Image: (APA/BARBARA GINDL)
Corresponding information from the APA was confirmed on Sunday by the new acting director Marina Davydova, the previous leading actor Michael Maertens and director Michael Sturminger.
“I was surprised and amazed by this decision, which was made without a single conversation with me,” said Maertens. He had a two-year contract and was also asked to play the “Everyman” role, which he played for the first time this year, in 2025 and 2026. That’s why he was taken aback when Davydova called him a few days ago to tell him that there would be a new director in 2024 and that it would rely on a new cast.
Shortly before the start of the Salzburg Festival, artistic director Markus Hinterhäuser answered in an APA interview whether the arrival of the new acting director could mean that 2023 would be the last year for Michael Sturminger’s “Everyman”: “No, about that “We don’t even talk.” Hinterhäuser did not want to comment on the matter to the APA on Sunday afternoon. Acting director Davydova confirmed the planned innovations to the APA and spoke of a “very difficult decision” that could not be made by one person alone. She did not want to provide any further information. “We will comment publicly on this in the very near future,” she said. An official statement from the Salzburg Festival on the matter has been requested.
According to Sturminger, the entire “Everyman” ensemble had already been personally invited by the new acting director via email in the summer for the coming year. “It was agreed that a production of ‘Everyman’ would under no circumstances be planned for a single season and therefore could not be offered to a well-known leading actor. Marina Davydova confirmed this to me at our first meeting in May and informed me in August after a joint visit to the performance that that she would like to perform our production with Michael Maertens until 2026. You can imagine that this invitation last Wednesday came out of the blue for all of us.”
As a reason, he had “heard very contradictory attempts at explanation from various people in charge, I don’t know of an official explanation,” Sturminger told the APA: “I’ve never experienced anything like that, but after seven years together, I would have liked a different kind of farewell .” He would of course “be happy to pass on the season, hopefully to a female director, but I wouldn’t have expected such disappointing circumstances.”
It is unclear whether the existing contract with Maertens could now be paid out and how verbal agreements that are not contractually fixed should be assessed. “It’s now a matter for the lawyers. Up to now I have always been able to rely on the quality of my partners’ handshakes. Apparently, important bodies have been lost in the board of directors of the Salzburg Festival in recent years,” said Sturminger. As far as he knows, festival president Kristina Hammer is currently in the USA, said Maertens. “I hope we can find a way after she returns.”
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Source: Nachrichten
