“The most precious thing a festival can achieve is to enable people to come together and essential artistic encounters to happen – that has been the Salzburg Festival’s goal since its very beginning. More than one hundred years ago, when artists thought up this Festival, Europe lay in ruins. And today, we once again feel that we have come to the threshold of tremendous change. Then as now, the mission of a festival is to open new intellectual spaces for our audience, to ask the essential questions of our times, using the great works of art as our guides. The dramaturgy of the 2022 Salzburg Festival was inspired by Dante’s Divina Commedia – and by numerous works created or first performed at the time of World War I. In Carl Orff’s De temporum fine comoedia, a work for the end of the world of unprecedented intensity, and in Leoš Janáček’s Káťa Kabanová or Marieluise Fleißer’s Ingolstadt, we examined pieces which are not necessarily anchored in the broader repertoire, but revealed themselves as benchmarks for our time. Once again, this summer outstandingly demonstrated that art enables nuances to be noticed, that it is art which brings sophistication to our thinking,” says Artistic Director Markus Hinterhäuser.
“The extraordinary success of this Festival summer reflects the importance of opera, theatre and concerts, even and especially in difficult times. Given the state of the world, we were not only allowed, but compelled to give the arts all the more room to unfold. This is reflected in the euphoric reactions of our audience. The fact that the percentage of occupied seats resembled the record-breaking year of 2019 demonstrates the unbroken desire people have for cultural live events. Guests from other continents, especially the USA, returned to the Festival this year in greater numbers. However, we are also increasing our efforts to attract new audience groups, both younger and older ones, to Salzburg. To this end, we are focusing more on online marketing and sales, but have also initiated the Festival mentorships and reserved a contingent of 6,000 discounted youth tickets explicitly for young festival goers,” says Festival President Dr. Kristina Hammer.
“Due to extraordinary demand, including from non-European countries, the 2022 Festival season has seen a return to the record sales of the pre-pandemic year of 2019. Had not four performances been cancelled for health reasons, a new record would have been achieved. Thus, Salzburg once again sets the standard for other institutions’ year long seasons beginning shortly: demand for the arts is unbroken! With 96% of all seats occupied, revenues increased by 16% compared to the previous year. This will help us overcome the great challenges facing us due to the extraordinary levels of inflation. We thank all artists, all staff and of course our wonderful audience for a Festival summer that was outstanding both in artistic and economic terms,” says Executive Director Lukas Crepaz.
“With 14 magnificent performances of Jedermann, Lars Eidinger, his Paramour Verena Altenberger, Edith Clever as an unforgettable Death, the wonderful Mother Angela Winkler and an impressive cast bid goodbye to Cathedral Square. The subject of the victim, especially the female victim, was central to all genres, as was the tripartite nature of Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which Paradise can only be attained by passing through Hell and reaching the Mountain of Redemption. These themes determined the figures we presented in this year’s drama productions. With enormous stage presence, our performers illuminated these constellations in very different, powerful theatrical forms staged by directors commanding strong, idiosyncratic idioms, many shown in Salzburg for the first time. In our complex world situation, there are no easy answers to the many pressing questions we ask on stage, to which the audience dedicated itself together with our artists with impressive intensity,” says Bettina Hering, Director of Drama.
The 2022 Salzburg Festival
172 Performances in 45 Days at 17 Venues
as well as 54 Performances in the Youth Programme “jung & jede*r”
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Opera
BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE – DE TEMPORUM FINE COMOEDIA IL TRITTICO
KÁŤA KABANOVÁ AIDA
DIE ZAUBERFLÖTE
IL BARBIERE DI SIVIGLIA
JAKOB LENZ (in concert)
LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR (in concert)
Drama
JEDERMANN
INGOLSTADTREIGEN
VERRÜCKT NACH TROST
IPHIGENIA
READINGS
FILM REIGEN
SCHAUSPIEL-RECHERCHEN
Concerts
OUVERTURE SPIRITUELLE Sacrificium
VIENNA PHILHARMONIC
GUEST ORCHESTRAS
CHAMBER CONCERTS
Time with BARTÓK
Homage WOLFGANG RIHM
CANTO LIRICO
SONG RECITALS
SOLO RECITALS
MOZART MATINEES
MOZARTEUM ORCHESTRA
CAMERATA SALZBURG
SACRED CONCERT
HERBERT VON KARAJAN
YOUNG CONDUCTORS AWARD
YOUNG SINGERS PROJECT
SPECIAL CONCERTS
“jung & jede*r” – The Salzburg Festival’s Youth Programme
MUSICAL THEATRE
Der Teufel mit den drei goldenen Haaren
WUT
Ich lieb dich
INTERACTIONS
School programme
From Abtenau to Zell am See
Festival Mentorships
Youth Tickets & Education
Young Friends
YOUNG ARTISTS
Opera Camps
Salzburger Festspiele und Theater Kinderchor
Young Singers Project · Kühne Foundation
Herbert von Karajan Young Conductors Award · Rolex
Special Concerts
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Dreamers – An Installation by Shirin Neshat at the Kollegienkirche
Exhibition: Robert Rauschenberg INFERNO
Ilya & Emilia Kabakov THE FLYING KOMAROV
44 Screenings as part of the Siemens Festival>Nights on Kapitelplatz
Young Singers Project
15 young singers from nine nations took part in the Young Singers Project this year. Stage rehearsals, language coaching, song interpretation and working with Festival artists make the YSP a young artist programme which has become an international benchmark. Public master classes were given by such renowned artists such as Lisette Oropesa, Piotr Beczala and Malcolm Martineau. Like every year, the Young Singers were heard in the children’s opera, the new production Der Teufel mit den drei goldenen Haaren, and during their final concert featuring a diverse programme. Since 2008, 182 young vocalists from 45 countries have been given this unique career opportunity.
