According to the VIAS collective agreement, young professionals in Vienna currently receive EUR 9.94 gross per hour, i.e. EUR 1722 gross for 40 hours per week. After 16 years of service it is then 11.40 euros gross per hour. Vienna Airport counters that employees have an average hourly wage of 13.45 euros when allowances and bonuses are taken into account. In addition, since June there has been an annual profit sharing of 500 euros per employee. In addition, a higher salary was decided from January.
Tag:
Salzburg
Suspicion as early as 2013 – student abused: display apparently lost
written by Alexandra Hartman Editor-in-Chief
Club: “Nobody approached us”
When asked regarding this, Philipp Schrangl, member of the board and legal adviser to the association, explained that they had never been aware of the advertisement at the time. “Nobody approached us. Otherwise we would have done everything in 2013 to clear up the incidents,” emphasized Schrangl in an interview with APA. He also regretted not having known anything regarding possible accomplices of the educator until the very end: “To this day we do not know whether any accomplices worked as supervisors for us or not.”
July 31, 2022
Stop the circus! In 2018 Lydia Steier caused veritable opposition with her production of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” at the Salzburg Festival, not least thanks to an overloaded circus aesthetic. This was only four years ago – and yet it seems like from another world, before war, before a pandemic. Festival director Markus Hinterhäuser has now given Steier the chance to revise her direction. And since Saturday evening it has been clear: it was worth it.
Steier manages to condense her sometimes exuberant work from 2018, in which she focuses, omits show effects and is therefore more concise overall. The move from the Great Festival Hall to the stage of the much smaller House for Mozart played a major part in this – and nomen est omen it works extremely well.
In doing so, Steier retained her basic concept of dressing the legendary disparate libretto of the Mozart/Schikaneder opera in a framework story. The events are told by the grandfather (Roland Koch) of an upper-class family to his three grandchildren as a bedtime story. This has the pleasant side effect that he, as the narrator, takes over the majority of the speaking passages – for which the audience can only be grateful, given the singers who often speak at the level of a nativity scene.
The entire “Magic Flute” world thus originates in the childish fantasy of the two-level bourgeois villa, which equates its own hysterical mother with the Queen of the Night, makes Tamino appear as a tin soldier and lets the butcher’s son become Papageno. The boys’ cuddly toys will also be given an oversized appearance over the course of the story.
This concept is just as coherent as it smooths out the complexity of The Magic Flute. Stringency at the price of depth. It gives the work that stringent arc that it doesn’t actually have on its own, and over long passages makes it what Mozart’s penultimate stage work is traditionally used for by parents: a children’s opera that can be used to hook young musicians.
And yet Steier, who was born in the USA in 1978 and now lives in Europe, manages better this time in the Director’s Cut not to let the philosophical questions of the work fall completely under the table. The misogynist image of women in the opera is addressed as well as the belligerence inherent in the men’s league. And for the somewhat heteronormative “Nothing nobler than woman and man. Man and woman, and woman and man, reach out to the deity” there is even a little lesbian kiss.
Nevertheless, this Salzburg “Magic Flute” does not become a highly philosophical, transcendent one, it remains one that emphasizes folk theater and does not shy away from rough gags. The circus elements, which still overloaded the work in 2018, have given way, there are effects and a sophisticated revolving stage system (stage design once more Katharina Schlipf), but no more spectacle.
Shooting star Joana Mallwitz, conductor of the Philharmoniker, is not at all averse to the spectacle. It begins almost provocatively slowly – but the suggestion of a long evening is misleading. The Maestra, born in 1986, goes at crazy tempos, but never as an end in itself. Rarely does the podium act so completely in coordination and reflection of what is happening on stage, the German always has the stage in view and puts the music at its service.
The question of the cast, on the other hand, is not unanimously positive. Regula Mühlemann is a beautiful-sounding, finely intonated Pamina, Michael Nagl is a charming, creamy Papageno and the fact that Tareq Nazmi has moved up from the supporting role to the bass-strong Sarastro compared to 2018 is also on the plus side.
The other group is led by the young Swiss Mauro Peter as Tamino, who unfortunately does not have the height for the game when he returns, which is forced and shaky. And Brenda Rae, as Queen of the Night, is fortunate that, unlike her predecessor in 2018, she does not have to wear a squirrel helmet, but this does not help her to elegantly master the breakneck game. The three Vienna Boys’ Choir, on the other hand, perform their clearly upgraded parts of the three boys confidently – without sniffing the air of the circus.
