Photo: Monika Rittershaus
St. Francis of Assisi is one of the most cited and popular religious figures of Western art and culture. Known as “il Poverello” (“the little poor one”) and “Giullare di Dio” (“God’s jester”), Francis has also enjoyed a rich history of commemoration in music including Liszt, Piernè, Poulenc, Hindemith, and Malipiero.
Olivier Messiaen’s Saint François D’Assise is the most expansive Franciscan musical oeuvre. Premiered in 1983, Messiaen’s only opera was inspired by Wagnerian epic scale—a Catholic apologia to Tristan and Parsifal—and French tradition, particularly Pelléas et Mélisande’s colors and symbolism. The massive opera spans three acts that unfold over nearly six-and-a-half hours (including two generous hour-long intermissions). Each of the eight tableaux is a sketch from Francis’s life, a series of impressions rather than a linear biography. Messiaen compiled the libretto himself, drawing from medieval sources such as the Little Flowers of St. Francis. Each act is framed by a miraculous climax: Francis overcoming doubt and kissing the leper; the Angel enabling his sermon to the birds; and, lastly, his stigmata, death, and reception in heaven.
In a new production for the Salzburger Festpiele (a recording from the premiere is available on ORF until the end of August), Romeo Castellucci focuses on the “extremely radical” elements of the Poverello. Castellucci wants to move away from the “deliberate amnesia” of the “official” Franciscan narrative passed down from the chronicles of Bonaventure that so captivated Messiaen. Instead, this counternarrative uncovers the “traces of scandal” in Francis’s biography, not yet “Saint” in his own lifetime but rather on the arduous path to holiness. Castellucci notes how “Francis, in the Middle Ages, discovers the [human] body,” a discovery that, in turn, gave rise to the Renaissance and humanism. Castellucci reinforces this by inserting two brief scenes from Francis’s biography not included in the libretto. In a silent prelude, Francis strips naked and rejects modern fashions despite his parents’ pleas. Before his sermon to the birds, he also tames the Wolf of Gubbio, here a visual nod to Joseph Beuys’s I Like America and America Likes Me, in which the artist locked himself with a coyote for three days. These additions ground the production in Francis’s earthly metamorphosis—or perhaps drug-induced psychosis. Overall, however, Castellucci teeters between affirmation and provocation with respect to Messiaen’s Catholic magnum opus.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
Castellucci’s “radical” vision gestures towards, but never fully embraces, a much darker vision of the title saint. Was Francis a cult leader or visionary? What is the cost of spiritual and corporal sacrifice? In the twentieth century alone, many reinterpretations challenged the gentler iconography even before Messiaen’s compositional journey in the 1970s. British author G.K. Chesterton noted in his 1923 St. Francis of Assisi that one cannot reduce Francis to a good-natured eccentric of a bygone period. The stories of his avian preaching and magnanimity are often treated as “a sort of sentimental sediment of the medieval world, instead of being, as the saint emphatically is, a challenge to the modern world. We must take his real human development somewhat more seriously.” Since then, diverse cultural groups subsumed the Franciscan spirit for modern times: as a protector of nature for environmental movements, as a 1968 hippie countercultural icon like in Franco Zeffirelli’s sensual Brother Sun, Sister Moon, and even as a nationalist leader when named co-patron saint in 1939 in Mussolini’s Italy.
This interpretive diversity is also reflected in Saint François D’Assise’s performance history. While the 1983 Paris premiere (Seiji Ozawa conducting and José van Dam in the title role) bore Messiaen’s aesthetic imprint—trademark Franciscan brown robes and tonsures, Fra Angelico’s Annunciation-like multicolored angel wings, mystical lights—later productions took the work in other directions. In 1992, only a few months after Messiaen’s passing, Peter Sellars staged the work at Salzburg’s Felsenreitschule as well. Van Dam returned in the title role alongside Dawn Upshaw as L’Ange with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the LA Philharmonic. Sellars’s television monitor-heavy vision blurred the lines between the miraculous and the human: drawing on another dimension of Giotto’s frescos, the physicality of the angels, here the Angel was a hospital worker helping the Leper. The 2002 US premiere in San Francisco, directed by Nicolas Brieger, had a winding staircase gesturing towards the arduous path of salvation. For the Bayerische Staatsoper in 2011, provocateur action artist Hermann Nitsch took the blood-soaked spectacle of Francis’s stigmata to an extreme. More recently, George Delnon’s 2024 production at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg found contemporary analogies, featuring videos of the NGO Sea-Watch volunteers helping refugees.
