Photograph: Monika Rittershaus
St. Francis of Assisi is without doubt one of the most cited and common non secular figures of Western artwork and tradition. Often called “il Poverello” (“the little poor one”) and “Giullare di Dio” (“God’s jester”), Francis has additionally loved a wealthy historical past of commemoration in music together with Liszt, Piernè, Poulenc, Hindemith, and Malipiero.
Olivier Messiaen’s Saint François D’Assise is probably the most expansive Franciscan musical oeuvre. Premiered in 1983, Messiaen’s solely opera was impressed by Wagnerian epic scale—a Catholic apologia to Tristan and Parsifal—and French custom, significantly Pelléas et Mélisande’s colours and symbolism. The huge opera spans three acts that unfold over almost six-and-a-half hours (together with two beneficiant hour-long intermissions). Every of the eight tableaux is a sketch from Francis’s life, a collection of impressions moderately than a linear biography. Messiaen compiled the libretto himself, drawing from medieval sources such because the Little Flowers of St. Francis. Every act is framed by a miraculous climax: Francis overcoming doubt and kissing the leper; the Angel enabling his sermon to the birds; and, lastly, his stigmata, dying, and reception in heaven.
In a brand new manufacturing for the Salzburger Festpiele (a recording from the premiere is on the market on ORF till the tip of August), Romeo Castellucci focuses on the “extraordinarily radical” parts of the Poverello. Castellucci desires to maneuver away from the “deliberate amnesia” of the “official” Franciscan narrative handed down from the chronicles of Bonaventure that so captivated Messiaen. As an alternative, this counternarrative uncovers the “traces of scandal” in Francis’s biography, not but “Saint” in his personal lifetime however moderately on the arduous path to holiness. Castellucci notes how “Francis, within the Center Ages, discovers the [human] physique,” a discovery that, in flip, gave rise to the Renaissance and humanism. Castellucci reinforces this by inserting two temporary scenes from Francis’s biography not included within the libretto. In a silent prelude, Francis strips bare and rejects fashionable fashions regardless of his mother and father’ pleas. Earlier than his sermon to the birds, he additionally tames the Wolf of Gubbio, right here a visible nod to Joseph Beuys’s I Like America and America Likes Me, wherein the artist locked himself with a coyote for 3 days. These additions floor the manufacturing in Francis’s earthly metamorphosis—or maybe drug-induced psychosis. Total, nonetheless, Castellucci teeters between affirmation and provocation with respect to Messiaen’s Catholic magnum opus.
Photograph: Monika Rittershaus
Castellucci’s “radical” imaginative and prescient gestures in the direction of, however by no means totally embraces, a a lot darker imaginative and prescient of the title saint. Was Francis a cult chief or visionary? What’s the price of non secular and corporal sacrifice? Within the twentieth century alone, many reinterpretations challenged the gentler iconography even earlier than Messiaen’s compositional journey within the Seventies. British writer G.Ok. Chesterton famous in his 1923 St. Francis of Assisi that one can not cut back Francis to a good-natured eccentric of a bygone interval. The tales of his avian preaching and magnanimity are sometimes handled as “a type of sentimental sediment of the medieval world, as an alternative of being, because the saint emphatically is, a problem to the fashionable world. We should take his actual human improvement considerably extra significantly.” Since then, various cultural teams subsumed the Franciscan spirit for contemporary instances: as a protector of nature for environmental actions, as a 1968 hippie countercultural icon like in Franco Zeffirelli’s sensual Brother Solar, Sister Moon, and whilst a nationalist chief when named co-patron saint in 1939 in Mussolini’s Italy.
This interpretive range can be mirrored in Saint François D’Assise’s efficiency historical past. Whereas the 1983 Paris premiere (Seiji Ozawa conducting and José van Dam within the title position) bore Messiaen’s aesthetic imprint—trademark Franciscan brown robes and tonsures, Fra Angelico’s Annunciation-like multicolored angel wings, mystical lights—later productions took the work in different instructions. In 1992, only some months after Messiaen’s passing, Peter Sellars staged the work at Salzburg’s Felsenreitschule as nicely. Van Dam returned within the title position alongside Daybreak Upshaw as L’Ange with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the LA Philharmonic. Sellars’s tv monitor-heavy imaginative and prescient blurred the traces between the miraculous and the human: drawing on one other dimension of Giotto’s frescos, the physicality of the angels, right here the Angel was a hospital employee serving to the Leper. The 2002 US premiere in San Francisco, directed by Nicolas Brieger, had a winding staircase gesturing in the direction of the arduous path of salvation. For the Bayerische Staatsoper in 2011, provocateur motion artist Hermann Nitsch took the blood-soaked spectacle of Francis’s stigmata to an excessive. Extra just lately, George Delnon’s 2024 manufacturing on the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg discovered modern analogies, that includes movies of the NGO Sea-Watch volunteers serving to refugees.