(SERVICE: “The Magic Flute”, new production at the Salzburg Festival, House for Mozart; musical direction of the Vienna Philharmonic: Joana Mallwitz, director: Lydia Steier, stage: Katharina Schlipf, costumes: Ursula Kudrna, lighting: Olaf Freese. With: Tareq Nazmi – Sarastro, Mauro Peter – Tamino, Brenda Rae/Jasmin Delfs – Queen of the Night, Regula Mühlemann – Pamina, Ilse Eerens – First Lady, Sophie Rennert – Second Lady, Noa Beinart – Third Lady, Michael Nagl – Papageno, Maria Nazarova – Papagena, Peter Tantsits – Monostatos, Henning von Schulman – Speaker/First Priest/Second Man in Armor, Simon Bode – Second Priest/First Man in Armor, Roland Koch – Grandfather, Vienna Boys’ Choir – Three Boys). Further performances on August 3, 6, 10, 17, 20, 24 and 27. salzburgerfestspiele.at)
July 25, 2022
The apotheosis of an apostate. The slaughter of a political scapegoat. The final chords of a desperate dream, smothered in the flames of the pyre: Arthur Honegger’s oratorio “Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher” was on the program at the Salzburg Festival on Sunday. Despite all the musical artistry – met with thunderous applause from the audience – the question remains: Does today need a religious fundamentalist war heroine like Joan of Arc?
The backdrop for Jeanne’s absurd show trial might hardly have been chosen more appropriately. The sharp-edged arcades protruded like shadows from the rugged rock on the back wall of the stage and gave the spectacle, which oscillated between cynicism and slapstick, a gruesome character, accompanied monumentally by the SWR symphony orchestra. The singing of the two choirs, sometimes feverishly excited and shrill trembling, sometimes menacingly whispering, rose up to the stone boxes in the bare rock. Around barefoot Jeanne, wrapped in a simple linen dress, played emotionally by Irène Jacob, 1991 Best Actress in Cannes.
Under the sovereign musical direction of Maxime Pascal, the sonorous voices of the theater children’s choir and its stylistically versatile counterpart from the Bavarian Radio fluttered through the stone hall like a colorful flock of birds. Sometimes in a disciplined formation as a powerful-voiced phalanx, sometimes in a diffuse confusion of breathless indignation. And once more and once more the rising scraps of words sank back onto the stage, cooled down, like feathers from Jeanne’s delusions. Pens with which heretical scholars scribbled a mendacious death sentence in the book from which Frère Dominique (Jérôme Kircher) reads to the dismayed Jeanne in the first scenes.
Honegger’s historical model failed following glorious victories once morest the enemy English in the 15th century due to profane megalomania fed by spiritual extravagance. Even following her death at the stake, Joan of Arc remained a highly political figure. Posthumously pardoned by the Church in the Middle Ages, she was only canonized following the First World War in times of surging nationalism. During the occupation of France by the Nazis, processed in the dark prologue of Paul Claudel’s libretto, the victorious maiden finally advanced to become a mystical national symbol.
Just as multifaceted and controversial as the main character, Honegger’s musical repertoire is designed in an unconventional spectrum, ranging from folkloric songs to elements of sacred vocal music and erratic jazz to military-style march fragments. A demanding potpourri, which the protagonists, with their great facial expressions and voices, around Elena Tsallagova (Virgin Maria), Mélissa Petit (Marguerite), Martina Belli (Catherine) and Marc Mauillon (Le Clerc) brought to the stage. Damien Bigourdan as the pretentious magistrate Porcus (pig) and Emilien Diard-Detoeuf as the whinnying donkey filled the insane grotesque around the court, which is decorated with allegorical animal figures, with humorous and elegant life.
Iconic fabric can be thankless. And Joan of Arc is always iconic as a canonical hagiography. Honegger, however, was neither intimidated nor carried away to iconoclasm. This Jeanne is different from her martial, sometimes chauvinistically appropriated historical role model. Paul Claudel reinterpreted them, carefully placing their emancipation in the foreground. It is the psychogram of a young woman who rebels once morest encrusted conservatism and remains true to her ideals. Scenically reinforced by the Salzburg director’s trick of confronting Jeanne with her childlike image in the meaningful Trimazô. Accompanied and encouraged by the programmatic call “Go your own way”, which became a recurring leitmotif, this Jeanne is not a war heroine, but an anti-heroine – maybe even an anti-war heroine. And this present needs that more urgently than ever.
(SERVICE – “Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher” by Arthur Honegger as part of the Spiritual Opening at the Salzburger Festspiele. Libretto by Paul Claudel. SWR Symphony Orchestra, Salzburger Festspiele und Theater Kinderchor, Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks. Conductor: Maxime Pascal, Choir study: Howard Arman and Wolfgang Götz. With Jeanne d’Arc – Irène Jacob, Frère Dominique – Jérôme Kircher, La Vierge – Elena Tsallagova, Marguerite – Mélissa Petit, Catherine – Martina Belli, Porcus – Damien Bigourdan, Le Clerc – Marc Mauillon, Une Voix /Héraut/Un Paysan – Damien Pass, L’âne – Emilien Diard-Detoeuf).