Cecilia Bartoli announces opera and ballet for Salzburg Whitsun Festival 2026
‘Travel’ is the theme chosen by Artistic Director Cecilia Bartoli for the Salzburg Whitsun Festival 2026, which runs from 22 to 25 May. After the city-themed festivals of recent years, when select places of relevance for music history were the focus of attention, she invites the audience to Salzburg this year under the motto “Bon Voyage”. The festival ” illuminates sea travel, expeditions of discovery, but also fateful journeys” and opens with Gioacchino Rossini‘s Il Viaggio à Reims, in which a travelling party fails to arrive at its destination due to bizarre complications. The programme also includes the Hamburg Ballet with John Neumeier‘s The Little Mermaid.
Bartoli says:
For freelance artists, travel is a way of life: Today, travel is often a commodity, but travelling slowly is a luxury. Your body may move fast, but it recovers at its own pace, and your mind needs even longer to get to grips with fresh surroundings.
During Rossini’s lifetime, the speed at which people moved about increased tremendously due to modern achievements such as the railways. Being the astute man that he was, Rossini integrated some of these developments into his works from very early on. In Il viaggio a Reims, for instance, he plays with the craze of the upper classes for travelling across Europe.
As a creative artist I have always been driven by an unending curiosity about composers, musicians and what has surrounded them. And I feel very lucky that this urge has not diminished in recent decades: constantly fuelling oneself with new input generates ideas, maintains creativity and drives one forward personally as well as artistically. Stagnation, conversely, leads to fossilization and death. In my mind, a sustainable artistic career – be it long or short – is an adventurous journey full of ups and downs, surprising turns, wonders and dangers. Don’t worry about being carried away to unknown shores, but do not hesitate to revisit familiar places either! New experiences make you reassess well-known things from a different, enriched perspective.
I love Rossini’s music, but I also admire his personality, his humour, his joie de vivre. Rossini fills me with perpetual excitement and wonder, while his oeuvre still contains plenty of repertory for me to discover. And thus 2026 will see me make my debut as the famous Roman poetess and improviser Corinna in Il viaggio a Reims. For me, the farcical storyline of this merry piece contains novel twists, the work’s emergence is one of the curiosities of opera history, while its performance history resembles an initially fraught but ultimately successful voyage, culminating now in a frolicsome production at the Salzburg Whitsun Festival. Remembering the enthusiastically applauded collaboration between Barrie Kosky and Gianluca Capuano in 2025, we can expect another joyful and memorable offering from them, once more thrillingly accompanied by Les Musiciens du Prince on period instruments.
Il viaggio a Reims is actually perfect for this Festival: it radiates historical significance, and its artistic challenges are on a par with many of Salzburg’s legendary past theatrical achievements and (why not…?) dazzling glamour.
Gianluca Capuano conducts Les Musiciens du Prince and the chorus of the Opéra de Monte-Carlo in Il Viaggio à Reims with a cast that includes Cecilia Bartoli, Marina Viotti, Mélissa Petit, Tara Erraught, Edgardo Rocha, Dmitry Korchak and Ildebrando D’Arcangelo. Director Barrie Kosky says of his new production:
A group of people come together, they’re stuck in a hotel – perfect for comedy. We’ve seen that in Feydeau, we’ve seen that in Buñuel. When a group of people are stuck somewhere, crazy shit happens. And in a way, that was my starting point for the production. To think, okay, what the opera gives for a director is amazing possibilities, because I can invent another story, because there’s hardly any story in the actual opera. And in the case of this production, I always smelt that there has to be something Feydeauesque about it. Georges Feydeau is one of my favorite playwrights. He’s, of course, later than Rossini. He came after Rossini at the end of the 19th century. But Feydeau was really one of the instigators of what developed in the 20th century as slapstick. Feydeau invented this form of farce, this form of incredibly fast entrances and exits, of slapstick, of sexuality and slapstick – because this is always the interesting combination of people in uncompromising positions, of lovers being discovered, of people having rendezvous in hotel rooms. This is all this world that Feydeau developed that you then see in the Marx Brothers and you see in other forms of comedy.
What I hope to achieve, the production is a sort of delirium. A delirium of music, because Rossini’s Italian comic music is the music of delirium. Of course, it’s got lovely cantabile sections, and there’s some beautiful sections, but the overall feeling is a world almost spinning out of control. Like Offenbach. It’s exactly like Offenbach. And I think, of course, that’s a present for a director like me!
Other events include John Neumeier’s ballet The Little Mermaid, Monteverdi’s opera Il ritorno d’Ulisse with Carlo Colla & Figli’s marionettes, and Davide Livermore directs a semi-staged opera gala with Cecilia Bartoli & Friends called Voyage de ma vie. Bartoli says:
Guided by Davide Livermore and his crew, I will take you on a journey through my own life and career in a specially designed staged gala concert on Sunday evening, where we will illustrate the variety of wonderful music and musicians which I have been lucky to encounter on my journey.
Subscriptions are available immediately; individual tickets go on sale on 19 January 2026.
Ticket Office of the Salzburg Festival:
Wiener-Philharmoniker-Gasse 3, 5020 Salzburg, Austria
Tel. +43 662 8045 500 info@salzburgfestival.at
Graham Spicer, aka ‘Gramilano’, is a writer, director and photographer based in Milan. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy. His articles have appeared in various publications from Woman’s Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the Danza in Italia column for Dancing Times magazine. Graham was the historical advisor on Codice Carla, the 2023 documentary on Carla Fracci.
Graham also works as a dance photographer, and his photos have appeared in many books, theatre programmes, and magazines, including Dancing Times, Dance Spirit and Ballet2000, as well as all the major Italian newspapers.
He is a member of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle.
