Hochmair will play “Everyman” and Carsen will direct

In Salzburg he recently celebrated a great success at the Whitsun Festival in 2021 with Handel’s oratorio “Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno”. The production was taken over by the Salzburg Festival. The title role of Everyman should bring a reunion with Philipp Hochmair.

Hochmair stood in for Tobias Moretti, who was ill, at very short notice in five performances in 2018 and was celebrated for a brilliant performance. He has been familiar with the Everyman material since 2013 at the latest. His rock version “Everyman (reloaded)” was created for the Young Directors Project in Salzburg. With the band “Die Elektrohand Gottes” he has already performed in many places in this version, in which he embodies almost all the roles himself – even in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna.

Director Robert Carsen staged Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Salzburg Festival in 2004, but has also left his mark with several productions at the Theater an der Wien – for example with a triumphant “Platee” by Jean-Philippe Rameau in 2014 or three Years later with Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck”. In 2005 he staged “Manon Lescaut” at the Vienna State Opera and the Verdi opera “Troubadour” on the lake stage in Bregenz.

He worked much less frequently in the spoken theater sector. He staged Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” at the Comédie-Française and “Mother Courage and Her Children” at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan. “My style is to have no style. My job is to build bridges between the audience and the work,” Carsen once said in an APA interview. “Every piece is different. I try to work in such a way that the work tells me what it wants – even if that sounds a bit strange. I try to get so close to the pieces that their inner structure is revealed to me.” Probably also a good approach for the “everyman”.

After the turbulence surrounding the rejection of the 2023 team, director Markus Hinterhäuser recently said in an ORF interview that he already knew about the new constellation of “Everyman”. The Salzburg Festival officially said that details of the new production in 2024 “will be announced in due course.” Acting director Marina Davydova could not be reached for comment on Thursday afternoon.