Зальцбурзький фестиваль 2026: коментують оглядачі провідних видань

Salzburg Festival 2026: leading critics have their say

This year’s Salzburg Festival has proved a study in contrasts: alongside clear artistic triumphs, critics have identified productions in which the director’s concept at times appeared to overshadow the work itself. One of the festival’s major events was Olivier Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise (France), staged by Romeo Castellucci. Writing in El País, Luis Gago described Messiaen’s music and Castellucci’s staging as one of the festival’s great legacies. BR-KLASSIK critic Meret Forster characterised the production as “monumental mysticism”, singling out its powerful imagery — from bread-making and live animals to the unsettling spectacle of a rain of artificial dead birds. Her conclusion was succinct: ultimately, it is the music that “moves and touches” the audience. The Financial Times was considerably more reserved, calling the production an “endurance test”: including intervals, it runs for around six hours and 15 minutes, and its monumental scale does not always translate into an equally compelling musical experience.

The response to the festival’s other major productions was no less divided. Bernhard Neuhoff of BR-KLASSIK described Gioachino Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims (Italy), directed by Barrie Kosky, as “several hours of first-rate escapism”, praising its pace, ensemble work, comic precision and relentless theatrical energy. Luis Gago, writing in El País, was far less convinced, seeing it above all as a spectacle constructed around Cecilia Bartoli.

Gago was harsher still on Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos (Germany/Austria), staged by Ersan Mondtag, describing it as a production that was all too easy to forget. Johann Jahn of BR-KLASSIK summed up the musical and theatrical result as “Ariadne with the handbrake on”, while Eleonore Büning, writing in Salzburger Nachrichten, argued that a “firework display of spectacular external effects” was no substitute for the work’s characteristic subtlety and irony. Against this backdrop, Ulrich Rasche’s staging of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust I (Germany) received a more serious critical response. Egbert Tholl of Süddeutsche Zeitung described the production as a “rigorous psychological concentrate”, while adding that Rasche did not pursue his own radical premise with complete consistency.

The use of artificial intelligence in Ariadne auf Naxos emerged as a separate point of debate. Mondtag relocates the action to Mars, with spacecraft, Martian landscapes and fantastical celestial worlds appearing through a vast stage porthole; the festival’s official programme credits Alexander Pannier with the video design. Andreas Klaeui, writing for Nachtkritik, observed that the projections tended to “duplicate the affects” rather than create a productive tension with the music and dramaturgy. Michael Atzinger in Orpheus Magazin, meanwhile, explicitly addressed the use of AI, dryly remarking that “AI does everything it can” but that an abundance of colourful imagery is not enough, before likening the result to “a trip to Mars in economy class”. The debate therefore extends well beyond this particular production. The question is no longer simply whether AI belongs on the operatic stage, but whether the technology can become an integral part of a director’s artistic language rather than merely a means of generating spectacular digital scenery.