Il viaggio a Reims - Salzburg Festival 2026 - Il viaggio a Reims - Salzburger Festspiele 2026, Barrie Kosky

Description

Revival of Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims at the 2026 Salzburg Festival.

Created in 1825 as an occasional piece to celebrate the coronation of Charles X, Il viaggio a Reims long remained a rarity, almost a ghostly presence, before fully reclaiming its place on the stage. Today, the work is a fixture of major opera houses, and the Salzburg Whitsun Festival presented a new production in May 2026, directed by Barrie Kosky. From August 5 to 16 of that same year, the production returns to the Salzburg Summer Festival at the Haus für Mozart as a celebration of the spirit, a carnival of voices and masks where Rossini transforms the act of waiting into something dazzling.

The production’s charm stems first and foremost from the very nature of the work. Rossini gathers a gallery of characters from across Europe, all stranded in a provincial hotel for lack of horses to reach Reims. This seemingly trivial premise becomes, in the composer’s hands, a theatrical laboratory: sensibilities sharpen, flirtations intensify, jealousies intertwine, and high-society socializing transforms into a comic machine. The plot is pared down to a minimum, making way for a rarer kind of energy: the pulse of inner movement, overflowing emotions, blazing ensembles, and music that seems to take command of the stage itself.

Entrusted to Barrie Kosky, a director known for his inventive exuberance, the production takes on the air of a visual fantasy that plays with contrasts. Everything here evokes the concept of “theater within a theater,” delightful excess, and the knowing, cultured wink. After all, is Rossini himself not one of the great poets of lighthearted vertigo – of laughter dancing on the edge of the abyss? Barrie Kosky seems to have grasped that Il viaggio a Reims is not merely a ceremonial comedy, but a joyful meditation on togetherness – on being stuck in the same place, driven by contradictory and incompatible desires, yet brought into harmony by the music.

In Salzburg, Barrie Kosky’s staging also embraces the work’s understated modernity. Beneath the apparent lightness lie themes of waiting, impeded mobility, caricatured national identities, the desire to leave, and the impossibility of doing so. The line quoted in the program note (“we talk endlessly of leaving, yet here we remain”) could almost serve as a motto for our times. Beneath the parody lies a mirror. Rossini, and Kosky alongside him, act as clear-eyed, playful observers, transforming the world into a makeshift hotel lobby where everyone plays their part while simultaneously revealing their own fragility.

At the pit, Gianluca Capuano must steer this score much like a troop of horsemen at full gallop. Rossini demands near-acrobatic precision, a collective sense of breathing, and an energy that tolerates neither slackness nor self-indulgence. The festival’s program notes highlight the richness of the ensemble pieces – particularly the famous grand concertato for fourteen voices, a pinnacle of vocal engineering and dramatic exuberance. One can already envision the crisp clarity, brilliant pulse, and theatrical momentum such a work demands – especially in a venue like the Haus für Mozart stage, where intimacy and brilliance can play off one another.

The cast features performers who make this production a vocal tour de force. Cecilia Bartoli, in the role of Corinna, is naturally one of its symbolic cornerstones; Alongside her, Marina Viotti, Mélissa Petit, Tara Erraught, Edgardo Rocha, Dmitry Korchak, Ildebrando D'Arcangelo, and Florian Sempey form a constellation of personalities capable of bringing Rossini’s virtuosity to life as an art of character rather than a mere stylistic exercise. Surrounding them, the Monte-Carlo Opera Chorus and Les Musiciens du Prince - Monaco in the pit provide the essential collective depth for this operatic celebration.

The Salzburg production thus promises a dual experience: a show of pure pleasure and a subtle reflection on social theatre – a total immersion in Rossini’s art, where virtuosity is never divorced from humanity. Il viaggio a Reims at the 2026 Salzburg Festival promises a celebration of musical intelligence and theatrical delight: a work that exists in the spaces between – between travel and stillness, satire and tenderness, precision machinery and intoxication. And when the world seems at a standstill, the music keeps flowing.

Further information is available on the Festival’s official website.