Photograph: Monika Rittershaus
The 2026 Competition d’Aix-en-Provence arrived in a interval of retrenchment and transition, with fewer new productions than in some latest seasons. Aix’s creative director, Pierre Audi died immediately in spring 2025 on the age of 67. Ted Huffman, his American successor, newly in place, is implementing Audi’s 2026 plans and a part of the 2027 version earlier than growing his personal imaginative and prescient from 2028 onward.
The 4 staged works I noticed through the opening days organized themselves right into a tough diptych. On one facet stood life-affirming operas in regards to the will to wrestle and persevere: Die Frau ohne Schatten and Die Zauberflöte. On the opposite had been two works about endings and leave-taking: a revival of Romeo Castellucci’s ritualization of Mozart’s Requiem, first staged right here in 2019, and the world premiere of Francesco Filidei’s chamber opera Accabadora.
To make sure, life and demise are porous classes. Vitality saved breaking into the works about endings, simply as intimations of mortality entered probably the most life-affirming items. Strauss’s fairy story opera is stuffed with magical transformations and dislocations: a white gazelle that turns into a girl; an emperor who turns to stone; a shadow that loosens itself from the physique of a poor girl. Mozart’s fantastical singspiel is both allegorical or nonsensical relying in your perspective. It ends with the triumph of affection and purpose, however alongside the best way characters ponder rape, homicide, and suicide. Castellucci’s Requiem, for all its catalogues of extinction, turned out to be probably the most bracingly alive issues I’ve seen from the Italian director. Accabadora, a couple of girl who performs mercy killings in a Sardinian village and her adopted daughter, can also be a coming-of-age fable and story of emancipation.
The plain spotlight of this yr’s competition was Barrie Kosky’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, performed by Klaus Mäkelä, who turns into chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in September 2027. Frau provides a director a surplus of which means after which dares him to not drown in it. Its symbolic equipment is so overstocked {that a} manufacturing can spend all night unpacking it and nonetheless by no means find its pulse. Kosky, to his credit score, trusted the opera’s weirdness. He didn’t tidy it up or flip it right into a psychiatric file with orchestral interludes.
Photograph: Monika Rittershaus
From the primary picture, Kosky made Nina Stemme’s Amme the determine by means of whose gaze, or consciousness, the opera unfolded. Seated in her rocking chair, she appeared to name the story into being and lingered at its margins even through the uncommon stretches when she had nothing to sing. The likelihood remained that the entire fairy story was hers to inform – or to dream.
Michael Levine’s set was dominated by a black dice that descended from above, swallowing and releasing our bodies and objects like a prime hat or field from which a magician may produce a rabbit — or a corpse. The Emperor rode a colossal rocking horse poised over a curved blade, with slaughtered deer under him. Barak’s home was a cluttered assemblage of scaffolding, buckets, rags, and pans. Keikobad, the Empress’s silent father, appeared as an outsized porcelain doll’s head, as surreal and disquieting as a drawing by Roland Topor. A dancer in a glittery black leotard slipped by means of the motion as each an erotic apparition and a personification of the sought-after shadow.
Kosky interpreted Hofmannsthal’s libretto as not narrowly involved with fertility; the director didn’t a lot erase the reproductive plot as make room for different resonances. Recalling Chamisso’s story of Peter Schlemihl, the shadow turned a visual mark of human belonging. The Empress’s dedication to not barter in shadows meant refusing to buy her humanity on the expense of one other’s distress. Kosky’s most conspicuous revision got here on the finish of Act II. As a substitute of responding to her husband’s threats of violence with newfound ardor and devotion, the Färberin did what any trendy girl would do: assault the bastard with the closest hammer. It was a deeply satisfying inversion that match the rating completely, even because it reduce towards the grain of the libretto.
Performances of Frau stay comparatively uncommon due to its huge technical, orchestral, and vocal calls for. My very own attachment to the work started with the Metropolitan Opera’s 2001 manufacturing, directed by Herbert Wernicke and performed by Christian Thielemann.
In 2001, I had not too long ago gotten into the behavior of scoring standing-room tickets ($16, if reminiscence serves) to something and all the pieces on the Met. The night was one in every of a handful of performances that helped decide the course of my life. I bear in mind leaning towards the again row of the orchestra in utter stupefaction, questioning what in God’s title this gigantic, ravishing, deranged factor was and why I had wanted to achieve the ripe age of 15 to find that opera could possibly be this overpowering and luxurious. Since then, Frau has been one of many few items (together with Lulu) that I’ll journey nice distances to see.
