Opera is back with the summer festivals of Salzburg, Bayreuth, and Aix-en-Provence, but it’s as bleak as Mozart’s Requiem

Why does the opening of the summer classical-music season in Europe feel so troubling? The stately festivals in Salzburg, Bayreuth, Munich, and Aix-en-Provence have apparently presented a series of new operatic productions of profound darkness and hopelessness, even when the intent of the composers—Mozart and Wagner, in this case—was to project resolution and uplift.

You might think this has something to do with the pandemic, but that would not explain a long European tradition of provocative stagings of the classics, one that began in the 1950s and might be oxymoronically described as “the institutional avant-garde.”