Director Peter Sellars in Salzburg
“The nightmare in America has been running for a long time”
14.08.2025 by Bernhard Neuhoff
It is one of the most influential opera directors of the past 40 years. At the Salzburg Festival, he was celebrated for one evening with Schönberg and Mahler. Peter Sellars tells how politics and spirituality shape his work and life in the big BR classic interview.
Image source: Picture Alliance/dpa | Julian Stratenschulte
BR-KLASSIK: At the age of ten you started at a puppet theater in your hometown Pittsburgh. How did you get?
Peter Sellars: The dolls are a world of miracles. You can fly there. Everything is transformation, incredibly pretty and nice and at the same time strange and frightening. The “Lovelace Marionette Theater” in Pittsburgh also made a production for adults every year. At that time, puppet theater was avant -garde. It was an intoxicating time, a world that looked hallucinatory. The Lovelace Theater was just a small dandruff, but there were dolls and masks from all over the world: India, Indonesia, Brazil. If you play with dolls, you have to learn to do everything yourself. You carve the wood, paint the stage design, write the text. You are totally involved in every aspect of the theater. And if you play on the street five times a day, you will learn how to make it that passers -by not only stop, but also put a dollar in your hat.
Bach thinks in pictures.
Regiser Peter Selllars
Music by Bach: Picture language in sounds
BR-KLASSIK: Your theater is often ritual. They love to stage spiritual works, such as the cantatas and passions of Bach. What did she get to do?
Director Peter Sellars | Image source: picture-alliance/ dpa | Hans_Klaus_Techt
Peter Sellars: Bach thinks in pictures. A Bach cantata tells you as a story how you win the fight with yourself. You think you are alone, but you are not alone because the oboe accompanies you. You can face your demons, your crises. And it is often about how to die – in a beautiful way. I staged “I have enough” with Lorraine Hunt. This wonderful singer fought against breast cancer for many years. When we brought this to the stage, it was very real how this ritual could respond to her suffering. Bach is about more than theater: In a ritual you don’t just say pretty things, you do it – with your body. What does it mean to live these words? Really with your own body in the footprints of Jesus? Here, with this foot – put it there. And the other foot – there! And stay in motion. That is the plot at Bach.
More on the subject
Everything about the Salzburg Festival 2025 can be found here.
Fuel as a source of inspiration for Peter Sellars
BR-KLASSIK: Are you a believing person?
Peter Sellars: I worked with many spiritual traditions, stream or tibetan Buddhism. Spiritual practice, especially those at the highest level, crosses geographical and cultural boundaries. And that’s why you often understand when you move in a Japanese or Chinese context what Bach is about. We are the first generation to live in all of these world parts at the same time. We can have friends – everywhere. Be in real dialogue with other cultural universes. It is very stimulating not only to look at western culture with western eyes.
BR-KLASSIK: Global networking is a huge opportunity. But what do we make of it? It seems more like there is more division than ever …
Peter Sellars: No, the beauty is still there. People let the bad news go crazy. There is more beauty in the world than you can ever imagine. How many flowers does a single fruit tree have? Now, at that moment, mothers are fighting their families without any money. With incredible courage, incredible strength. In these nightmare times, so many people do beautiful, needy, friendly things. That is the reality of this world. Not the stupidity we see everywhere. It will destroy itself that never survives. She collapses in her own cruelty. What remains is every flowering fruit tree, every mother who feeds her child. We should see that we should celebrate that.
Everything is political.
Regiser Peter Selllars
BR-KLASSIK: But sometimes you have to fight for it.
Peter Sellars: I would not say: fight, but: make an effort. Everything that is worth doing it is difficult. That’s why we play difficult music. And because it is so difficult, you have to find forces that don’t know that you have them. Can have courage that you did not know about, endurance that you didn’t know about. You have to find something brilliant that you had never seen before. And that you only find if you challenge yourself. The world challenges us every day. And in return we have to challenge them.
She might also be interested
At this year’s Salzburg Festival, director Peter Sellars for “One Morning Turns Into an Eternity” put together the short opera “expectation” by Arnold Schönberg and the last sentence from Mahler’s “song from the earth”. Read here our criticism.