These days, Frau is usually handled as an orchestral luxurious good, all polish and expense. (That was the dismaying impression left by Thielemann’s latest performances in Vienna and Zubin Mehta’s in Berlin.) Mäkelä ensured that the night by no means turned a shower of Straussian fragrance. The Orchestre de Paris saved revealing the rating’s joints: the concertante exchanges between voice and instrument; the small instrumental commentaries that appear to hearken to and reply the singers; the mournful cello solo through the Emperor’s nice Act II scena; and the violin meditation previous the Empress’s confession earlier than Keikobad in Act III.
Mäkelä understood that the human voice in Frau is usually much less a melody positioned above the orchestra than one other good instrument inside an unusually wealthy chamber texture. His tempi could possibly be daring. Some stretches had been held again to the sting of stillness, as within the Empress’s resolute farewell to the Amme close to the beginning of Act III. These suspended moments, coupled with Kosky’s exceptionally delicate Personenregie, made the opera’s dream-time palpable: the characters appeared trapped inside slowly churning equipment that might at any second flip lethal. The performing version assembled for Aix puzzled me in the very best means. Mäkelä wrote in this system that it retained lots of the cuts Karl Böhm made with Strauss’s approval, but I can not bear in mind listening to a stay efficiency that sounded extra full.
Photograph: Monika Rittershaus
Aix assembled an enviable solid with one knockout efficiency. Ambur Braid’s Färberin had the amplitude, metal, and nerve for the position, but additionally the desolation. Her voice reduce by means of the orchestra with thrilling safety, and he or she appeared dramatically alive in each bar. The half did one thing related for Christine Goerke within the Met’s 2013–14 revival; Braid’s tour de power gave the identical sense of a performer seizing this towering position with utter conviction. Although nobody else onstage matched Braid’s white-hot depth, all of the performances benefited enormously from Kosky’s dramatically refined and nuanced path, which included phrases and phrases that had been barked out, whispered, or screamed.
Stemme, a veteran Amme, is aware of the best way to flip the character’s limitless arioso into rousing theater with Sprechstimme-like instructions, threats issued between clenched tooth and sudden eruptions of vocal extravagance. Vida Miknevičiūtė’s Empress took longer to steer me. At first, her voice sounded too steely, too firmly planted within the human world, for a determine who begins as an ethereal creature. The position ideally desires a gleam that may counsel each fragility and distance. But because the Empress gained ethical weight over the course of the opera, Miknevičiūtė’s full-bodied, even lusty, depth felt earned. By the ultimate Act, her hovering, frankly hochdramatisch singing was deeply transferring.
Michael Spyres, who not too long ago wowed within the Met’s latest Tristan, sang the Emperor with magnificence and the Aristocracy, although the half didn’t appear an ideal match. Strauss’s most interesting tenor position asks for heroic altitude with lyric poise. Spyres’s sound was often too weighty, with some patchiness within the uncovered writing. Nonetheless, he lent the character dignity, no small feat in a job that’s almost a psychological clean. Brian Mulligan’s Barak was the weak hyperlink among the many principals. He sang thoughtfully and with clear musical intelligence, however the voice lacked the darkish, burnished middle and weight the position wants. Barak ought to anchor the mortal world. Mulligan supplied sympathy in spades, however not sufficient gravity.
Photograph: Jean-Louis Fernandez
If Frau was the competition’s triumph, Clément Cogitore’s Die Zauberflöte, staged on the out of doors Théâtre de l’Archevêché, was its most exasperating failure. There was a transparent logic to inserting the 2 works on the identical program: Strauss and Hofmannsthal modeled their Märchenoper on Mozart’s earlier one.
Cogitore, a French video and multimedia artist, approached Zauberflöte as a reckoning with the ethical and historic legacy of the West because the finish of World Conflict II. Tamino and Pamina had been doubled by baby and adolescent actors, figures of innocence trapped within the nightmare of historical past. For higher or worse (and principally for worse), projected video carried a lot of the manufacturing’s burden: An limitless montage of archival footage confirmed cities of rubble slowly being rebuilt and the triumph of the American lifestyle alongside anti-Black racism and late Twentieth-century and early Twenty first-century wars and calamities.
