“The laying of flowers and candles before the arcade of the Felsenreitschule (a riding school transformed into an arresting theater) came at the start of the second act of Mozart’s ‘La Clemenza di Tito,’ directed by Peter Sellars at the Salzburg Festival,” writes Mark Swed in Monday’s (8/14) Los Angeles Times. “It was [Nelson] Mandela whom Sellars cited a decade ago in discussing the need for a new look at Mozart’s last and little-loved opera. Mandela, Sellars said, attempted to break the cycles of racial violence with an ‘unexpectedly humane response to terrorism,’ and in ‘Clemenza’ the director makes the Roman emperor Titus, who forgives his assassins, a Mandela-like figure…. This ‘Clemenza’ … sets new standards for how to play Mozart, how to sing Mozart, how to stage Mozart … and how to find cliché-free hope for humanity…. Sellars and the extraordinary Greek conductor Teodor Currentzis have radically reimagined ‘Clemenza.’ … Unlike Mozart’s original, in which Titus survives, the emperor in this retelling spends the second half of the opera in a hospital bed, profoundly coming to terms with betrayal and mortality. His final act is to find that Mandela state of forgiveness.”
Posted August 15, 2017