The complex and multilayered Franciscan legacy is therefore an opportune canvas for Castellucci, who brings an imaginative yet cerebral vision to Messiaen’s “anti-opera.” This is a multisensory staging. Like in his 2021 Salzburg Don Giovanni, Castellucci’s signature iconography includes smoke and flames, rain showers, live animals, and anachronistically modern technology (wafting smells of monastic bread baked live on stage in industrial ovens). Stark monochromatic sets incorporate the Felsenreitschule’s distinctive stone arches, harkening to the rockface of La Verna where Francis received his stigmata. Black-and-white robed dancers choreographed by Yasmine Hugonnet serve as monks, birds, and divine henchmen sent to test Francis. The Italian director clearly admires Messiaen’s work—at one point “Je t’aime, Olivier, immense artiste” is projected on stage—but in order for the substantive moments in each tableau to avoid coming out half-baked, Castellucci pushes back on and perhaps even distorts Messiaen’s theology.
The staging is full of deconstructed Christian imagery, reduced to primordial symbols: rainfall, flour, a sneaker, an orange. Even the cross is abstracted, from two simple lines on the theater curtain, to a massive pillar that opens up the curtain, to a glowing beam that Francis lifts to obey Jesus’s “take up your cross and follow me.” It would be exhausting to try to provide a comprehensive semiotic analysis, but three key moments particularly stood out.
In Act 1, the Leper, miraculously healed by Francis’s sacrificial kiss, is a dual role: Georg Schwamberger played a silent, frail elderly man and Sean Panikkar sang as part of a trio of angels. This Personenregie makes the divine element of the leper’s apparition (later revealed by the Angel in Act III) already apparent from the first contact, while Panikkar’s white-robed angel alludes to the Trinitarian visit of the three strangers to Abraham in Genesis 18. Although dramaturg Christian Longchamp cites philosopher Massimo Cacciari’s notion of Franciscan “hilaritas,” joy in light of profound suffering, here the leper does not dance with joy despite Messiaen’s instructions in the libretto. The healing is purely internal. As Francis dies in Act III, the roles reverse: the Leper reappears to bathe the naked friar’s body.
Act II reframes the Sermon to the Birds as a bleak sacrifice. A lifelong ornithologist, Messiaen was particularly drawn to Francis of Assisi because both the saint and the composer recognized, as Castellucci explains, “birds as brothers, as musical brothers, even as professors of music.” The anthropological and natural musical worlds are connected as “birds embodied music on planet Earth even before the arrival of humankind.” Yet our modern times have permanently damaged this relationship. Here, Francis’s miracle of communication comes from the angels bloodily removing their wings. Rather than departing gracefully in four groups to form the shape of the cross, the birds instead drop dead onto the stage with a thud. Behind them, a projection lists the many species notated by Messiaen that have since become extinct. Our communication with nature, and thereby the divine, has been permanently ruptured by ecocide.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
Echoes of Castellucci’s 2022 Resurrection in Aix, a setting of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, are traceable in Act III, as the dark forces of God drag Francis through a large burial pit. As Francis lies in the dirt, his black-robed brothers emerge from among the group to announce his death and bury a white bird beside him. Yet as the celestial chorus proclaims the glory of God, Brother Léon places his foot on Francis’s body, and the brothers drag him out again, his body alone and naked. The white light noted in Messiaen’s score is here accompanied by smoke and sheep grazing on the crumbs of Act 1’s bread: is this a crematorium and lambs going to the slaughter? Or are these the clouds of paradise and Francis’ accomplished mission tending to Jesus’s flock which eat the bread of life?
In his role debut, Philippe Sly proved to be a commanding Francis, a youthful timbre combined with rugged intensity. Sly’s embodiment of Il Poverello was a feat of incredible vocal and physical stamina. In the program, Castellucci cites performance artists Chris Burden and Gina Pane, who blended religious symbolism and bodily pain, as well as Antonin Artaud and Jerzy Grotowski’s Theatre of Cruelty as inspirations for Sly’s extreme ordeals. This taxing role required deep focus, his voice never straining. Instead, Sly developed a warmer, more rounded lower register across the evening as Francis accepts his harrowing tribulations with fervent submission.