Zauberflöte is, on one stage no less than, about enlightenment and initiation. But the ethics of the piece is way from easy. The Queen of the Evening — a transparent progenitor of Strauss’s Amme — lurks in ethical ambiguity. The opera asks us to simply accept on religion that Sarastro is an enlightened chief fairly than merely a misogynist tyrant. There was, then, a sure logic to utilizing the piece to meditate on the darkish facet of rationality and the dialectic of Enlightenment. Sadly, the severity overwhelmed an opera that’s typically simply plain foolish. Any director who approaches Zauberflöte wants to permit solemnity to rub up towards nonsense.
For some time, the kid doubles, who delivered the spoken textual content in adorably high-pitched voices, helped. Tamino, one of many stiffest characters in opera, gained vulnerability; Pamina’s struggling appeared related to the phobia of studying what sort of world adults had ready for her. The Three Boys made sense as witnesses from the ruins fairly than ornamental cherubs. However Cogitore saved barraging the viewers with archival footage that provided commentary fairly than transferring the manufacturing ahead.
The musical facet was one other matter. Leonardo García-Alarcón and Cappella Mediterranea performed with magnificence, elevate, and an ear for chamber-scale element. The outstanding glockenspiel and harpsichord gave their studying a zing that the onstage motion sorely lacked. One of many manufacturing’s few jokes was musical: Sarastro’s ceremonial motif recurred as a ringtone throughout a sequence of telephone calls throughout which Tamino and Pamina’s destiny was mentioned with unseen interlocutors. The concept was not particularly deep, however on this ponderously Sebaldian Zauberflöte any comedian reduction was welcome.
The solid rescued a lot of the night. Ying Fang’s Pamina was beautiful: pearly, poised and delicate. Her melting, aching “Ach, ich fühl’s” had time-stopping depth. Mauro Peter was a good-looking and succesful Tamino, singing with sturdy, versatile tones. Sabine Devieilhe’s Queen of the Evening was wild, eccentric, and adored by the viewers. Brindley Sherratt introduced old-school authority to Sarastro, right here imagined as blind. Sean Michael Plumb’s Papageno had allure, ease, and a boisterousness that appeared out of tune with nearly all the pieces else in Cogitore’s manufacturing.
A number of nights later, the ruins projected throughout Zauberflöte gave approach to full-scale annihilation in Mozart’s Requiem, additionally staged on the Théâtre de l’Archevêché. Castellucci’s well-travelled manufacturing is an intricately conceived, masterfully executed meditation on the ceremonies and rituals by means of which people reply to the ache and thriller of demise.
The manufacturing begins with a girl close to the tip of life and expands outward till her departure turns into a planetary stock of vanishings. The names of extinct animals, languages, locations, peoples, and civilizations are patiently projected onstage. The staging piles loss upon loss till Mozart’s funeral mass appears to be sung for the cosmos.
That description makes the night sound grueling and bleak. It was not. Castellucci will be extreme, and a few of his work trades in a smooth, trendy pessimism. This Requiem, in contrast, was stuffed with our bodies in movement and coloration in bloom. Dancers, choristers, folks costumes, youngsters, flowers, ritual objects, processions: The stage saved producing types of life even because the manufacturing recorded their disappearance. Loss of life was all over the place, however so had been human invention and pleasure. Flowers, our bodies, voices, gestures, and even the theater itself appeared as short-term concentrations of vitality, stunning as a result of they had been transitory. Castellucci treats dissolution and entropy as processes that awaken and ignite our creativity. We make music, costumes, rites, and dances as a result of all the pieces will, sometime, vanish.
Raphaël Pichon and Pygmalion, an ensemble comprising orchestra and refrain, made Mozart’s unfinished rating, supplemented on this 95-minute association by numerous different Mozart works, plainchant, and German chorales, really feel like an natural entire. The taking part in was refined and forceful, with spectacular transparency and self-discipline. Mélissa Petit, Beth Taylor, Duke Kim, and Alex Rosen fashioned a robust vocal quartet, however the choral singing carried the night’s bodily and religious weight. In this system, Castellucci writes of performers exhausted like supernovae on the finish of the piece, and the picture felt apt.
Silvia Costa, Castellucci’s assistant on the unique manufacturing, deserves credit score for the revival’s precision and vitality. Recreating Castellucci can simply turn into a matter of preserving cryptic photos underneath glass. Right here the staging had rigor in addition to heat, and the choreography of our bodies and objects felt freshly inhabited.
