In the decades since its founding in 1920, the annual Salzburg Music Festival in Austria has earned a well-deserved reputation as one of the best – and priciest – summertime music venues in the world. The core repertory of the Festival has always been the music of Salzburg’s most famous native son, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and other classical and romantic masters from the Austro-Germanic tradition.

Fearing that the Salzburg Festival was becoming a bit too conservative and predictable, in the 1990s the Festival’s directors began shake things up by including some challenging contemporary classics into the mix.  On today’s date in 1997, for example, a car-horn overture signaled the Salzburg Festival premiere of a revised version of György Ligeti’s opera “La Grand Macabre.”

In Ligeti’s opera, the world is fast approaching apocalypse, and the ultimate catastrophe is overseen by a rather ineffectual, and occasionally tipsy Grim Reaper. The libretto is silly and serious at the same time, and was devised by the composer and Michael Meschke, a master puppeteer. For the 1997 Salzburg production, the American director Peter Sellars set the work in a devastated Chernobyl-like landscape contaminated by a nuclear disaster.

György Ligeti (1923 - 2006): Mysteries of the Macabre, fr Le Grand Macabre (Sibylle Ehlert, soprano; Philharmonia Orchestra; Esa-Pekka Salonen, cond.) Sony 62311