Salzburg Festival

• 1. Introduction

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  The Salzburg Festival opened on the 22nd of August 1920 on the steps of a cathedral, with an actor named Alexander Moissi performing a medieval morality play to an open-air crowd. That play, Jedermann, or Everyman in English, was written by the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. It had first been staged nine years earlier at the Berlin Zirkus Schumann arena. Now it had found a home in the city where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born, and it has been performed there every year since. What drove five men to found a major arts festival in the ruins of a shattered empire? How did it survive annexation, war, and a ban ordered by a Nazi propaganda minister? And how did it grow into a summer institution that generates hundreds of millions of euros for a single Austrian city each year?

• 2. Five Founders, One Vision

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  Friedrich Gehmacher and Heinrich Damisch formed the organizing body in 1917, calling it the Salzburger Festspielhaus-Gemeinde. Their aim was an annual festival devoted to drama and music, with Mozart at its center. But the creative vision behind the festival crystallized around five men who championed its revival as the war ended in 1918. Hugo von Hofmannsthal was the poet and dramatist who supplied the festival's signature text. Richard Strauss was the composer who would conduct its first operatic production. Alfred Roller brought the scenic design. Franz Schalk provided the conductor's perspective. And Max Reinhardt, then running the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, supplied theatrical direction. Reinhardt had been the one to stage the premiere of Jedermann in Berlin in 1911, making him the natural choice to mount it again on Salzburg's cathedral steps. Hofmannsthal was not simply contributing art; he had a political philosophy behind the enterprise. His writings argued that the festival should embody the centuries-old Habsburg principle of live and let live, in deliberate contrast to what he called the Prussian-North German uncompromising worldview. The festival was meant to stand for tolerance across ethnic groups, peoples, minorities, religions, cultures, and languages. Music festivals had actually been held in Salzburg on and off since 1877, organized by the International Mozarteum Foundation, but they had stopped in 1910. A 1914 festival was planned and then cancelled when the First World War broke out. By 1920, the project finally had the political support, the artistic team, and the peace to proceed.

• 3. Building the Stages

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  The first festival hall rose in 1925 from the former Archbishop's horse stables at the northern foot of the Mönchsberg mountain. It was designed by architect Clemens Holzmeister and opened with a production of Gozzi's Turandot, adapted by Karl Vollmöller. By then the festival already had live radio broadcasts running on the Austrian RAVAG network. The following year, a neighbor of that hall was transformed into a second performance space: the Felsenreitschule, a riding academy that had been carved directly into the face of the Mönchsberg rock. Its inauguration production was Carlo Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters. In the 21st century, the original 1925 hall was fully reconstructed for staged opera and reopened in 2006 as the Haus fur Mozart. The Great Festival Hall, or Grosses Festspielhaus, joined them when it opened in 1960, adding a full opera house to the complex. The 2006 festival also carried another milestone: it staged all 22 of Mozart's operatic works, including two unfinished pieces, marking the 250th anniversary of his birth. All 22 were filmed and released on DVD in November of that year.

• 4. The Toscanini Years and the Nazi Interruption

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  Between 1934 and 1937, conductors Arturo Toscanini and Bruno Walter filled the festival with some of its most celebrated performances. In 1936, the Trapp Family Singers appeared on the Salzburg stage, performing at the Felsenreitschule; their story would later be dramatized in the musical The Sound of Music, though that show placed the scene inaccurately in 1938. In 1937, Boyd Neel and his orchestra gave the world premiere of Benjamin Britten's Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge at the festival. Then came 1938 and the Anschluss, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria. Toscanini resigned in protest. Max Reinhardt and Georg Solti, both Jewish, were forced to emigrate. Jedermann was dropped. Its last pre-war Salzburg performance starred Attila Horbiger. The festival managed to continue through the war years but was finally cancelled in 1944 by direct order of Reich Minister Joseph Goebbels, in response to the 20th of July plot against Hitler. The festival did not stay dark for long. In the summer of 1945, immediately after Allied victory in Europe, it reopened.

• 5. Karajan and Postwar Prestige

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  Herbert von Karajan became artistic director of the festival in 1956, and his tenure shaped the postwar Salzburg identity more than any other single figure. Under his leadership, the repertoire concentrated on Mozart and Richard Strauss, though works by Verdi and Beethoven also had their place on the program. The Great Festival Hall opened in 1960, giving the festival its largest and most prominent venue. Karajan died in 1989. The director who followed him, Gerard Mortier, took the festival in a sharply different direction, drastically modernizing and expanding it. Mortier was succeeded in 2001 by Peter Ruzicka. Karajan had also founded the Salzburg Whitsun Festival in 1973, originally under the name Salzburg Whitsun Concerts, as a companion event to the Easter Festival. That Whitsun event was later taken over by the summer festival organization and augmented with opera, with a focus on the baroque and classical periods. Since 2012, its artistic director has been the Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli, who also performs as the female lead. The Whitsun opera production has routinely been revived a few weeks later at the summer festival, a practice that became standard under Bartoli's direction.

• 6. Finance and Economic Weight

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  The festival's 2017 figures give a sense of its scale. Ticket sales that year brought in roughly 27 million euros. But the total economic value the festival creates in Salzburg, counting direct and indirect effects, was reported at 183 million euros per year. That activity sustained around 2,800 full-time equivalent jobs in Salzburg alone, or about 3,400 across Austria when seasonal workers are included. The public sector received approximately 77 million euros in taxes and duties as a result. The Easter Festival, held separately since 1967, is organized by its own independent organization. The Whitsun Festival has been organized by the Salzburger Festspielfonds since 1998 and takes place at both the Great Festival Theatre and the Haus fur Mozart. Helga Rabl-Stadler served as president of the main festival from 1995 to 2021, a tenure of more than two decades. Markus Hinterhäuser became Intendant in 2016. In April 2024, the festival announced that his contract had been extended through 2031.

• 7. Continuity Under Pressure

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  During the COVID-19 pandemic, Intendant Markus Hinterhäuser and president Helga Rabl-Stadler designed a health and safety framework that allowed the festival to run at least partially in 2020. It was, according to the festival's own account, the only festival in Europe to manage that. The 2020 program included an Elektra directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski and conducted by Franz Welser-Möst, and a Cosi fan tutte directed by Christof Loy and conducted by Joana Mallwitz. The festival chose as its slogan for that year a line from Hofmannsthal himself: "Wo der Wille nur erwacht, ist schon fast etwas erreicht" , where the will is merely awakened, something has almost been achieved. The same play Hofmannsthal wrote more than a century ago, Jedermann, is still performed every summer on the Cathedral Square in Salzburg. Lydia Steier became the first woman to stage Die Zauberflote at the festival in 2018, a milestone that arrived nearly a century after the festival's founding.