Reviews for Ulrich Rasche’s ‘landmark’ Maria Stuarda
Ulrich Rasche’s new production of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda at Salzburg Festival has impressed reviewers as a ‘hypnotic’, ‘landmark’ performance
‘At the Großes Festspielhaus, Maria Stuarda became a gripping Gesamtkunstwerk. At the Salzburg Festival, Ulrich Rasche keeps the few characters of Gaetano Donizetti’s tragedia lirica – about the 1587 execution of Mary Stuart – in constant physical motion and under unrelenting psychological tension. The director’s trademark approach – building systemic parables out of movement and emotion – proves strikingly effective...
‘The emotions of the two leading characters are rendered tangibly through their bodies and strictly rehearsed movement patterns. Rasche has created a Gesamtkunstwerk equal in intensity, imagery and concentrated density to the late Robert Wilson. That the Vienna State Opera Chorus sings from backstage – thus contributing “only” atmospherically to what is not concretely seen – heightens the already charged tension of Donizetti’s here-fascinatingly compressed opera...
‘All in all, it was a weighty and imposing evening, one in which Donizetti’s queenly drama achieved a level of intensity approaching that of Verdi’s far more complex Don Carlo. The Salzburg production has every chance of becoming a landmark in the performance history of Maria Stuarda.’
‘The windmills Ulrich Rasche weaves in our minds in his production of Maria Stuarda at the Salzburg Festival take manifest form in the set itself. The Großes Festspielhaus stage houses two enormous discs, like clocks, which manoeuvre and tilt, orbiting each other slowly, while a third hovers above them like the sun, source of light and video...
‘Clockfaces representing the relentless passage of time; the machinery representing the ‘brutal mechanisms of politics and violence’; the rigid treadmill movement standing for bel canto’s formalism; the notion that each queen is – in her own way – trapped. Each of these ideas are cited in the programme book. On paper, much of this reads pretentiously. In practice, however, it works effectively, if noisily (the hydraulics hiss and whirr). Gradually, the viewer is mesmerised by the slow, hypnotic movements, drawn into the plot’s intricate web.’
‘Rasche has created a visually virtuosic Gesamtkunstwerk, in which music becomes movement, and every element – action, song, design – fuses into a single organic flow. Each dimension translates into the others; nothing stands still. The result is a great, inescapable motion that sweeps along performers and audience alike, as well as the queens themselves, who are as trapped in this endless cycle as they are its agents.’
‘Director Ulrich Rasche has devised a “theatre of reduction” for these murderous emotional entanglements – showing individuals as prisoners of a power structure that they both shape and are deformed by. In the Großes Festspielhaus, no clanking 16th-century armour is heard (only the occasional rumble of stage machinery). Rasche avoids contemporary political allusions and even keeps the formidable Vienna State Opera Chorus hidden from view... Instead he creates a strongly atmospheric, abstract stage space in which Elisabetta and Maria, revolving endlessly on circular platforms, are transformed into sculpted figures of hatred and suffering. It is a theatre of walking and turning, in which the states of the two adversaries are expressed through stylised movement. Above them, a third disk hovers: like a celestial body emitting changing colors, it sometimes becomes a screen on which Maria, in black-and-white video, is shown surrounded by men – depicted in slow motion and open to many interpretations.’
‘Director Ulrich Rasche is famous – and notorious – for his revolving platforms. In Salzburg, he has now turned his attention to Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, with results that both narrow the scope of the drama and strip it of bel canto cliché...
‘Rasche has long insisted that his performers remain in constant motion, marching on his slowly spinning carousels for the entire evening. He imposed the same physical demands on Hofmannsthal’s Elektra in Munich. Now, at Salzburg, he ventures for the third time into opera staging—of all things with a bel canto score, a genre absent from the Festival’s main stage for generations. The result is a production both monumental and ritualistic, but also strangely remote...
‘Rasche’s revolving architecture exerts a hypnotic pull. Slowly and inexorably, the discs glide across the vast stage of the Großes Festspielhaus, while a third disc overhead provides a canvas for projections and colored light. Singers emerge from swirling fog like figures in an ancient rite. The effect is archaic, monumental, incantatory.’
Maria Stuarda continues at Salzburg Festival until 30 August and is available to watch on Mezzo.tv until 1 October and on ORF in Austria until 27 January 2026
