Salzburg Festival - Schedule, Program & Tickets

Salzburg Festival

Festival as a beacon in the search for one's own identity, for the meaning of life, but also to restore the identity of entire peoples - that was the great idea of ​​those artists and citizens who considered the Salzburg Festival "one of the first works of peace" 100 years ago founded. Above all, the theater magician Max Reinhardt, the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the composer Richard Strauss, the stage designer Alfred Roller and the conductor Franz Schalk.
We commemorate this founding idea, festival as a peace project from the spirit of art, in our anniversary year 2020 with our Overture Spiritual in the Sign of Pax - Peace.
The Salzburg Festival with Jedermann began on August 22, 1920 in front of the most beautiful set in the world, the facade of the Salzburg Cathedral.
100 years is a reason to celebrate, is an occasion to say thank you to all the artists, employees and employees who turned the delicate little plant festival into the largest classical festival in the world: more than 200 performances at 15 venues over 44 days with visitors from 80 Countries, including 40 non-European.

At the center of our anniversary program are the idea of ​​community, the relationship of the individual to the whole, radical individualism and, as a great hope, the idea of ​​the changeability of the world through a society based on solidarity, through a new humanity. As in a killing spree, Mozart's Don Giovanni strays towards his own destruction. There is no love, no utopia, no light in his world. Its mainspring is excess, is nihilism. Elektra is driven in a completely different sense, ruthless, frenzied and excessive in her vindictiveness. Another immoderate one is Richard III, drawn by William Shakespeare as the incarnation of evil.
In 1960, Mussorgski's Boris Godunow and Luigi Nonos Intolleranza 1960 were the antithesis of the extreme exceedance of the individual by the dynamics of the people and the masses. It is they who formulate protest and call for change. The people are the main protagonist in Mussorgski's opera. In his works, Luigi Nono exemplifies the turmoil, the resistance. Even though Intolleranza documents the fate of an individual in 1960, Nono means the anonymous mass. His work is an outcry against all the injustices of the world and a blazing plea for humanity and justice.
In Peter Handke's world premiere Zdeněk Adamec, a society is formed in speech and counter-speech, which jointly creates a fictional psychogram of a young man who made himself a fan with his disturbing self-immolation.
Like William Shakespeare, Friedrich Schiller was a central author of his theater work for Max Reinhardt. In Maria Stuart two rulers face each other, their respective positions exemplarily dealing with the relationship between law and justice.
It is the map of the great artistic expressions of all eras and of all times, from Monteverdi to the music of our day, from the Greek tragedy to Peter Handke, who feel committed to the festival that gives content to our festival.

100 years of the Salzburg Festival are 100 years of cultural history. The Salzburg Festival does not have to be reinvented every year, but it must always be brought into a new present. “A work of art that wants to stimulate and move needs qualified rejection as well as approval. […] Art has to reflect the mental state of its time, be opposed to it and opposition, ”Nikolaus Harnoncourt summed it up in his still shaking festival speech in 1995.
Bazon Brock, professor of aesthetics, called you, our wonderful audience, an “enthusiastic community”. Because the festival creates a unique form of shared experience that unites people of different origins, languages ​​and religions. A community of enthusiasm for the power of art.
100 years of the Salzburg Festival therefore combine our thanks to you, dear audience, with the request: Remain members of this enthusiastic community!

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