Adam Fischer Streamlines Mozart’s Lucio Silla at Salzburg Festival

Adam Fischer and the Mozarteum Orchester Streamline Mozart’s Early Opera

Written by a teenage Mozart, still not seventeen years old, for Milan in 1772, Lucio Silla (KV 135) has long struggled to find a steady home on modern opera stages. Conductor Adam Fischer tackled that hurdle directly at the Salzburg Festival by trimming the massive score down to a tight, two-and-a-half-hour running time. Fischer and the Mozarteum Orchester bypassed rigid philological exactness for a pragmatic approach, cutting lengthy recitatives, omitting aria repetitions, and excising individual numbers to deliver the core of the piece. As Ádám Fischer is quite certain, it is not the music’s fault, but rather this two-part structure running contrary to contemporary listening habits, that such operas have almost entirely disappeared from the playbill.

That musical core remains deeply virtuosic. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s „Lucio Silla“ arose shortly after the successful youth opera „Mitridate, re di Ponto“. Musically, „Lucio Silla“ is perfect because the arias and recitatives are filled with an almost instinctively secure beauty. Nowhere else does one find comparably elaborately designed accompagnato recitatives in Mozart where the violins make the air shudder eerily like in a Stephen-King-novel or the horns sound threatening à la „Don Giovanni“.””””

The production pairs the crisp musical direction with a semi-staged setting inside the Felsenreitschule, utilizing the venue’s striking stone arcade arches as natural backdrops for the ancient Roman plot.

Navigating Complex Political Plots and Projected Diagrams

The opera’s libretto by Giovanni de Gamerra weaves together intense political intrigue and tangled romance. There is the dictator Silla, who has banished his political adversary Cecilio from Rome. The latter, in turn, plans the overthrow together with his fiancée Giunia, the daughter of Silla’s erstwhile arch-enemy Mario, and his friend Cinna, who is in Silla’s service. Silla’s sister Celia, who is in love with Cinna, is also occasionally allowed to exert her influence on the dictator. To help audiences follow the labyrinth of political plots, the performance featured helpful text projections.

At the beginning, during the prelude, there is a lovingly designed introduction to the characters and the plot, who loves whom, who wants to kill whom, and who knows nothing about what. In white script, a kind of plot family tree is projected onto the wall. Even during the performance itself, not only the libretto, but a content-related guideline is thrown onto the wall (alongside synapses that wind their way up and down the wall): „Emotional chaos,“ it says at the appropriate place, „Friendship,or „The downfall of Silla is near.”

Vocal Standouts in the Salzburg Cast

Nina Solodovnikova needs a little bit to find herself as Giunia. Giovanni Sala sang the title role in a suit jacket and a sort of city-chief sweatpants energetically and credibly.

A Skeptical Approach to the Traditional Happy Ending

What the Roman dictator is ultimately supposed to be famous for is only learned late in Mozart’s opera: He exercises mercy when everyone expects only brutality. The marble block is already standing ready from which the monument for Lucio Silla is soon to be hewn, its silhouette already painted on. At the end, the dictator abdicates. The Senate and people of Rome celebrate him in the closing chorus. „I am one of you,“ Lucio Silla proclaims pathetically: any resemblance to election slogans from recent Austrian history is purely accidental, the libretto good 250 years old. And tenor Giovanni Sala, the singer of the title role in Mozart’s youth opera, loses himself a little later in the audience rows of the Felsenreitschule.”

Yet his former enemies have trouble getting over Lucio Silla’s sudden transformation into a pillar of virtue: Is he supposed to be able to sneak away from all responsibility for the earlier atrocities so easily? In her semi-staged interpretation, director Birgit Kajtna-Wönig leaves especially Cecilio and Giunia as bewildered as they are angered in the end. True enough, now the two are allowed to marry, even though Silla would have liked to have Giunia as his wife himself and Cecilio had returned from banishment with the intention of tyrannicide.