The complicated and multilayered Franciscan legacy is due to this fact an opportune canvas for Castellucci, who brings an imaginative but cerebral imaginative and prescient to Messiaen’s “anti-opera.” It is a multisensory staging. Like in his 2021 Salzburg Don Giovanni, Castellucci’s signature iconography contains smoke and flames, rain showers, stay animals, and anachronistically fashionable expertise (wafting smells of monastic bread baked stay on stage in industrial ovens). Stark monochromatic units incorporate the Felsenreitschule’s distinctive stone arches, harkening to the rockface of La Verna the place Francis acquired his stigmata. Black-and-white robed dancers choreographed by Yasmine Hugonnet function monks, birds, and divine henchmen despatched to check Francis. The Italian director clearly admires Messiaen’s work—at one level “Je t’aime, Olivier, immense artiste” is projected on stage—however to ensure that the substantive moments in every tableau to keep away from popping out half-baked, Castellucci pushes again on and maybe even distorts Messiaen’s theology.
The staging is stuffed with deconstructed Christian imagery, decreased to primordial symbols: rainfall, flour, a sneaker, an orange. Even the cross is abstracted, from two easy traces on the theater curtain, to an enormous pillar that opens up the curtain, to a glowing beam that Francis lifts to obey Jesus’s “take up your cross and comply with me.” It could be exhausting to attempt to present a complete semiotic evaluation, however three key moments significantly stood out.
In Act 1, the Leper, miraculously healed by Francis’s sacrificial kiss, is a twin position: Georg Schwamberger performed a silent, frail aged man and Sean Panikkar sang as a part of a trio of angels. This Personenregie makes the divine component of the leper’s apparition (later revealed by the Angel in Act III) already obvious from the primary contact, whereas Panikkar’s white-robed angel alludes to the Trinitarian go to of the three strangers to Abraham in Genesis 18. Though dramaturg Christian Longchamp cites thinker Massimo Cacciari’s notion of Franciscan “hilaritas,” pleasure in gentle of profound struggling, right here the leper doesn’t dance with pleasure regardless of Messiaen’s directions within the libretto. The therapeutic is solely inner. As Francis dies in Act III, the roles reverse: the Leper reappears to wash the bare friar’s physique.
Act II reframes the Sermon to the Birds as a bleak sacrifice. A lifelong ornithologist, Messiaen was significantly drawn to Francis of Assisi as a result of each the saint and the composer acknowledged, as Castellucci explains, “birds as brothers, as musical brothers, whilst professors of music.” The anthropological and pure musical worlds are linked as “birds embodied music on planet Earth even earlier than the arrival of humankind.” But our fashionable instances have completely broken this relationship. Right here, Francis’s miracle of communication comes from the angels bloodily eradicating their wings. Reasonably than departing gracefully in 4 teams to kind the form of the cross, the birds as an alternative drop useless onto the stage with a thud. Behind them, a projection lists the numerous species notated by Messiaen which have since change into extinct. Our communication with nature, and thereby the divine, has been completely ruptured by ecocide.
Photograph: Monika Rittershaus
Echoes of Castellucci’s 2022 Resurrection in Aix, a setting of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, are traceable in Act III, because the darkish forces of God drag Francis by a big burial pit. As Francis lies within the grime, his black-robed brothers emerge from among the many group to announce his dying and bury a white fowl beside him. But because the celestial refrain proclaims the glory of God, Brother Léon locations his foot on Francis’s physique, and the brothers drag him out once more, his physique alone and bare. The white gentle famous in Messiaen’s rating is right here accompanied by smoke and sheep grazing on the crumbs of Act 1’s bread: is that this a crematorium and lambs going to the slaughter? Or are these the clouds of paradise and Francis’ completed mission tending to Jesus’s flock which eat the bread of life?
In his position debut, Philippe Sly proved to be a commanding Francis, a youthful timbre mixed with rugged depth. Sly’s embodiment of Il Poverello was a feat of unbelievable vocal and bodily stamina. In this system, Castellucci cites efficiency artists Chris Burden and Gina Pane, who blended non secular symbolism and bodily ache, in addition to Antonin Artaud and Jerzy Grotowski’s Theatre of Cruelty as inspirations for Sly’s excessive ordeals. This taxing position required deep focus, his voice by no means straining. As an alternative, Sly developed a hotter, extra rounded decrease register throughout the night as Francis accepts his harrowing tribulations with fervent submission.
