The Salzburg Festival celebrates tradition and innovation
July 20, 2018
With nine new productions, nearly 90 concerts and a host of theatrical performances, this year's Salzburg Festival has plenty to offer culture lovers. Performers on the roster are some of world's best.
Advertisement
Curtain up! 10 reasons to visit Salzburg
Narrow lanes, spacious squares, Baroque splendor and a glorious panoramic mountain view: the city where Mozart was born offers a perfect backdrop for the Salzburg Festival, one of Europe's loveliest summer festivals.
Image: Tourismus Salzburg/G.Breitegger
Salzburg Festival centenary: A city becomes a stage
Every summer, Salzburg becomes a showcase for stars and celebrities. In 2020, as the Salzburg Festival turned 100. Around 200 concerts, opera and theater performances in just 43 days attract more than a quarter of a million visitors from more than 80 countries to Austria's fourth-largest city.
Image: Tourismus Salzburg/G.Breitegger
Spectacle, drama and great opera
The festival opens every year with "Everyman" (pictured) on Cathedral Square. The production of this play in 1917 also marked the birth of the festival and has become its trademark since then. In addition to Cathedral Square, the Festspielhaus and the Felsenreitschule (Riding School) are its best-known venues. In 2020, actor Tobias Moretti (left) gets a new female paramour.
Image: picture-alliance/B.Gindl
Where the musical genius Mozart was born
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart first saw the light of day at Getreidegasse 9 (left in the picture) in 1756. Now there is a museum in the family’s original living quarters. Mozart fans can see a second Mozart residence just around the corner, where he lived as an adult while serving as concertmaster until he turned his back on the city and moved to Vienna.
Image: picture-alliance
Getreidegasse: the flagship of the Old Town
It's always worth looking up: The delicate, playful wrought-iron guild signs above the shops and pubs are an optical highlight in Getreidegasse. Salzburg's soul is in its cafés — with their tempting sweet specialties: Salzburger Nockerln, a kind of baked soufflé, and Mozartkugeln, small, round chocolates filled with nougat and marzipan.
Image: picture-alliance/R.Goldmann
A UNESCO heritage site with 1,000 landmarks
As in Mozart's time, the Old Town is shaped by its narrow lanes and spacious squares. One of the loveliest is Kapitelplatz, Chapter Square. High above it towers the symbol of the city, Hohensalzburg Fortress, one of the largest medieval fortified castles in Europe. Since 1996 the Old Town has been a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Image: Tourismus Salzburg/G.Breitegger
Building the Baroque in Salzburg
In the 16th century, Salzburg's prince-archbishops had the DomQuartier district with its Residenz palace and St. Peter's Abbey rebuilt in Italian Baroque style to display their prestige and power. Their aim was to create a “Rome of the North.” Salzburg Cathedral is now considered a major innovation: the first early Baroque church building north of the Alps.
Image: picture-alliance
Water games at Hellbrunn Castle
Hellbrunn Palace was one of the Salzburg prince-archbishops' prestige-building projects. This masterpiece of hydraulic engineering, with its water-powered automata and trick fountains, attracts 300,000 visitors a year and leaves none of them dry. The old trees that line Hellbrunner Allee, which runs through its park, provide a habitat for rare beetles, bats and woodpeckers.
Image: Schlossverwaltung Hellbrunn/Sulzer
Salzburg's most romantic weddings
Engaged couples queue up in front of Mirabell Palace on summer weekends for the privilege of saying “I do” in its Marble Hall. Prince-Archbishop Wolf Dietrich had this pleasure palace built 1606 as a love token for his mistress, Salome Alt. The park provides a vista that reaches as far as Hohensalzburg Fortress, framed by an alpine panorama.
Image: Tourismus Salzburg/G.Breitegger
Contrast program in the "Museum der Moderne"
On the steep cliffs of the Mönchberg, one of Salzburg's three local mountains, the puristic architecture of this museum of modern art challenges the Baroque of the Old Town. The museum focuses on modern Austrian graphic and photographic works. Its terrace provides one of the loveliest views of Salzburg.
Image: Museum der Moderne Salzburg/M.Haader
Amusement at Salzburg Airport
Airplanes, racing cars and delicious food: Since 2003, Austrian billionaire Dietrich Mateschitz has been sharing his passions with the public. In Hangar-7, a unique glass and steel structure, Mozart operas and TV shows take place in the middle of his historical aircraft collection. The event location also houses a gourmet restaurant and bars — all with a view of the Alps.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Electric Love Festival on the race track
Salzburg isn't just for classical music lovers: There's plenty of partying and dance music at the Electric Love Festival, which has taken in early July since 2013. In 2022, the festival took place from July 6-9. On the Salzburgring race track, usually used for motorsport events, 120 DJs appear on five stages. It's considered Austria's most important electronic music festival.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Nikelski
11 images1 | 11
On Friday, many of the world's finest artists from the classical music and theater world will once again gather in Salzburg for six weeks of music-making and performances. Since 1920, Mozart's birthplace has been home to the Salzburg Festival, which continues to feature the stars of the theater and classical music world. Big names in classical music at this year's festival include Italian conductor Riccardo Muti and opera diva Cecilia Bartoli, among others.
The play Everyman (Jedermann) by Hugo von Hofmannsthal kicks off the annual cultural event. The main cathedral square remains the venue for the Hofmannsthal's play about morality, which is performed each year as an integral part of the festival. It's a seminal work in German theater, and landing a role in the annual production, however small it may be, is considered a great honor among German-speaking actors.
The 200 events spread throughout 18 venues include drama, opera and concerts performed by international artists from all over the world. With 89 performances, the concert series offers music lovers plenty of options. Throughout the summer, festival organizers expect around 250,000 visitors to descend on the small city of only 146,000 people.
This year, a total of nine new opera and drama productions will be performed: five operas and four theater pieces. Prominent new productions include operas such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's The Magic Flute, Richard Strauss's Salome and The Queen of Spades by Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky.
German author, philosopher and historian Philipp Blom will give this year's opening speech. "Philipp Blom is one of the outstanding intellectuals of our time, an incorruptible thinker committed to the ideas of the Enlightenment and humanism," festival director Markus Hinterhäuser told a German press agency on Tuesday. A relentless analyst of European history, he is the ideal speaker for this year's commemoration year, says the festival's President Helga Rabl-Stadler.
Although music festivals in Salzburg have taken place since 1877, primarily organized by the International Mozarteum Foundation, the Salzburg festival began in 1920 in its present form. Author Hugo von Hofmannsthal and director Max Reinhardt inaugurated the first festival on August 22, 1920 with a performance of Everyman on the steps of the Salzburg cathedral. The first opera came two years later, when Richard Strauss conducted Mozart's Don Giovanni.
This year's festival opens July 20 and ends August 30.