From our roving critic Susan Hall:
The American director Peter Sellars, a fixture at the Salzburg Festival, arrived this year with a juxtaposition of works by Anton Schoenberg (Erwartung) and Gustav Mahler (Der Abschied from Das Lied von der Erde), bridged by short pieces by Anton von Webern.
The pairing should not surprise. Both works are monodramatic, composed in the early 20th century, at a time when these composers were inventing new hybrids of song, symphony, and cantata. The production draws inspiration from a painting by Schoenberg titled Erwartung. Designer George Tsypin’s tall columns, decorated with Miro-like images, occupy the left side of the stage. Often rotating slowly, they suggest movement through memory or time—through pathways both real and imagined.
Schoenberg’s Erwartung, presented first, is sung by Ausrine Stundyte. A lone woman traverses a forest — and her own psyche — in a full range of human emotions. Lost and disoriented, she stumbles through uncertainty, memory, hope and terror. Stundyte’s voice, textured and varied, lofts these states vividly.
Sellars rejects early psychoanalytic readings of women as hysterical. There is no false jealousy here, no rationalized drama. This woman is in crisis, and the anxiety she experiences is real. As she penetrates the darkness of the forest, she is overcome —s wept up in fear, isolation and grief.
Stundyte commands the stage. Her breathless, fervent lines sometimes crest as screams. Her arms, glowing white under James F. Ingalls’ lighting, seem to dance with inner feeling. They are not just expressive — they are the imagined arms of a rival lover, burned into her mind. Ingalls’ lighting design adds depth: sharp shafts of light, color-washed walls, and shadow play that renders the woman’s silhouette mysterious and ghostlike. The towering stone wall at the back of the Festspielhaus becomes part of the action, enfolding the performers and audience alike in sonic and visual darkness. Stundyte’s performance is grounded by the music itself. This woman may be unraveling, but she is held — carefully, intimately — by a powerful score.
Esa-Pekka Salonen led a performance of clarity and nuance, summoning a spectrum of light from the Vienna Philharmonic — from moonlight to dusk,from shadow games to saturated earthly colors — brilliantly echoed on stage.
Fleur Barron stepped into Der Abschied at the last moment and sang beautifully. The first of Mahler’s farewell works found quiet dignity in her voice. Particularly haunting were passages accompanied by flutist Karl-Heinz Schütz, stationed high above the stage in two separate windows.
Sellars reminds us that Freud, who so preoccupied Europe during this period, has since been reinterpreted. The fear and trembling we see are not the result of hysteria, but of real, lived
experience. The anxiety of these two women is not symbolic — it is visceral. That truth is unmistakable from the first moment, when we see a dead body on stage. There is no ambiguity: he is dead. This is reality. The performance unfolds from that stark premise, and the audience grips their seats.
The wide, shallow stage of the Festspielhaus draws us in. Darkness is not just part of the staging — it is the medium itself. It clings to the singers’ lips and hangs like a canopy over the hall. The evening is haunting. And it is spectacularly moving.
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