Lauranne Oliva as L’Ange equally introduced an efficient dynamic and timbral vary: from ominously confronting the skeptical monks to offering divine consolation to the bleeding Francis. Oliva additionally carried out acrobatics, as in Act 2 the Angel emerges out of the large upside-down metropolis backdrop, Castellucci’s refined reference to Roland Penrose’s 1937 surrealist portray Seeing is believing (L’ile invisible) that impressed Messiaen’s song-cycle Harawi.
Panikkar’s Le Lépreux was neither grumbling nor weak, as an alternative providing a vivid timbre that introduced out the explicitly angelic characterization embedded in Castellucci’s Personenregie. The Franciscan brothers rounded off the forged with equal poise. Russell Braun conveyed a uncertain, although not meek, Frère Léon. Léo Vermot-Desroches’s Frère Massée offered firm through the sermon to the birds with a mellow tenor timbre. Whereas often coated by the orchestra through the moments of ecstatic birdsong, Vermot-Desroches’s lyricism demonstrated that he’s a singer on the rise for main roles sooner or later. A Saint François veteran from the SF Opera manufacturing, Willard White offered a comforting and authoritative Frère Bernard, a distinction to the whining exasperations of Aaron-Casey Gould’s uncertain Frère Élie.
Acoustically, the Felsenreitschule’s unusually vast stage provided the Vienna Philharmonic and Maxime Pascal a possibility to discover Messiaen’s kaleidoscopic rating: from the three ethereal digital ondes Martenot (performed antiphonally by Nathalie Overlook, Augustin Viard, and Cecile Lartigau) depicting the Angel’s viol, whose “sounds appear to come back from a number of factors within the horizon” to the 200 layers of birdsong within the avian sermon.
Conducting and not using a baton, Pascal led a skillful, although not significantly mellifluous, interpretation. In any case, Messiaen’s moments of elegant divinity are supposed to be unbearably candy moderately than saccharine romanticism; this isn’t Scriabin-like intoxication. Often tough across the edges when coordinating between percussion teams and the pit throughout the cavernous corridor, the Vienna Philharmonic nonetheless gave a assured rendition of a fiendishly troublesome rating. The huge however unseen Live performance Affiliation of the Vienna State Opera Refrain, led by Jozef Chabroň, was amplified offstage to significantly haunting impact in Act 3. In contrast to the nice and cozy French-infused sound of the Ozawa/Paris and Nagano/Hallé recordings, right here the orchestra and choir matched the starkness of Castellucci’s staging.
Photograph: Monika Rittershaus
This 12 months’s performances happen throughout a world “Franciscan Yr,” the 800th anniversary of the saint’s dying. The Catholic Church has proclaimed a particular Jubilee, publicly displaying his bones in Assisi for the primary time in historical past. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s authorities declared his upcoming October 4 feast day a nationwide vacation.
The political background has additionally struck a nerve on this manufacturing itself. As A.J. Goldmann has famous on these pages, the Salzburg Pageant is in an unsure interval of transition following the abrupt termination of inventive director Markus Hinterhäuser. Regardless of the turbulence, Hinterhäuser’s imprint stays seen at this summer season’s version, significantly this opera and the “Visions de Messiaen” live performance theme. Hinterhäuser’s determination to carry again Messiaen’s opera was a transparent nod to Gerard Mortier, Karajan’s successor as Intendant, and the watershed 1992 Sellars manufacturing. Even after his dismissal, Hinterhäuser has nonetheless made appearances this summer season, accompanying Matthias Goerne and becoming a member of Igor Levit for Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen for two pianos.
Furthermore, the Hinterhäuser-Castellucci partnership was a high-moment of his tenure with Salome, Don Giovanni, and Bluebeard’s Fortress/De temporum high-quality comoedia. Castellucci himself has publicly criticized the continued drama, noting within the interview with Longchamp (printed in this system ebook) that Hinterhäuser is a “sufferer now of petty politics that may arrogantly search to fetter tradition whereas missing the flexibility to know the implications.”
But Francis’s modern influence extends past institutional political ritual and drama. A 2025 article in The Atlantic dubbed Francis “the saint America wants now”: “Kindness has change into countercultural. Maybe Saint Francis may also help.” The Vatican just lately organized a Francis-themed “Canticle of Peace” occasion with Andrea Bocelli and his ABF Voices choir wherein Pope Leo XIV remarked: “music has the extraordinary capability to carry completely different voices collectively in unison … On this sense, the choir turns into a perfect image of concord and cooperation.” Messiaen actually believed that music might unite us and transcend divisiveness. Whether or not these values got here throughout in Castellucci’s enigmatic manufacturing is an open query.