BR-KLASSIK: Is there anything that shouldn’t say as a director to a singer or actor?
Peter Sellars: Never say anything negative. Never. For no person. You don’t say to an actor: Hey, you stumbled across a chair. Nobody wants to stumble across a chair. You don’t have to talk about it. The stupid thing is: if you talk about something negative, it will be stuck. On the other hand, if you talk about the positive alternative, you are moving towards something new. Everyone prefers to discover something new instead of getting stuck in a mistake. If you have a better idea, say it. And if not, just be quiet.
Peter Sellars with Mahler and Schönberg in Salzburg
BR-KLASSIK: Here In Salzburg you have a double evening staged with Schönberg’s “expectation” and the final from Mahler’s “song from the earth”. It’s about farewell, but also about politics: two officials drag a corpse bag in – apparently someone was killed on the state mandate …
Peter Sellars’ “One Morning Turns Into an Eternity” at the Salzburg Festival 2025 | Image source: SF / Ruth Walz
Peter Sellars: It is said that the female role in Schönberg’s “expectation” is influenced by the discussion about hysteria at that time. But what Freud said about the hysteria of women is just ridiculous. Today we know that the patients, about whom Freud writes in his “studies on hysteria”, were systematically abused. Women are not hysterical. You go through real trauma. This is not an exaggerated answer, but the appropriate, exactly correct answer. If you have illegally killed people in Afghanistan and then collapse your system, it shows that you as a person gave the right answer. Then you have a real awareness, then you show that you feel and think. And deep. And in Schönberg’s music these are very deep feelings. This is not insane, that’s clarity. Take your feelings true, live with them. And that’s why “expectation” is not about a woman who screams panicked in the dark, but at a moment of realization: that reality itself is a terrible dream. And the same thing happened in Gustav Mahler in 1909. At Schönberg, the tonality collapses, and Mahler is “Morendo” on every page. Everything dies. The ideas, the hope, the memories – everything disappears. This is sad on one level, heartbreaking – and on another level it is a liberation.
In Schönberg’s music there are very deep feelings.
Regiser Peter Selllars
The entire interview to listen
Following the broadcast of “My Music” with Peter Sellars on August 16 from 11:05 a.m., you can listen to the shipment in the BR Radio app for seven days. The other radio program from BR-Klassik is also available there. You can find the web player here.
Peter Sellars: Bring questions about justice on stage
BR-KLASSIK: But how about these judicial officers? Isn’t that politically understandable?
Peter Sellars: Everything is political. Yes. And we cannot avoid the question of justice. There are simply higher powers who say to us humans: Please, please, please – create justice! Thirst for justice, necessity of justice – that’s what music is about. She needs the right decision. Can you hear the woodwinds, even if they play strings? Everything revolves around the right balance, the balance. You have to understand how the orchestra works together. This is only possible through attention for others, because every victim makes for the whole thing. That is our work.
BR-KLASSIK: Is this artistic work looking for justice in the USA at the moment particularly difficult?
Peter Sellars: Nothing is simple. What is happening in America is terrible. The years 1933 and 1938 are associated in Germany and so on. But in fact these things have been happening for some time. It is not the case that Mr. Trump can simply implement all of this in 15 minutes. The nightmare of these mass displays started long before. I’m sorry to say that, but Mr. Obama was our “chief deporter”. He had more people deported than every president in the history of the United States. The nightmare is that we have to live with ourselves. We have to look in the mirror and ask ourselves: Is it human what we do? No, it is not – for a long time.
Necessity of justice – that’s what music is about.
Regiser Peter Selllars
Now we have to put ourselves and recognize where we did: to a degree of moral blindness that allows us to accept things that have never been acceptable. These new laws that are decided every day! That it is illegal to give people food who suffer hunger. You can get into prison because you give people food. Will we get over it? Or be another society that destroys itself? Nobody is powerful enough to destroy us – besides ourselves. And that’s why for me Bach, Chopin, Schönberg and Mahler are so important – all of these pieces have a moral intensity, a moral middle that challenges us. We have to listen very carefully to this music.
The interview led Bernhard Neuhoff
Broadcast: “My music” on August 16, 2025 from 11:05 a.m. On BR classic
