Leading a Revolt in Mozart Country

The Salzburg Festival ended Sunday, with the last performances of its nine major opera productions, four plays and countless orchestral and chamber music concerts, recitals and new music events. It is the world’s most prestigious music festival, and it is presented in a jewel-box Baroque town at the foot of the Alps.

But the next day Gerard Mortier, the director of the Salzburg Festival since 1992, was on a plane to a place he really loves. In a typically provocative gesture, Mortier flees Salzburg every year the day after his festival ends and heads for California.

“There is an open-minded attitude [there],” he confessed in a meeting shortly before the festival’s end. “And nobody knows me.”

A great many people, of course, recognize this controversial 53-year-old Belgian in Europe. His picture is common in the press every summer, since every summer he seems to go a step further in revolutionizing a festival long regarded as the guardian of musical tradition in the very center of Mozart country.

“I like to change things,” he cheerfully announced. And change things he has. Avant-garde operatic productions and new music are the new calling card of Salzburg. Moreover, Californians are now a common sight at the festival. Peter Sellars and Esa-Pekka Salonen are symbolic of the new Salzburg. Composers Terry Riley and John Adams, the Kronos Quartet and the Los Angeles Philharmonic have all had a role in it as well.

In fact, Mortier displays an unpretentiousness that immediately stands out in a world of proper Austrian formality. At a meeting in his office he was wearing jeans, and he offered coffee, joking that since Nestle is a sponsor, he had a lot of it. The day was warm; the window was open; and horse hoofs clattered on cobblestones below (carriages are popular with tourists), emphasizing how little some things had changed since Mozart was born here.

But Mortier talked only of the future, not the past, of new operas and music theater works he was commissioning, of new symphonies, of ferrying the festival into the 21st century.

Which is not to say that he has undone all tradition in Salzburg. The hidebound (if excellent) Vienna Philharmonic remains in residence each summer, and it still plays Schubert and Schumann and Mahler under the likes of Riccardo Muti, Seiji Ozawa and Bernard Haitink. But it is not, for Mortier, the sacred cow it long has been in Salzburg.

“You know, for me,” he said, “nothing is holy, the way the orchestra is to the Viennese. It is my feeling that all the 19th century musical institutions have to rethink their commitment for the future.”

No one better represents this future for Mortier than Sellars, whom he calls “a great mentor.” Sellars this year was responsible for three Salzburg events. He directed a penetrating new production of Gyorgy Ligeti’s modern opera “Le Grand Macabre,” which Salonen conducted; he created a theatrical version of a Bach cantata for Dawn Upshaw; and he read John Cage’s 1949 “Lecture on Nothing.”

Mortier even went so far as to make Sellars something of a festival poster boy, sending out a mailer with a photograph of Sellars (taken by Betty Freeman, the Beverly Hills arts patron and close friend and supporter of Mortier) seated in his L.A. backyard, smiling the same smile as his nearby white cat. The caption (in German) read, “Peter Sellars invites you to the high points of the Salzburg Festival.” Inside was a ticket order form for the Ligeti, for Robert Wilson’s stunning realization of Debussy’s “Pelleas et Melisande” and other selected events (including a couple of Vienna Philharmonic programs).

“Peter has been with me since my first year here,” Mortier said. “Peter doesn’t really like it in Salzburg. He thinks it’s racist, and, of course, he’s right. But it is only interesting for me to be here if I can have the artists I adore--Bob Wilson, Simon Rattle, Esa-Pekka and [conductor] Sylvain Cambreling--around me.”

Actually, Mortier needs his circle and his allies. His revolution hasn’t happened without resistance--from the Viennese press, old-guard patrons, local businesses all horrified by some of the experimental and avant-garde “high points” in the brochure. The attacks can even turn personal.

“They are always writing about me as ‘the Belgian,’ as if a Belgian is something you must be careful of,” Mortier complained. His first summer here, a sign appeared under a statue of Mozart in the center of town that read “Belgian go home.”

