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  • Mozart22: A DVD Review Portfolio Introduction
  • Adeline Mueller (bio)

The operatic equivalent of an ultramarathon, a "complete" cycle of Mozart operas has often proven an irresistible challenge to ambitious companies.1 The past century has seen several such undertakings: a cycle at the Leipzig Opera House in 1941–42, on the occasion of the sesquicentennial of Mozart's death; a 1980–87 cycle at the Zurich Opera under Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Jean-Pierre Ponnelle; a Lincoln Center cycle in 1991, as part of their "every note Mozart wrote" approach to the bicentennial; the Warsaw Chamber Opera's annual festival of "all twenty-six" of Mozart's stage works, a tradition that has endured from 1991 to 2012; and in 2006, the Salzburg Festival's staging of twenty-two of Mozart's operas, opera fragments, and oratorios in a single summer festival season.2

The Salzburg cycle bore special cultural weight not just because it took place in the 250th anniversary year of Mozart's birth, but also because it was the first such cycle to occur in Mozart's birthplace.3 Performances ranged across the city, from the University of Salzburg, where at age five Mozart had first taken the stage as a dancer, to the brand-new "Haus für Mozart," built on the site of the Kleines Festspielhaus. Among other architectural elements retained from the old building were the original foyer frescoes by the Expressionist painter Anton Faistauer, which had been removed and damaged following the Nazi invasion in 1938, partially restored in 1956, and were only in 2006 fully restored for the Haus für Mozart, with Le nozze di Figaro as the housewarming present.4 Some of the damaged panels were "restored" in a self-consciously incomplete way, using monochrome canvas reproductions of high-quality photographs taken in the 1920s to show the original plan of the panel (fig. 1). In eschewing a more seamless, self-effacing full-color paint reproduction, the restorers left a visible reminder of the damage done not just to the frescoes, but to Salzburg—and arguably to Austria as a whole—during the years of Nazi occupation.

Peter Ruzicka, the festival's outgoing artistic director, adopted a similar posture toward the anniversary. In a manifesto of sorts for the festival, he explained that "one cannot help 'destroying'—or, to put it more benignly, ending—traditions so that new ones may be started." He continued:

This programmatic desire, this longing for an intact world, was also there at the founding of the Salzburg Festival, as a conservative antidote to the troubled reality between [End Page 41]


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Figure 1.

Anton Faistauer, Werkleutewand (Workmen's wall) fresco, Haus für Mozart foyer, after restoration, with monochrome reproduction of destroyed portion at left. Photo courtesy of the Austrian Federal Monuments Office; photographer, Petra Laubenstein.

the world wars. But in the long run, reality cannot be shut out, not in Salzburg and not in the Festival. So in this Mozart anniversary year, we too want neither to celebrate the Festival as a return to a golden age of classical music, nor to leave the present behind, but precisely the opposite: to bring Mozart close, as close as possible, to our present, to realize his music as though we were hearing it for the first time.5

The Faistauer frescoes might therefore serve as a visual emblem for the ethos of the 2006 festival as a whole. Both aspired to a more honest confrontation with the darker chapters in the festival's past; to scrub away the well-meaning but ill-informed or dated productions of more recent decades; to integrate the results of the most recent archival research; and, where gaps remained, to introduce new elements that evoked a spirit of authenticity, without a slavish or rigid anachronism. They were both, in short, exercises in preservation.

Six years on, the DVD box set that preserves the festival experience—Mozart22, a collaboration between Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, Unitel, and TDK—remains the most ambitious opera-on-video release in the history of the medium. It comprises fifty-one hours of opera over thirty-three discs with 5.1 surround [End Page...

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