Worn-out clogs and hiking boots, a 700-year-old breviary and a reliquaried finger of St Elisabeth: to contemplate these objects, in a wing of the Archbishop’s Palace in Salzburg, put on show in an exhibition to mark 800 years since the death of St Francis, is to reflect on the ordinary and humble yet strange and difficult nature of a life given in service to God.
Five minutes away, on the stage of the Felsenreitschule, a new production of Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise brings us face to face with the transcendental paradox of such a life in all its dirt and holiness. Messiaen wasn’t interested in dirt, he said, but the director Romeo Castellucci certainly is. Praying to receive the wounds of Christ on his own body, Francis appears to be digging his own grave at the start of Act 3’s Stigmata scene, and Castellucci-watchers will think back to his hypnotic, archeological staging of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony at Festival d’Aix in 2022. The holy wounds are inflicted not by divine laser beam but a crowd of black-clad figures who rise from the earth and beat him up.
Castellucci demands suffering on the part of his actors and singers, over and above the months of patient work required to learn and rehearse their parts in an extravagantly complex opera. In the first scene, as Francis extols the virtues of the mendicant life, he and his followers stand in a pouring storm. To pick the bones out of a show abundant in such symbols, their literal or spiritual fidelity to Messiaen, or to the Franciscan virtues of poverty and humility, challenges the conditions of an overnight review.
“I love you, Olivier, immense artist,” reads the projection at the close of Scene 5, after the Angel has given Francis a taste of paradise in music. I believe Castellucci here, in his disarmingly sincere show of ego, and Act 1 in particular is touched with respect both for the score and the religious mind that created it. Rather than kneeling at prayer in the Lauds scene, the brothers bake bread, in one of several inspired translations of religious action which fulfil Brother Leo’s hope, for the invisible to be made visible. What it costs to buy and adapt two professional bread ovens, to be wheeled on stage and then fill the Felsenreitschule with the aroma of baked goodness as the loaves are taken out at the close of the first act, only heaven and the Salzburg Festival’s accountants know.
In the opera’s most musically intricate scene, of Francis preaching to the birds, Castellucci delivers his own sermon on environmental collapse. As the saint catalogues the wondrous variety of birdsong, flocks of birds drop from the flies, dead or still twitching in animatronic distress. Such striking imagery will land according to the distinct sympathies of each witness.
Castellucci only lost me at the end, where sheep wandered across the empty earth-covered stage, Francis’ body left slumped at the back, while the marvellous chorus of the Wiener Staatsoper were still hidden away, behind the rock wall of the Felsenreitschule, where they had sung their hearts out all evening. Messiaen and the performers deserved better than so dismally bathetic a reward for their efforts. “It takes a tremendous effort to overturn the way you see,” remarks the director in a booklet conversation. “But when you do, you find beauty everywhere, because it’s all to do with inner vision.” Maybe I could do with new inner spectacles.
So it was that the conductor Maxime Pascal could not achieve the overpowering crescendo demanded by Messiaen on the opera’s final chord. Louder and longer as his handling of that chord had been in Bucharest, at the 2023 Enescu Festival, Pascal now had the Vienna Philharmonic at his disposal, as well as (presumably) more lavishly appointed rehearsal time. What we lost in the last degree of transparency, from the vast instrumental forces filling the enormous pit (most opera houses can only fit them on the stage itself), we gained in a buttery glow and bass-rich tone which felt true to at least the baked-in excess of the work. Stationed above the main orchestra on side stages, the battery of percussionists blended almost too smoothly with their colleagues.
In the title role, Philippe Sly set out with commanding vocal authority. His pitch and diction stayed the course, his tone and stamina less so, leaving his farewell speech all too believably weak. Lauranne Oliva's Angel rang out with wider vibrato than other exponents of the role, but she pitched its tricky expressive tessitura well, gentle and graceful with the Leper, headstrong and defiant with the brothers.
The warm legato of Sean Panikkar’s Leper compensated for his studied French, while the lesser brothers were all well taken. Russell Braun sang an unusually assertive Frère León, and Sir Willard While contributed a marvellous cameo as Frère Bernard, both voice and stage presence still inimitable. Pascal and the orchestra won the evening’s loudest cheers, deservedly so.
