The Salzburg Festival will mark its 100th birthday in 2020. It is the world’s most important celebration of opera, music and theater with brilliant productions and an extensive array of festivities.
A festival to shine as a guiding light in the search for one’s own identity, for the meaning of life, but also for the restoration of the identity of whole peoples – that was the thought uppermost in the minds of the artists and citizens who a century ago founded the Salzburg Festival as ’one of the first deeds of peace’. Chief among them were that magician of the theatre Max Reinhardt, the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the composer Richard Strauss, the stage designer Alfred Roller and the conductor Franz Schalk. Through our Ouverture spirituelle under the sign of Pax — Peace we call back to mind in this anniversary year of 2020 that founding principle of the Festival as a project dedicated to peace. The Salzburg Festival began on 22 August 1920, when Jedermann (Everyman) was performed before the most beautiful stage backdrop in the world, the façade of the Salzburg Cathedral. One hundred years provide a reason to celebrate and an occasion to express thanks to all the artists, the staff members and employees who nurtured that delicate seedling, the Festival, and made it into the greatest classic festival in the world: More than 200 performances in 15 venues on 44 days, with guests from 80 countries, 40 of them non-European.
Several ideas are at the heart of our anniversary programme – community, the relationship of the individual to the whole, radical individualism and, as a great hope, the idea that the world can be changed through communal solidarity, through a new humanity. One hundred years of the Salzburg Festival mean one hundred years of cultural history. The Salzburg Festival does not have to be reinvented each year, though it must be led again and again into a new present. We will gladly arrange tickets for our guests.
