In Milo Rau’s first opera treatment, Emperor Tito’s well-wishing commitment degenerates into a strategy of sheer self-preservation, an empty revolutionary platitude. Together with eighteen people who live in Vienna and have partly themselves experienced repressive regimes, the Camerata Salzburg (directed by Thomas Hengelbrock) and the Arnold Schoenberg Choir, Rau undertakes an actualisation of Mozart’s last opera. While crowds of displaced persons are eking out their existence in a trailer park ghetto outside of the palace walls, the social elite are celebrating their own benevolence. Is it possible for political art to change the world? Or does it, in fact, only reinforce the status quo? The Festwochen artistic director’s controversial Mozart interpretation calls convenient social commitment into question while at the same time paying homage to the people of Vienna.