Lauranne Oliva as L’Ange similarly presented an effective dynamic and timbral range: from ominously confronting the skeptical monks to providing divine comfort to the bleeding Francis. Oliva also performed acrobatics, as in Act 2 the Angel emerges out of the enormous upside-down metropolis backdrop, Castellucci’s subtle reference to Roland Penrose’s 1937 surrealist painting Seeing is believing (L’ile invisible) that inspired Messiaen’s song-cycle Harawi.
Panikkar’s Le Lépreux was neither grumbling nor weak, instead offering a bright timbre that brought out the explicitly angelic characterization embedded in Castellucci’s Personenregie. The Franciscan brothers rounded off the cast with equal poise. Russell Braun conveyed a doubtful, though not meek, Frère Léon. Léo Vermot-Desroches’s Frère Massée provided company during the sermon to the birds with a mellow tenor timbre. While occasionally covered by the orchestra during the moments of ecstatic birdsong, Vermot-Desroches’s lyricism demonstrated that he is a singer on the rise for major roles in the future. A Saint François veteran from the SF Opera production, Willard White provided a comforting and authoritative Frère Bernard, a contrast to the whining exasperations of Aaron-Casey Gould’s doubtful Frère Élie.
Acoustically, the Felsenreitschule’s unusually wide stage offered the Vienna Philharmonic and Maxime Pascal an opportunity to explore Messiaen’s kaleidoscopic score: from the three ethereal electronic ondes Martenot (played antiphonally by Nathalie Forget, Augustin Viard, and Cecile Lartigau) depicting the Angel’s viol, whose “sounds seem to come from multiple points in the horizon” to the 200 layers of birdsong in the avian sermon.
Conducting without a baton, Pascal led a skillful, though not particularly mellifluous, interpretation. After all, Messiaen’s moments of sublime divinity are meant to be unbearably sweet rather than saccharine romanticism; this is not Scriabin-like intoxication. Occasionally rough around the edges when coordinating between percussion groups and the pit across the cavernous hall, the Vienna Philharmonic nevertheless gave a confident rendition of a fiendishly difficult score. The massive but unseen Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus, led by Jozef Chabroň, was amplified offstage to particularly haunting effect in Act 3. Unlike the warm French-infused sound of the Ozawa/Paris and Nagano/Hallé recordings, here the orchestra and choir matched the starkness of Castellucci’s staging.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
This year’s performances take place during a global “Franciscan Year,” the 800th anniversary of the saint’s death. The Catholic Church has proclaimed a special Jubilee, publicly displaying his bones in Assisi for the first time in history. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s government declared his upcoming October 4 feast day a national holiday.
The political background has also struck a nerve in this production itself. As A.J. Goldmann has noted on these pages, the Salzburg Festival is in an uncertain period of transition following the abrupt termination of artistic director Markus Hinterhäuser. Despite the turbulence, Hinterhäuser’s imprint remains visible at this summer’s edition, particularly this opera and the “Visions de Messiaen” concert theme. Hinterhäuser’s decision to bring back Messiaen’s opera was a clear nod to Gerard Mortier, Karajan’s successor as Intendant, and the watershed 1992 Sellars production. Even after his dismissal, Hinterhäuser has still made appearances this summer, accompanying Matthias Goerne and joining Igor Levit for Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen for 2 pianos.
Moreover, the Hinterhäuser-Castellucci partnership was a high-moment of his tenure with Salome, Don Giovanni, and Bluebeard’s Castle/De temporum fine comoedia. Castellucci himself has publicly criticized the ongoing drama, noting in the interview with Longchamp (published in the program book) that Hinterhäuser is a “victim now of petty politics that would arrogantly seek to fetter culture while lacking the ability to understand the consequences.”
Yet Francis’s contemporary impact extends beyond institutional political ritual and drama. A 2025 article in The Atlantic dubbed Francis “the saint America needs now”: “Kindness has become countercultural. Perhaps Saint Francis can help.” The Vatican recently organized a Francis-themed “Canticle of Peace” event with Andrea Bocelli and his ABF Voices choir in which Pope Leo XIV remarked: “music has the extraordinary capacity to bring different voices together in unison … In this sense, the choir becomes an ideal symbol of harmony and cooperation.” Messiaen certainly believed that music could unite us and transcend divisiveness. Whether those values came across in Castellucci’s enigmatic production is an open question.
