The Mozart Week (German: Mozartwoche) is a classical musicfestival centred on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, held every year in his native Salzburg. It was created in 1956 on the 200th anniversary of his birth, and coincides with his birthday 27 January, lasting in fact slightly over a week.
Although the festival has Mozart’s music in focus and perspective, it also features works by his contemporaries, composers of the prior eras who inspired him, and those of later eras he influenced in return, and, since the 2000s, new works commissioned to contemporary composers. It typically includes orchestral and chamber music concerts and recitals as well as regular opera performances, featuring international orchestras and artists. Since the turn of the 2010s, it has also experimented with other genres of the performing arts.
The Mozarteum originally organised a Salzburg Mozart Festival (Salzburger Mozartfest) on an occasional basis. The first was in 1877, marked by the first apparence of the Vienna Philharmonic in Salzburg and in fact out of Vienna. Others followed in 1879, 1887 (the 100th anniversary of the premiere of Don Giovanni), 1891 (the 100th anniversary of the composer’s death), 1901, 1904, 1906 (the 150th anniversary of his birth), and 1910; one was planned for 1914 but cancelled due to the outbreak of the Great War. Suggestions of an annual event, inspired by the Bayreuth Festival, did not come to fruiting, chiefly for lack of funds as well as due to the inadequate local artistic resources.[1][2] The Salzburg Festival was eventually created in 1920, but organised every summer independently of the ISM and, although putting an emphasis on Mozart at a time when the newly-standalone German-Austria was seeking to define its identity, open to a broader repertoire.
Programmes originally included mainly works by Mozart’s contemporaries of the classical period in addition to his own. They were first expanded to earlier composers who had influenced him in 1959, with George Frideric Handel on the 200th anniversary of his death.[11] Starting in 2004, on an initiative of the new artistic director Stephan Pauly[de], they have increasingly featured later composers up to the present day, including commissions of new works and composers-in-residence.[12] Pauly also called for new forms of performing arts to be featured at the Mozart Week, and “to dare to experiment and think artistically about how to present music in concert in the 21st century.”[13]
The Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón became artistic director from the 2019 edition, with a contract eventually extended to run until 2028. In 2021, he also became artistic director of the Mozarteum Foundation.[14] He announced his intention to bring the festival “back to its root” and to Mozart’s music, which was featured exclusively on his first edition, although heard in a range of styles and interpretations, and supported by new partnership with local institutions in order for the whole town to celebrate Mozart.[15][16] In addition to singing himself, he has acted as stage director at the festival.
During the COVID-19 pandemic in Austria, the 2021 edition was replaced with a reduced programme streamed online, as the updated government regulations on social distancing made it unpractical to plan 56 events in eleven days with enough certainly.[17] The 2022 was cancelled entirely at short notice due to the spread of the Omicron variant.[18]
Programmes
The Great Hall of the Mozarteum.Vienna Hall at the Mozarteum.
The programmes of the Mozart Week have Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his music in focus and perspective, but, despite its name, are not limited to his own compositions, and have long included works by his contemporaries, composers of the previous eras he drew inspiration from, and those up to the present day. Also, it lasts in fact about ten days, with a busy schedule of around fifty performances.[19][20]
Most performances take place in the two concert halls of the old Mozarteum building, the Great Hall (Große Saal) and smaller Vienna Hall (Wiener Saal), as well as in the Great Hall (Große Aula) of the University of Salzburg, where Mozart himself performed and which was substantially redesigned in modern times.[24] Performances of opera or with a large orchestra take place at the adjoining performing venues of the Salzburg Festival, the Great Festival Theatre, the smaller Haus für Mozart and the open-air Felsenreitschule, or at the Salzburger Landestheater.
The festival has edited a substantial programme booklet since 1971, with essays, introductions and pictures.[12]
In 2019, Rolando Villazón created Mozart Week on Tour (Mozartwoche on Tour), a touring project which brings some festival programmes to other cities.[30] Performances have been given at the Aix-en-Provence Easter Festival in Aix-en-Provence, France in April 2019,[31] at the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, Germany in December 2022,[32] and at the Mozart Festival in Medellín, Columbia in October 2024, following the appearance of the Orquesta Iberacademy at the 2023 Mozart Week.[33]
Governance and funding
The Mozarteum building, with the Great Hall to the left.
It is independent from the other classical music and opera festivals held in the city, the Salzburg Easter Festival (founded 1967), the Salzburg Whitsun Festival (founded 1973), and the summertime Salzburg Festival (founded 1920). The ISM also produces a concert season during the rest of the year, as well as another festival, Dialoge, founded in 2006.
As is common for a number of opera festivals, especially those which only give a reduced number of performances, the staged productions of the Mozart Week are sometimes in co-production, for example with the summer festival.
↑ The festival is unrelated to the Mozart Week of the German Reich (Mozart-Woche des Deutschen Reiches), organised by Nazi authorities in 1941 on the 150th anniversary of Mozart’s death, and which took place in Vienna.[4][5][6][7][8] It was the climax of a year of celebrations across Germany and annexed Austria, some of which in Salzburg, in order to celebrate Mozart as a German composer.[9]
Citations
↑ Laut, Joseph (1965). Festspiele in Salzburg: Eine Dokumentation (in German). Salzburg: Residenz-Verlag. pp.16–30.
↑ Kriechbaumer, Robert (2021). „Salzburg hat seine Cosima”: Lilli Lehmann und die Salzburger Musikfeste (in German). Vienna: Böhlau. pp.9–71. ISBN978-3-205-21362-8.
↑ Benoit-Otis, Marie-Hélène; Cécile, Quesney (2016a). "Eine Wiener Feier für den "deutschen Mozart". Nationale Fragen bei der Mozart-Woche des Deutschen Reiches (1941)". In Mecking, Sabine; Wasserloos, Yvonne (eds.). Inklusion & Exklusion. »Deutsche Musik«in Europe und Nordamerika, 1848-1945 (in German). Göttingen: V&R unipress. pp.253–270. ISBN978-3-8471-0473-5.
↑ Benoit-Otis, Marie-Hélène; Cécile, Quesney (2019). Mozart 1941. La Semaine Mozart du Reich allemand et ses invités français (in French). Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. ISBN978-2-7535-7598-1.
1 2 Walterskirchen, Gerhard; Großpietsch, Christoph (2019) [1st ed. 1987]. "Mozartwoche". In Mittermayr, Peter; Spängler, Heinrich (eds.). Salzburger Kulturlexikon (in German) (3rded.). Salzburg: Jung und Jung. ISBN978-3-99027-226-8– via Salzburger Kulturlexikon 3.0, University of Salzburg.
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![The actor Matthias Bundschuh [de] with Rolando Villazon during the 2024 edition, at which he staged a marionette production of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Mozart and Salieri at the Salzburg Marionette Theatre. Matthias Bundschuh, Rolando Villazon.jpg](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e4/Matthias_Bundschuh%2C_Rolando_Villaz%C3%B3n.jpg/220px-Matthias_Bundschuh%2C_Rolando_Villaz%C3%B3n.jpg)
