At Summer Camp With Mozart and Tchaikovsky

Louise Dorner was 14 when, during her summer break from school, she took part in a weeklong opera camp at the Salzburg Festival, the prestigious classical music event held every year in Mozart’s birthplace.

Joining other children between the ages of 9 and 17 at Schloss Arenberg, a 19th-century palace with a handsome sculpture park, she learned the cello part for an abridged version of Verdi’s opera “Falstaff,” then performed it on stage alongside a cellist from the Vienna Philharmonic (whom she recognized from televised concert broadcasts). Returning to the camp the next year from her home in Salzburg, she played Leonora, the female lead in Verdi’s “Il Trovatore,” silently acting and gesturing onstage as three fellow cast members (including her younger sister) narrated the plot.

“The Salzburg Festival, for a young person, is something very, very prestigious,” attended by “all these rich people,” Ms. Dorner, now 19 and soon to start her university studies in Amsterdam, said in a telephone interview. From a child’s standpoint, opera productions there are highbrow and remote, especially as “the plots are very difficult to understand,” she said, and “you don’t feel this connection.”

The Salzburg opera camps “change your perspective” completely, she added: By spending a week studying the music and story line of an opera, and rehearsing next to accomplished musicians from a major orchestra, “you feel closer: you don’t feel this distance.”

Read the article at The NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/arts/music/salzburg-opera-summer-camp.html