“A veritable manifesto of what the operatic genre can be today”, was how critics judged Milo Rau’s “revolutionary” staging of Mozart’s opera La Clemenza di Tito at the end of October. But can art really change the world? Or at least resist the current rise of the far right around the world?

This is the question posed by the Resistance Now! Autumn Tour, which – after several open letters, columns, controversial speeches and talks in Amsterdam, Stockholm, Belgrade, Antwerp, Liège, New York and Taipei – will be making five further stops in Europe next week, starting today, Tuesday, in Vienna.

“Milo Rau dedicates the Vienna Festival to Love”: A few weeks ago, the  Funkhaus (Vienna state radio station) was closed, but the Vienna Festival has declared it the headquarters of the Republic of Love: As a kick-off, Rau welcomes today Croatian activist Srećko Horvat, Hungarian producer Nóra Büki and the dismissed General Director of the Slovak National Theater, Matej Drlička, in the legendary Funkhaus.

Together they will discuss the necessity of international solidarity in the fight against the global rise of the radical right. “If we let the dominoes fall one by one, they will all fall,” as Rau recently told the Czech newspaper Denník. “Let us realise that unless somebody stops these people, they will continue until the end.“