“Gateway drug to opera” at the Tillysburg Castle Festival

From July 4, artistic director Nikolaus Büchel will be offering his audiences a “really gateway drug to opera” to the sounds of Mozart at Tillysburg Castle near St. Florian: “The Drama Director – Brings Figaro” is the Austrian premiere and his direction takes Mozart’s one-act play as the starting point for a play within a play in German.

Mozart’s fragment contains only 20 minutes of music, but a somewhat questionable avalanche of text. This is why Büchel and Solveig Palm have written a new libretto about a theater director who takes on too much by wanting to stage Mozart’s “Figaro”. The music in the piece draws on treasures from Mozart’s opera as well as from “Cosi fan tutte”, which have been newly translated and edited.

As a comedy, the libretto explores “catastrophes of vanity and inattention,” but also the reality of theater life, including its “latent danger of the precariat,” says Büchel. The question of the social value of theater is also raised: “Nobody would think of saying that a school is subsidized. Although everyone knows that it is publicly funded. The glue that holds society together after the loss of religion and belief in science could be culture.”

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