Peter Sellars, having made history with his 1998 staging of the opera Saint François d’Assise by Olivier Messiaen in the Felsenreitschule, returns to Salzburg to stage and direct for TV Mozart’s opera seria La clemenza di Tito. In the pit is his comrade-in-arms and long-time collaborator, Greek-Russian star conductor Teodor Currentzis with his Russian MusicAeterna choir and orchestra from Perm. Sellars, who functions also as video director, and Currentzis take up the story and develop it for their Salzburg production, creating a fresh and original yet contemplative new version of Mozart’s last opera through the interpolation of excerpts from his c-minor Mass. The parable of rebellion and forgiveness is set in a developing country, with a brutal police presence but a thoughtful leader and with a chorus of citizen-refugees, displaced by a catastrophe. The story is driven by Sesto, Marianne Crebassa “in a star-making performance” (New York Times), here a disrupted terrorist, torn by the painful demands of the necessary violence needed to move the world and history forward and the horrifying, unavoidable loss of innocent lives.