Open Dress Rehearsals
This year the Salzburg Festival opened the dress rehearsals for Jedermann and Die Zauberflöte. The artists agreed to give these performances without additional fees.
100,000 Euro for Charity
The revenue from ticket sales to the dress rehearsals amounted to 100,000 €, of which 35,000€ each were donated to the organizations “Doctors without Borders” and “Nachbar in Not”, 20,000 € went to the Caritas and10,000 € to “Pro Mente Salzburg”, the charitable society for psychological and social rehabilitation of young people.
Thanks to Siemens, ORF Salzburg and UNITEL, the Siemens Festival>Nights have been taking place for 21 years, the world’s largest public screening of cultural events, using optimal daylight-compatible LED screen technology and a state-of-the-art sound system. Every year, music and theatre lovers from all around the world enjoy historical and current Festival performances free of charge. This summer, 40,000 visitors attended the 44 screenings.
The Association of Friends of the Salzburg Festival offers numerous accompanying events every summer, taking up issues suggested by the Festival programme and illuminating them further. This year, its members and patrons had 73 events to choose from; 5,977 tickets were issued.
One of these events was the two-part Festival Symposium (Festival Dialogue in two parts) on 12 and 26 August at the main auditorium of the Salzburg University.
Taking the programmatic centrepiece of this year’s Festival – Dante Alighieri’s epochal work Divina Commedia – as its point of departure, the two-part event created a connection with current events. “Listening, seeing, writing, reading, talking – against war, against oblivion, against suppression”. Lectures and panel discussions featured experts from Austria, Ukraineand Russia: Marina Davydova, Tanja Maljartschuk, Katja Petrowskaja, Emil Brix, Dmitrij Kapitelman, Vladimir Vertlib and Karl Schlögel. The moderator was Michael Kerbler. The podcast is available at falter.at.
Music, drama, readings, exhibitions and dance – for two days, Salzburg’s residents and guests celebrated the beginning of theFestival summer at the Festival Opening Party. On 22 and 23 July, the festivities featured 66 events, and more than 10,000 free tickets were distributed for 29 performance venues.
Honours: Ruby Festival Brooch
The Ruby Festival Brooch was awarded to Wolfgang Rihm this summer. “Wolfgang Rihm has been associated with the Salzburg Festival for 40 years; his works have become an important, an essential part of the Festival’s landscape nearly every summer. Wolfgang Rihm never imagines art in spaces devoid of history. To him, however, it is always more than a space forevents to resonate. Culture and the arts, both are essential for educating our hearts. That is where Wolfgang Rihm’s music leads us,” thus Artistic Director Markus Hinterhäuser praised Wolfgang Rihm’s oeuvre.
100 Years of IGNM
Founded on 11 August 1922 under the patronage of Festival President Richard Strauss at the Café Bazar, it was one of the first musical peace projects after World War I and included such composers as Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith and Anton Webern: the International Society of New Music (IGNM) has become a major institution fostering contemporary music. 100 years after its founding, members of the Vienna Philharmonic performed a chamber music concert featuring works of the original members at the main auditorium of the International Mozarteum Foundation.
Robert Rauschenberg INFERNO | Ilya & Emilia Kabakov THE FLYING KOMAROV
This exhibition, curated in cooperation with the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and shown on the balcony of the Karl-Böhm-Saal, met with a broad audience response. Taking Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia, the 2022 Festival summer’s programmatic centre, as its point of departure, the Salzburg Festival cooperated with the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac to show an installation of Robert Rauschenberg’s set of offset lithographies facsimiles of his Dante Cycle and a projection by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov entitled The Flying Komarov. The exhibition was open to the public starting on 19 July, one hour before performances began and during the intervals at theHaus für Mozart and the Felsenreitschule.
Renovation and Expansion of the Festspielhäuser
After the award of the winning project to Jabornegg & Pálffy Generalplaner ZT GmbH by an international jury, all the entries in the competition were presented to the public as part of an exhibition at the foyer of the Großes Festspielhaus from 2to 15 July. More than 700 interested visitors studied the 15 submissions here, while guided tours given by Lukas Crepaz, Executive Director of the Salzburg Festival, and Michael Brandauer, the project manager, offered insights into the conceptual ideas behind them.
Dreamers – Video Installation • Shirin Neshat
Raised in Iran and living in New York, the artist Shirin Neshat examines the role of women in the context of Islamic societies in her award-winning films and photographs. For her artistic work, she has received the International Award at the VeniceBiennial. In the trilogy Dreamers, Neshat refers to her own dreams, the fear of strangers and questions of homelands, “mother” lands and freedom. The works were shown on two evenings at the Kollegienkirche.
Summer Revenue
31.1 million Euro gross
Visitors
211,000 at regular events (as of 29 Aug.)
4,834 at ticketed dress rehearsals
13,247 at 41 special events (master classes, Festival Opening Party etc.)
12,514 at 11 ticketed rehearsals and dress rehearsals
Total: 241,595
At 96%, the rate of occupied seats returned to pre-coronavirus pandemic levels.
Provenance of Visitors
76 Nations in total
37 Non-European Nations
The Press Office accredited 551 journalists from 31 countries this year. The 44 screenings of the Siemens Festival>Nights on Kapitelplatz allowed more than 40,000 guests to view current and historical Salzburg Festival performances between 23 July and 28 August. (Figures current as of 29 Aug.)
Great thanks are due to all supporters of the Salzburg Festival. Without financial support from our sponsors and private patrons, it would be impossible to present the Salzburg Festival in this form.
