Passion (Concert performance)

Collegiate Church, Salzburg, Austria

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8:30 PM

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US$ 101

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Ticket delivery: E-Tickets

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You can only select the category, and not the exact seats.
If you order 2 or 3 tickets: your seats will be next to each other.
If you order 4 or more tickets: your seats will be next to each other, or, if this is not possible, we will provide a combination of groups of seats (at least in pairs, for example 2+2 or 2+3).

Important Info

Festival: Salzburg Festival Summer 2026

Type: Opera in Concert

City: Salzburg, Austria

Starts at: 20:30

Ticket delivery: E-Tickets

E-tickets: Print at home or at the box office of the event if so specified. You will find more information in your booking confirmation email.

Can I choose my seats?

Cast

Performers

Conductor: Franck Ollu

Ensemble: Ensemble Modern

Baritone: Georg Nigl

Soprano: Sarah Aristidou

Ensemble: Schola Heidelberg

Creators

Composer: Pascal Dusapin

Festival

Salzburg Festival Summer 2026

The Salzburg Festival Summer 2026 invites you into a world where music, theatre, and emotion merge into one unforgettable cultural journey. From July 17 to August 30, 2026, the baroque city of Salzburg becomes a living stage, hosting more than a hundred performances across historic venues, where every evening feels like a premiere of beauty itself.

Overview

Simply She and He – ‘Lei’ and ‘Lui’ – is what the composer Pascal Dusapin called the two solo roles in his opera Passion, and yet the characters of Orpheus and Eurydice echo in them like a distant memory. Numerous issues occupied Dusapin when he was planning this, his sixth music theatre work – such as whether Orpheus consciously looks back at Eurydice on his return from the Underworld because he has realized how much her disappearance and the pain of his loss have in fact inspired him as an artist. These questions led him to make significant changes to the myth. In Dusapin, the woman is not sacrificed like Eurydice: here, she refuses to follow the man, and neither does he return to the land of the living.

First performed in 2008, this opera develops as a dialogue of a couple moving between rapprochement and estrangement. It is structured in ten interlocking sections, to each of which Dusapin gave the same title as to the work as a whole: Passion. He had long been considering a project whose central topic would be the musical expression of ‘passions of the soul’. When the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence commissioned Dusapin in 2005 to compose a stage work that engaged with the three surviving operas by Claudio Monteverdi, he immediately thought of the immense importance that this operatic pioneer had assigned to expressing emotions and affects. Accordingly, he decided to combine this commission with his ‘passions’ project.

Thus, Lei and Lui find themselves in an uninterrupted flow of shifting mental states. ‘Their passions’, says the composer, ‘overlap, collide and divide into a multitude of different paths marked by fear, joy, pain, terror, desire, delight, sorrow, love and anger’. Dusapin’s score makes subtle references to Monteverdi and the Baroque, yet he creates a sound world all of his own. This is music that radiates a calm tension, hypnotic power and austere beauty.

Christian Arseni

Translation: Chris Walton

Venue Info

Collegiate Church - Salzburg
Universitätspl. 1

The Kollegienkirche (Collegiate Church) in Salzburg, Austria, is the church of the University of Salzburg. It was built in Baroque style by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach. Dedicated to the Immaculate Conception, it is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site Historic Centre of Salzburg. It is now both the parish church of people connected to the university and a venue of the Salzburg Festival.

The building is the church of the University of Salzburg, located at the Universitätsplatz (University square). Bishop Paris von Lodron planned a university church on the location of the former Frauengarten, instead of using the Aula (main auditorium) for church services of the university. While two successors were not able to realise the plan, Johann Ernst von Thun succeeded as part of his plan to develop Salzburg in Baroque style. The building by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach was begun in 1694. In 1707, it was dedicated to the Immaculate Conception, which is celebrated on 8 December, a national holiday in Austria. It is believed that Mozart's Missa brevis in D Minor, K. 65, was commissioned by the church and premiered on 4 February 1769.

During the occupation by Napoleon, the church was used as storage. After the university was dissolved, it served as a garrison church. In 1922, the Salzburg Festival performed there the premiere of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Das Salzburger große Welttheater, directed by Max Reinhardt. In 1969, Emilio de' Cavalieri's Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo was presented in an arrangement by Bernhard Paumgartner. The church has been a regular venue of the festival since the 1970s. In 2008, Salvatore Sciarrino's opera Luci mie traditrici was staged by Rebecca Horn.

The church was returned to its original status as a university church in 1964. On 18 May 2008, it was designated the parish church for a parish named Universitätspfarrsprengel, serving people connected to the university. The building has been restored in the 21st century, beginning with the apse, which was completed in 2010. Most of the other restoration was completed in 2013.

The church is a listed monument and part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site Historic Centre of Salzburg.

Important Info

Festival: Salzburg Festival Summer 2026

Type: Opera in Concert

City: Salzburg, Austria

Starts at: 20:30

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