulge in stereotyped operatic “acting,” again driving home the point that life in the court of Phillipe II is nothing but a hollow performance.

Genuinely brilliant work by the veteran Stein, and if he hadn’t spent eight weeks of rehearsal to create this unfocused, energy-free spectacle (and you hadn’t spent € 400 for a single ticket) you might almost think what you were seeing was nothing but a routine repertory performance of a long-outdated staging…

(Thanks, for about the hundredth time this week, to Intermezzo for pointing out both the production and the absurdity therein.)

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