Live animals and baking bread feature in Messiaen's `Saint François d’Assise' at Salzburg Festival

SALZBURG, Austria (AP) — Philippe Sly worked up a sweat to prepare for the daunting title role in “Saint François d’Assise,” composer Olivier Messiaen’s crowning achievement.

Sly moved into the Kapuzinerkloster, a Capuchin monastery about 1,550 feet (470 meters) above sea level, 7 1/2 weeks ahead of the Aug. 4 opening of Romeo Castellucci’s new Salzburg Festival production timed for the 800th anniversary year of St. Francis’ death .

Sly climbs the steps from the city center or walks up a road several times daily and sleeps without air conditioning in a summer of record European heat waves.

“Just being here has been extremely important because I’m going to Lauds every morning,” the 37-year-old Canadian bass-baritone said in a reference to Franciscan morning prayers.

“I’ve taken on all these habits that they have here and now I long for it," he said in an interview with The Associated Press outside the monastery on the morning after the first performance. "It’s weird. I’m excited to come back to the monastery and be present for Vespers or for the Eucharist Mass.”

Messiaen, a prolific 20th century French composer, spent nearly a decade creating his only opera, which premiered in 1983, nine years before his death.

His score for the 6-hour, 20-minute, eight-tableaux opus (including a pair of one-hour intermissions) depicts episodes in St. Francis' spiritual journey, including his encounter with a leper and his sermon to birds. The score calls for two raised percussion sections on either side of the stage and three ondes Martenots. The electronic instruments figure prominently in the 45-minute “Sermon to the Birds,” the sixth tableau, reflecting Messiaen's devotion to his Catholic faith.

Conductor Maxime Pascal leads 120 musicians and a chorus of 90 in six performances through Aug. 23. A second conductor in the pit waves a baton capped by a white light, signaling percussion beats at odds with the other instruments’ markings.

“It’s 2,500 pages of music, sometimes very, very complex,” Pascal said. “There is never one transition. It’s a succession of infinity of moments and so each moment, it can be short or long, but each moment is like a work by itself.”

Castellucci’s production features a Czechoslovakian Wolfdog, a female peacock and seven sheep who romp across the stage near the end as the roof opens at the Felsenreitschule , a 1,400-seat theater built in the Mönchsberg rock quarry and famous for its appearance in the film “The Sound of Music.”

In the Franciscan tradition of bread for the poor, a pair of MIWE four-level ovens are moved on stage and bake 33 sourdough loaves, their aroma wafting through the audience. Each oven weighs 2,650 pounds (1,200 kilos). The bread is later made available to the backstage crew.

“In the New Testament, often there’s quotes of Jesus saying that the kingdom of God is like yeast,” Sly said.

José van Dam originated the title role at the Paris Opéra , with Seiji Ozawa conducting. Peter Sellars directed a 1992 Salzburg production starring van Dam with Esa-Pekka Salonen leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“Messiaen had these pictures of colors and dimensions of time and space. Pretty exhilarating,” said Sellars, who first heard the music when Ozawa conducted three tableaux in concert with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1986.

“Most opera is about stabbing the girl in the back," Sellars told the AP. "This is just about what are the revelations in your life, what are the moments when you have another idea of how to live and what it means to be human and what it means to be part of nature.”

Performing the opera for the first time, the Vienna Philharmonic started with five rehearsals back home followed by 12 more in Salzburg. The orchestra is known for Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler and Strauss, not contemporary compositions.

“It’s very important for an orchestra today to play also modern music,” said double bassist Michael Bladerer, the Vienna Philharmonic’s general manager.

There has been just one major U.S. staged production, by the San Francisco Opera in 2002 starring Willard White with Donald Runnicles conducting . Then-general director Pamela Rosenberg believed the city named after St. Francis should stage the portrayal of him.

“It’s one of the two or three most compelling pieces of the second half of the last century,” she said. “For me it was almost distressing — being dramatic — that it hadn’t been shown in the Western hemisphere yet.”

“He’s just so unique,” she added of Messiaen. “In spite of being part of the spectral music movement, he wasn’t continuing the footsteps of anyone with his musical language and he really created something that had an enormous artistic impetus in the music world.”

White, now 79, sings the shorter role of Frère Bernard in the new production and was able to pass on his experience to Sly.

“It was partly technical but it’s also a mindset,” White said. “I basically said that in this life we got to go from one moment to the next and in the acceptance of the moment that we’re in it actually guides us to the approach of the next moment.”

Soprano Lauranne Oliva (The Angel), tenor Sean Panikkar (The Leper) and baritone Russell Braun (Frère Léon) are part of a standout cast dominated by Sly’s quivering, self-mutilating performance as he gets smothered with dirt and blood.

Pascal thinks Messiaen chose St. Francis as a subject because of their mutual interest in birds and faith, then created the opera as a synthesis of his use of orchestral color.

“Messiaen was convinced while composing the work that it would be his last work," Pascal said. "He thought it was his swan song.”