(Photo Credit: Monika Rittershaus)

At the 2025 Salzburg Whitsun Festival, “Hotel Metamorphoses” emerged as an ambitious new opera project — a contemporary reworking of the Baroque pasticcio format that splices myth, music, and modernity into an unlikely unity. Conceived over three years of development by director Barrie Kosky in collaboration with Cecilia Bartoli, the production draws from five mythological episodes in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” sutured together by more than 40 opera overtures, arias, concertos, and excerpts from Antonio Vivaldi. By invoking the most emblematic musical son of Venice, “Hotel Metamorphoses” responds to the festival’s 2025 focus on Venetian culture.

Rather than employing newly written recitatives in the Baroque pasticcio manner, “Hotel Metamorphoses” is told through the eyes of Orpheus, performed by actress Angela Winkler, whose grave monologues guide the audience through the disorienting sequence of scenes. With music that never attempts to force narrative continuity, and characters who dissolve as quickly as they appear, “Hotel Metamorphoses” creates a dream logic of myth: fragmented, recursive, and shaped by desire, grief, and metamorphosis.

The stage remains focused: a spacious, modern hotel suite with a double bed in the center, desk to the left, and projection screen above the bed’s headboard. Lighting and video projections do much of the narrative lifting, with the large screen before the stage displaying myth-inspired visual tableaux — half-classical, half-digital. The hotel suite
where everything unfolds becomes Orpheus’s dream-space — a psychic residence where the myths return, mutate, and replay themselves in looping tragedy or grotesque parody.

Prologue: Eurydice’s Disappearance

The brief prologue, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, functions more like the thematic thesis. Bartoli as Eurydice sings from the bed in a sorrowful, slow-blooming aria, before being swallowed by it in a moment of theatrical sleight: the mattress opens like a mouth, dragging her silently downward. The bed becomes a portal — not to Hades, but to the recesses of Orpheus’s mind.

Pygmalion: Longing and Laughter

Scene One from Act One, Pygmalion, shifts the tone abruptly. The lighting snaps to warm pastels, the music quickens, and the story plays out like a romantic comedy. Philippe Jaroussky’s Pygmalion is cast as an endearing shut-in: cable-knit sweater, thick glasses, and all the gentle eccentricities of a lonely man who falls in love with his sculpture. The object of his affection is a hyper-sexualized, life-sized doll. Jaroussky sings with radiant, syrupy warmth, capturing the soft delirium of someone who believes in their own fantasies. Eventually, the statue — brought to life by Lea Desandre — awakens into a real woman, and the pair sing a glowing, affectionate duet surrounded by a chorus that wraps the lovers in a cocoon of harmony. Vivaldi’s melodies in this act are spun out at leisure, unbroken and luxuriant. The comic styling makes its emotional kernel more poignant: love, here, is an act of invention and vulnerability. Pygmalion’s dream, for once, gets to come true.

Arachne: Digital Threads and Divine Rage

The next scene, Arachne, is perhaps the opera’s most explosive and conceptually daring. The set morphs into a fashion media room. Bartoli returns in a new guise — this time as the titular mortal spinner of divinity-defying tapestries. Dressed in a blazing couture ensemble, she is surrounded by paparazzi, fashion influencers, and a chorus of frantic fans.

Opposite her stands Minerva, disguised initially as a hunched crone, played by Nadezhda Karyazina, who soon sheds the disguise to reveal a terrifying diva-goddess. The two engage in a furious contest — not with looms, but with laptops. Seated at opposing desks, they compete in crafting surreal digital collages using projection-mapped
software: hybrid creatures, grotesque juxtapositions of human and animal. Images flicker on the screen overhead, echoing the audacity of Arachne’s weaving in the original myth. Bartoli’s vocal performance here is electric — sharp-edged and swaggering in the opening, but after Minerva violently smashes Arachne’s laptop, Arachne then rages
and eventually collapses in a sequence of mounting vocal despair, ending in suicide. She hangs herself from a cord. The final visual transformation is both grotesque and oddly moving: a giant spider projection looms over the stage as the low murmur of the bassoon signals her metamorphosis — doomed to weave forevermore.

Myrrha: Desire Without Exit

The final scene of Act One, Myrrha, shifts toward a more psychologically realistic mode. The hotel suite now resembles a domestic setting — its cold-toned lighting turning the space into an emotional wasteland. Myrrha, portrayed by Desandre, spends the entire act in a bizarre fusion of depression and volatility — her expression vacant, her demeanor unresponsive to the many suitors who approach her. Her object of desire, shockingly, is her own father.

The father figure is portrayed throughout with an obsessive, workaholic detachment — dressed in professional attire, his face impassive, perpetually shifting between phone meetings and work on laptop. He remains entirely silent, creating a suffocating emotional vacuum.

