Easter Festival 2026 - 2030: A Ring and Schoenberg

Both works are the result of decades of work on the part of their respective composers. Both composers, moreover, shaped or devised every one of their aspects from their genesis to their first performance, in other words, their texts, their music and their staging. Each in his own way rethought the music of his age and both were rightly regarded as innovators and even as revolutionaries, Wagner with his concept of leitmotifs that replaced the formal conventions that had previously held sway in the world of opera, and Schoenberg with his system of twelve-note music, a system that held the musical material together in the densest imaginable manner.

At the time that Wagner and Schoenberg conceived their works, the world was in a state of turmoil and out of joint. Wagner was implicated in the democratic and nationalist movements that swept across Germany in the 1830s and 1840s and more specifically in the revolutionary uprisings of 1848 and 1849. He also witnessed at first hand the failure of the Frankfurt National Assembly. His observations led him to conclude that the state as an institution was beyond repair and needed to be reinvented, and he expressed these thoughts in a stage work that was initially conceived as a single stand-alone music drama, only for the narrative to expand until it finally embraced four separate works drawing on German heroic legend in the form of the »Lay of the Nibelungs« and on the »Edda« and the »Saga of the Volsungs« of the Old Norse tradition.

For Schoenberg, the catastrophe of the First World War, the culture wars of the Weimar Republic and the rise of open anti-Semitism in the ostensibly civilized world of the 1920s were decisive factors in driving him back to his Jewish faith and encouraging him to champion the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine, while expressing his convictions and his doubts in the artistic form of a great opera. The polyphonic textures of his colourful twelve-note technique, which can be experienced by listeners as a newfound richness of the voices was as if tailor-made for this work. »Moses und Aron« depicts the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt but revolves round the idea of the question of the modern Jewish identity. The ban on graven images leads to the irreconcilable clash between the theory of the idea and the problems of putting that idea into practice. This clash is personified in two prototypical politicians, Moses and Aaron. Moses is powerless to deal with the slippery power politics of his brother, and that impotence finds expression in the discrepancy between the idea and its realization. The last line that Schoenberg set before his monumental but fragmentary composition breaks off is: »O word, thou word, that I lack!«

Both the »Ring« and »Moses und Aron«describe worlds whose intellectual and spiritual foundations have been shattered or are destroyed in the course of the piece. Both composers longed for a new world order, a new society and a new type of state whose members would be guided by spiritual and emotional concerns. Both works were intended to inspire their audiences to think AND to believe, clothing their arguments in mythical or Biblical tales that may climax in dramatic situations such as the Dance Around the Golden Calf. Their ideas are expounded at length, while at the same time using music to appeal to our emotions and also to our subconscious.

The first performances of the complete »Ring« cycle in Bayreuth in 1876 introduced their audiences to a new kind of libretto, a new way of setting the words and a new type of music drama. The result is a parable of human civilization and an exemplary family drama that tells the story of the origins of historicity and warns of the danger of destroying nature. Lasting a total of sixteen hours, this monumental music drama is impossible to reduce to a simple narrative structure, which is why every production must focus on certain aspects and allow each generation to find its own point of access. The fact that we are now especially exercised by our interaction with the world of nature needs no explanation or justification and it is equally obvious that a work in which laws and power rest on the destruction of a tree – the World Ash Tree – that symbolizes the whole of nature is almost literally predestined to set us thinking.

The idea of using treaties and contracts to impose order on the world and the power required to put this idea into practice are linked to a particular symbol in »Das Rheingold«. This symbol is the spear that Wotan hews from a branch of the World Ash Tree. His laws are carved into the spear by means of runes. In this way the spear is a record of the constitution and at the same time the instrument that may have to be used to force acceptance of that constitution. But this flash of inspiration on Wotan’s part brings with it its own burden of guilt: ever since the branch was cut from the World Ash Tree, the tree has begun to die. Wotan later becomes entangled in the toils of the dishonest treaty that he signs with the giants, but this is by no means the beginning of his problems: the fate of the world over which he rules has hung in the balance ever since he committed this first act of despoliation. He is more closely related to us than we care to think.

The »Ring des Nibelungen« will be staged by the director Kirill Serebrennikov, who is arguably the most musical and at the same time one of the most original and uncompromising opera directors of the present day, a man whose head is teeming with ideas. He sees our age in general as being reflected in this great work, an age that veers between extremes, between disaster and upswing and between impending catastrophe and inspirational hope. In keeping with his vision, the inhabitants of a post-apocalyptic age seek new ideas and new ideals. On the ruins of a world that has been destroyed they build a new life for themselves. Forgotten rules have to be reformulated and the brutality of the belief that »might is right« needs to be curtailed by a new set of regulations. Here Serebrennikov means literally everyone: the world’s most disparate cultures will all play a role in his narrative and find their way into a myth that Wagner himself invented by synthesizing a number of different epic poems. In the course of the tetralogy audiences will find examples, inter alia, of the traditional theatre art of Indonesia, wayang kulit, or shadow puppetry.

For Serebrennikov and his team sustainability is essential – far beyond any fashionable slogans. His idea of an interpretation of the »Ring« that is appropriate to our own times presupposes that something new can be created on the ruins of a world that has been annihilated. A phoenix can rise from the ashes and a new religion can spring up on the basis of the fragments of obsolete ideologies.

In staging the »Ring«, the director will be working with the Recycle Art Group, a collective at whose heart are two Russian artists now living in Paris, Andrey Blokhin and Georgy Kuznetsov. Like computer experts they work their way through various forms of cultural and visual “software” that have accumulated and formed a solid layer on the hardware of our collective consciousness, and they try to identify incompatible »programmes« and prevent these programmes from stopping each other from working. They may be said to examine contemporary culture through an archaeologist’s lens, an experiment inspired by their concern about the growing amount of waste material that is a by-product of our behaviour as consumers.

This new chapter in the history of the Salzburg Easter Festival will begin next year, 2026, with »Das Rheingold« described by Wagner himself as the cycle’s »preliminary evening« After completing »Das Rheingold«, Wagner went on to compose the music of »Die Walküre« and »Siegfried«, only to break off his work on this last-named piece approximately halfway through it and not return to it until the following decade. By the same token the Salzburg Easter Festival will be interrupting its staging of the »Ring« by presenting »Moses und Aron« in a production that both contrasts with and complements Wagner’s cycle of music dramas. As a result this new »Ring« will extend over five, not four, Easter Festivals.