Director
19 February 1932, Paris, France - 11 August 1988, Munich (collapsed while rehearsing at the Salzburg Festival)
Jean-Pierre Ponnelle is the director whose visual world defined what Mozart looked like at the Salzburg Festival for a generation. Working with Karl Bohm and Karajan from the late 1960s through the 1980s, his productions were filmed and broadcast worldwide, and they are what most people picture when they think of Salzburg Mozart.
Ponnelle came to opera with the training of a visual artist. He had studied philosophy and art history at the Sorbonne and taken painting lessons from Fernand Léger, and those influences are visible in his work: a concern with the picture as a whole, with how light falls and how architecture frames a figure. When he began directing, he also designed his own sets. The result was an unusual coherence: the visual language and the dramatic language came from the same person.
His breakthrough at the Salzburg Festival came in 1968 with Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, conducted by a young Claudio Abbado. The production was a success, and it opened twenty years of work in Salzburg. Over that period he staged the complete Mozart da Ponte cycle and other operas in collaboration with Karl Bohm and Karajan, the two conductors most associated with Salzburg’s peak period.
The productions he made with Böhm in particular, Le nozze di Figaro, Così fan tutte, Don Giovanni, La clemenza di Tito, were filmed for television and broadcast internationally. This is why Ponnelle’s work matters beyond opera specialists: the filmed versions reached millions of people who had never been to Salzburg, and they fixed a particular visual image of Mozart in the popular consciousness. The costumes, the lighting, the staging of that era are still what many people see when they hear those operas.
He collapsed during rehearsals at the Felsenreitschule in August 1988 and died in Munich the same day. The Salzburg Festival held a memorial gathering for him that year. He had spent twenty years building, piece by piece, the visual identity that the Festival still trades on.
On the map
The 3 places on this page, where they actually stand.
Locations
Built 1693
The Felsenreitschule is a theater carved directly into the Moenchsberg cliff face, which means the backstage wall is living rock and three tiers of 17th-century arcades form the auditorium. It was originally built in 1693 as a summer riding school for the Archbishop's horses.
Completed 1960
The Grosses Festspielhaus (Large Festival Hall) opened in 1960 as a major expansion of Salzburg's Festspielhaus complex, carved in large part from the Moenchsberg cliff face to achieve its 2,179-seat auditorium. Architect Clemens Holzmeister cut the main stage directly into the rock, creating one of the widest stages in the world at 100 meters.
Renamed 2006
Formerly the Kleines Festspielhaus, renamed "Haus für Mozart" in 2006 after major renovation. Primarily used for Mozart operas during the Salzburg Festival. Acoustically designed for the scale and intimacy of Mozart's operatic works.
Organizations
One of the world's most prestigious performing arts festivals. Held annually late July to end of August. Founded 1920 by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Max Reinhardt, Richard Strauss, Franz Schalk, and Alfred Roller. Inaugural event: Jedermann on Domplatz. Herbert von Karajan defined the postwar era. Opera, drama, concerts.