It is not hard to understand why. Not only does Mortier foist the late 20th century upon Mozart’s birthplace, but he foists it upon Mozart as well. This summer’s “Magic Flute,” directed by German artist Achim Freyer, transformed all the characters into clowns in a cosmic circus.

And then there was “The Abduction From the Seraglio,” in which a Palestinian director, Francois Abou Salem, relocated the Turkish comedy to today’s very unfunny Middle East and ended it with whirling dervishes.

Predictably, there was an uproar. The booing was reportedly deafening the first night of the “Flute” production. But Mortier took it all in stride. “They are upset, because you don’t see the arcades and all else that is traditional,” he said with a smile and a shrug. “But that’s fine. They come anyway and buy the tickets.”

The Salzburg Festival was founded in 1920 to serve Mozart opera in a very different way, with the emphasis on singing and conducting, often with casts that are now legendary. It was a festival the Nazis happily inherited, and Hitler maintained a mountain retreat nearby. Later, the festival took its direction from Herbert von Karajan, the perfectionist and dictatorial conductor who made Salzburg the summer headquarters for Europe’s powerful cultural jet-setters and the classical music establishment.

Since there was no succeeding Karajan after his death in 1989, the board of directors chose to remake the festival altogether. And it turned this time to a non-musician who had done something similar on a smaller scale at the Thea^tre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, which Mortier made into a world center for postmodern opera and dance, including commissioning John Adams’ second opera, “The Death of Klinghoffer,” and inviting the Mark Morris Dance Company to be resident ensemble.

Mortier, however, proved not just a wild avant-gardist who helped gain international attention for Belgium, he was a wild avant-gardist who sold tickets. In 10 years, he increased the Monnaie subscription sevenfold, regularly selling out 12 performances of his productions.

That same box-office magic has worked in Salzburg, which is clearly one secret to his survival. This year’s festival boasts a record quarter-million tickets sold (for opera, tickets ranged from about $80 to $325). But John Rockwell, the director of the Lincoln Center Festival and a former music critic for the New York Times, points out that Mortier is also an impressive political animal.

“He is no mild-mannered lad undone by controversy,” Rockwell observes. “He’s got to be utterly shrewd in his ability to work his way through the treacherous shoals of Viennese cultural politics and to cultivate a sympathetic press outside of Austria.” While Rockwell says he doesn’t always share Mortier’s tastes, he applauds him for “his role in changing central European tastes in music. If Salzburg focuses its attention on new work, the rest of Europe cannot help but notice.”

This summer Mortier announced, however, that 10 years is enough, and he will stay in Salzburg only through 2001. And rumor has it that Mortier may next have his sights set on Los Angeles, perhaps as successor to Ernest Fleischmann, the retiring general manager of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and maybe to run the L.A. Opera as well, were Peter Hemmings to leave.

Mortier denied the rumor. But that doesn’t seem to stop him from California dreaming.

“Were I to come to America,” he said, “it would be the West Coast, and probably Los Angeles, because for me that is where the most is happening. If I could work together with Esa-Pekka and Peter [Sellars] and with some filmmakers, you know, that could interest me.”

In particular, Mortier finds Los Angeles’ operatic resources untapped. “Why not have David Lynch do an opera just in Los Angeles? Or Jim Jarmusch? It is my feeling that it would be easier to convince these directors to do things in Los Angeles than to come over to Europe. And not one ticket less would be sold. Maybe more.

“I think it is only a question of courage.”

Courage, of course, is not something Mortier lacks. He has just commissioned new operas for Salzburg from three generations of composers (Luciano Berio, Kaija Saariaho and 26-year-old Matthias Pintscher). He has convinced New York art-film director Hal Hartley to try his hand at music theater. He is talking to Robert Wilson and David Bowie about a collaboration. And he has turned to Philip Glass for a millennial symphony.

“So,” he said, “I feel a little bit like a missionary in Salzburg. Maybe I am even a little bit of a Peter Sellars type myself.”