The up to date atlas of vanished or endangered locations included websites destroyed in Gaza and southern Lebanon, which can have prompted the lone however very vociferous boo on the curtain name. The ultimate projected title, a memorial to Audi, was additionally deeply transferring. What had been one of many main successes of his tenure now returned as a tribute and farewell.
Photograph: Jean-Louis Fernandez
If Castellucci’s Requiem attracts particular person mortality outward towards the extinction of cultures and species, Francesco Filidei’s Accabadora brings demise again to the bedside. Tailored from Michela Murgia’s novel, the opera follows Tzia Bonaria Urrai, a Sardinian seamstress known as on to finish the struggling of the dying, and Maria, the adopted daughter who discovers Bonaria’s vocation and recoils from it.
Filidei’s earlier opera was a large-scale adaptation of Umberto Eco’s The Identify of the Rose that had its world premiere at La Scala in 2025. Accabadora is an 80-minute work scored for 17 gamers; Lucie Leguay led members of the Orchestre de l’Opéra de Lyon in a exact however considerably chilly efficiency. Filidei creates a finely graded chamber texture from harmonics, tremolos, and flickering dynamics. Harp, accordion, celesta, and bells give the ensemble a few of its most distinctive colours; the Sardinian identification enters most forcefully by means of the evocative choral writing. A lot of the solo vocal music stays near inflected speech, holding the Italian textual content unusually intelligible whereas additionally constraining lyrical growth. An offstage male ensemble evokes cantu a tenore, whereas a extra nakedly expressive feminine refrain involves the fore in an prolonged lament on the opera’s midpoint.
Filidei writes in this system that he conceived of the refrain as a second orchestra, however its uneven distribution all through the piece signifies that it not often determines the work’s musical syntax. This folkloristic music, sung in Sardinian, opens a rougher, extra resonant house. I wanted it had been extra absolutely absorbed into the rating. So lots of the surrounding scenes developed by means of curiously colorless recitative and ostinatos.
I loved Accabadora rather more within the radio broadcast, the place I might deal with Filidei’s attentiveness to sonority and proportion, and on the friction between particular person and collective voices. With out Valentina Carrasco’s engaging however static staging earlier than me, Filidei’s management of timbre and instrumentation turned simpler to admire. Within the theater, the bread baking, looms, and grapevines descending for the vendemmia produced prettified photos of village labor that remained stubbornly undramatic — and troubling of their romanticization of rural poverty. The path of the singers was typically broad and awkward, leaving Noa Frenkel and Rachel Masclet, the accabadora and her adopted daughter, to provide emotional definition missing from the manufacturing. Frenkel however lent Bonaria weight and focus, whereas Masclet channeled Maria’s youth and openness.
Photograph: Jean-Louis Fernandez
Accabadora was staged on the 493-seat Théâtre du Jeu de Paume, an 18th-century Italian-style theater that has hosted the competition’s previous chamber operas. Given the competition’s monetary constraints, smaller-scale works like these will probably turn into extra vital sooner or later. Aix is hardly alone find that although creative plans are made years forward, manufacturing prices refuse to face nonetheless whereas subsidies and sponsorship are removed from assured. However the competition’s personal place is especially delicate.
A regional audit protecting 2014–20 had already described the competition’s financial mannequin as fragile. Beneath Audi, who ran the competition from 2018 to 2025, Aix pursued a bigger and costlier program whereas counting on sponsorship that proved much less reliable than projected. A mixed €4.4 million shortfall for 2023 and 2024 led to €1.6 million in repayable emergency public assist, and the €23.1 million funds for 2026 is 16 p.c under the 2023 stage. Future tasks are prone to be scaled again as Aix repairs its funds. All that makes chamber opera greater than a cost-effective sideline. Works similar to Accabadora permit Aix to maintain new opera an important a part of the competition with out assuming the fee – or the chance – of a large-scale world premiere. No matter modifications Huffman makes to Aix, I hope that new chamber opera stays a part of the competition’s identification.
On its opening weekend, Aix appeared much less like a competition in mourning than one pondering each its inheritance and its future. Frau and Zauberflöte requested how individuals turn into absolutely human by means of schooling, initiation, trial, and temptation. Requiem and Accabadora requested how we meet our inevitable finish: by means of reminiscence and ritual, by means of naming and being named. In Audi’s remaining absolutely deliberate Aix, opera turned what it has all the time been at its strangest and strongest: a medium the place the dwelling sing within the presence of the lifeless.
