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Mozart22: A DVD Review Portfolio

2013; Oxford University Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/oq/kbt013

1476-2870

A. Mueller,

Visual Culture and Art Theory

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.