In a scene steeped in nocturnal hues, Myrrha, under the influence of a tempter, dons her mother’s clothing and slips into her father’s bedroom. The forbidden act unfolds amid an oppressive haze of light and shadow, where desire and disassociation blur. Her transgression is ultimately met with the harshest of punishments: the desk in the room
slowly opens and begins to devour her mercilessly. Harsh zebra-striped lighting slashes across the stage as time seems to warp, and Myrrha’s body, entwined with shadows and light, gradually vanishes.

When the narrator, Orpheus, re-enters the hotel room — now returned from madness to an eerie stillness — Myrrha has already been transformed into a silent tree, lying motionless at the center of the stage.

Alienated Love: Echo and Narcissus

After the intermission, Act Two opens with Echo and Narcissus, beginning with a physically charged ensemble of dancers. They are costumed in vibrant attire reminiscent of a Dionysian festival — flamboyant in color, crowned with flowers — and whirl ecstatically around Narcissus, played by Jaroussky. Amid this prolonged and visually saturated celebration, Narcissus remains silent and unmoved.

At this point, Echo, performed by Desandre, enters like a breeze — light, flippant, childlike, and mischievous. She first appears at the edge of the stage, watching, imitating, and mocking Narcissus from a distance, emitting playful, infantile sounds. She repeats his words, yet never receives a reply. Already, she is caught in the abyss of love for him.
But her longing can only manifest through repetition — she is condemned to echo his final words only.

Eventually, Narcissus becomes entranced by his own reflection, unable to pull away. His double body — physically embodied by two semi-nude male dancers — mirrors itself in a gradual collapse into the abyss of self-obsession. In the final image of this scene, Narcissus metamorphoses into a daffodil, forever gazing at his reflection. Orpheus, the
narrator, holds the flower in his hand, filled with mournful wonder.

Finale: Fission in Silence

Scene Two from Act Two, and the finale of “Hotel Metamorphoses,” circles back to Orpheus. He has ultimately failed to bring Eurydice back from the underworld, and he himself has been torn apart by the frenzied Maenads. Eurydice returns, shrouded in sorrow, to the now shadowy and foreboding hotel suite, only to be met with the horrific
sight of Orpheus’s severed head lying on the bed.

Overcome with grief, Eurydice begins the longest lament aria of the entire opera, surrounded by ghostly figures dressed in black and wearing plague doctor masks. The entire suite is elevated above the stage, allowing the writhing shadows below to underscore Eurydice’s despair and helplessness in the face of fate. In the final
moment, the light vanishes completely. Orpheus and Eurydice dissolve into darkness.

Final Reflections

“Hotel Metamorphoses” is not a pasticcio in the typical Baroque sense — there are no connective recitatives to unify the Vivaldian corpus, the normal da capo aria showpieces no longer matter here. Instead, what emerges is a ‘baroque cut-up,’ where music, myth, and mise-en-scène fracture and refract each other in endlessly suggestive ways.

Director Barrie Kosky avoids moralizing the myths. Instead, he leans into their ambiguity, their violence, their surreal elasticity. Each scene occupies a different tonal register — comedy, horror, tragedy, elegy — but all are bound by the same visual framework: a single hotel suite where bodies transform and identities blur. In this way, the production updates Ovid’s thematic concerns for the 21st Century — by exposing the mythic logic latent in the contemporary. In a world of Instagram filters, loneliness, gender instability, and alienation, the metamorphoses feel eerily familiar.

In the program notes for “Hotel Metamorphoses,” Kosky candidly describes the laborious preparation process: he and music director Gianluca Capuano listened to over 500 excerpts before narrowing them down to 40 pieces drawn from various works by Vivaldi.

Musically, this patchwork works convincingly to sustain the three-and-a-half-hour drama. Under the direction of Capuano, the Les Musiciens du Prince – Monaco ensemble achieves both continuity and stylistic agility, adjusting tempi and ornamentation subtly to fit the shifting dramatic moods. Tempos are often stretched, even suspended, to accommodate Winkler’s spoken interjections or stage transitions — but never at the expense of musical integrity.

The soloists’ performances are uniformly compelling. Three star singers — Bartoli, Jaroussky, and Desandre — each perform signature arias from their own past Vivaldi albums, recalling the Baroque practice of ‘suitcase arias.’ Though some arias may not be dramaturgically ideal, they serve to maintain audience engagement, especially given the fact that Vivaldi’s operas are still only well-known to Baroque enthusiasts. Bartoli conjures a different vocal mask for each role, from Euridice to Arachne’s digital rebel. Desandre brings a luminous emotional precision as Pygmalion’s coy statue and Echo, while Jaroussky, ever elegant, reveals unexpected vulnerability in his final Narcissus. But it is Winkler who anchors the experience — by watching it all unfold with the quiet ache of someone who has already lost everything.

In the end, “Hotel Metamorphoses” is less about mythic transformation than the echo of transformation — the afterimage, the shadow on the wall. It is Orpheus dreaming in reverse. And when the dream ends, we are left, like him, to search the empty room for what is no longer there.