The great quartet that is the spiritual summit and human crucible of Idomeneo equalizes parents and children, men and women, rulers and citizens, haves and have nots, entitled native-born and refugees. Mozart’s brilliant and liberating act was to take this intellectual construct from church music and instrumental music and apply it to social and personal relationships in his operas. Some of these Greeks would spend 20 years trying to reach their homes again and others perished in the waves and became food for fish. ![]() The victors turned from the bloody beaches of Troy, stepped into their ships to go home, and set sail, and the ocean said “Stop right there.” The victors’ ships were destroyed and in those shipwrecks, their hubris and their egos. Idomeneo is based on Greek mythology, on references in the Iliad and the Odyssey which describe the ocean’s response to the Greek armies who were so proud of their victory at the end of the long, brutal, and ultimately pointless Trojan War. Mozart wrote his music for the ocean in a landlocked country, feeling the ocean as a physical force, a cosmic force, and a magnetic moral presence. We are beings containing oceans of love, oceans of hurt, oceans of knowledge, oceans of longing, oceans of remorse, oceans of compassion, oceans of joy, and oceans of hope ebbing and flowing in violent and calm weather patterns that move through the human heart, in the blood that runs through our limbs and our lives. More than half of every human being is water, and the emotion that surges through our minds and our bodies is also fathomless. ![]() Covering 70% of the earth’s surface, and the planet’s life support system, the vast ocean systems sustaining our planet generate weather, food, mystery, beauty, and hold unfathomed depths that mirror the human soul, the subconscious realms of human dream, memory, and imagination. The waves are breaking, alive, seething, teeming with infinite life. His visionary, overwhelming, and still unfinished opera was a challenge to its first audiences and remains a challenge to us today. Tonight we open the 99th Salzburg Festival with Idomeneo, an opera written by a very brilliant, very angry, and very impatient 24-year old named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. ![]() Peter Sellars (Eröffnungsredner der Salzburger Festspiele 2019)
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