Sinner and Scott

The magic number of the week for the Salzburger Festspiele is 96, setting a new all-time high percentage of seats sold for the six-week event which closed after (mostly) rave reviews on Wednesday.

Among the highlights were concert performances of Jules Massenet’s Thaïs and Otto Nicolai’s Il templario.

Despite being a passionate fan of Werther, I have to admit that Massenet just doesn’t do it for me. I can deal with a well-cast Manon every few years, and something insane and rare like Esclarmonde, but I have always found Thaïs rather a sleeper.

Indeed, while listening to this week’s upload yesterday afternoon, I dozed off about half an hour in and was awakened by the final ovation. I must say I find this a bit strange as I love most of the operas recently posted as successful French works by very our own Poison Ivy, and you all must know by now that Les Troyens (every note of it!) is one of my two desert island operas. So it’s not a problem with French opera.

The opera has endured, and I hope one day to be able to appreciate it. For all you Sibyl Sanderson fans out there, here is the 16 August performance with Marina Rebeka, Plácido Domingo, and Benjamin Bernheim.

Among the rarest items to appear on the festival program were two concert performances of Otto Nicolai’s Il templario. If Wikipedia is to be believed, in his brief life (he died at 38, the same age as Sanderson), Nicolai wrote four operas in Italian, but his best known and final opera was the only one composed in German, Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor; it further states that Nicolai was once more popular in Italy than Verdi.

Il templario follows the plot of Ivanhoe, which you were likely forced to read in junior high English Lit. I know that I certainly would have appreciated it more if the illustrations looked like Juan Diego Flórez, who takes the hero’s florid, high-flying role in this performance from 30 August.

I rather love Wikipedia’s four-sentence plot synopsis for one line which could only pertain to opera: “Briano [sung by Luca Salsi] and Rebecca [sung by Clémentine Margaine] are both – inexplicably – struck dead in the final scene of the opera.”

Twice deemed a lost work before reconstruction in 2006, it was a huge hit throughout Italy from its 1840 premiere at Torino’s Teatro Reggio through the mid-1860s, and is described as being in the bel canto style of Bellini. Listen to Vilfredo d’Ivanhoe’s aria which begins at 11:28 and judge for yourselves.

The pit band, led by Andrés Orozco-Estrada is, appropriately, the Wiener Philharmoniker, which Nicolai helped establish in 1842.

More performances from the 2016 Salzburger Festspiele will be posted in the coming months.