Taschenopernfestival 2025

With the 11th biennial Salzburg Taschenopernfestival, Klang21 continues its goal of not only presenting music theatre of the immediate present, but above all of setting different small forms of this genre in a discursive, but also provocative dialogue within one evening. Four commissions are awarded to composers from different backgrounds, each to allow them to explore the possibilities of contemporary music theatre in a unique way. The central questions behind this are: How much reality can this genre tolerate, how much explosive power can it withstand and radiate? And how relevant is its effect on the present day, including on the audience?

This year’s festival is breaking new ground: for the first time, the ‘instrumentarium’ will be an all-vocal ensemble. The SWR Vokalensemble has been specially engaged for the occasion. Nikolaus Brass, Bernd Richard Deutsch, Elena Mendoza and Vito Žuraj have been commissioned to write a consistent, dramaturgically diverse vocal piece for a total of 29 voices, which will serve as the basis for a production but can also be performed as a concert piece.

The thematic starting point for the dramatisation of the music is Thomas Mann’s novella Mario and the Magician, in which an auditorium is described as the plaything and victim of a carnival magician and hypnotist, as the seduced and used of a power-crazed cripple. But the narrator, as a detached observer, also shines a light on the magician, how he stimulates, seduces and abuses the individualities from the crowd in his game. The opposite is also subtly addressed through the perspective of the narrative: resistance to arbitrariness, the individual’s reflection on his powerlessness and his power.

An important part of the music theatre will be a children’s choir (children’s choir of the Salzburg Festival). On the one hand, it personifies the next generation in new power relations, and on the other hand, it will, depending on the situation, hurl the triviality of the inciting mass singing against the self-sufficient language of the commissioned compositions with choruses and arias from Verdi operas and surrender itself to unconsciousness as a dancing horde.

The 2025 Taschenopernfestival is supported by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.

Further information:
klang21.com

Dates

November 11 – 16, 2025
SZENE, Salzburg