History
The founder of the Salzburg Festival in 1920, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, envisioned extending it, with editions “every year in the summer, but also now and then at other times, such as around Christmas, or elsewhen in the winter, also at Easter and Pentecost”. [1]
Karajan years
The festival was founded in 1973, as the Salzburg Whitsun Concerts, by the conductor Herbert von Karajan. A Salzburg native and nearby resident, Karajan was in charge of the summer festival since 1957, and in 1967 had created a separate Salzburg Easter Festival in order to produce opera with complete artistic and managerial independence, bringing the Berlin Philharmonic, of which he was chief conductor. Due to the high demand for the relatively short Easter festival, the Whitsun concerts were created for repeat or complementary concerts by Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, intended for those who could not obtain tickets for Easter. The concerts took place at the Salzburg Grand Festival Theatre, built at Karajan’s request and opened in 1960. [2]
Karajan and the orchestra usually performed three symphony or choral concerts featuring great works of the romantic era, with an initial focus on the works of Anton Bruckner, paralleling those on Richard Wagner at Easter and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Strauss in the summer. [3] Anne-Sophie Mutter, Karajan’s favourite violinist in his last decade, first performed with him at the age of 13 at the 1977 edition, playing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto . [4]
Starting in 1982, Karajan, due to his degrading relation with the Berlin Philharmonic as well as his declining health, invited a number of guest conductors, such as Lorin Maazel, Seiji Ozawa, Vladimir Ashkenazy and James Levine, and for a time brought the Vienna Philharmonic for his own concerts. [3] [5]
1990s transition
The festival continued after Karajan’s death in 1989. Karajan’s successor in Berlin, Claudio Abbado, became artistic director of the Easter Festival only in 1994; however, the Berlin Philharmonic ended its association with the Whitsun Concerts. Other international orchestras such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and London Symphony Orchestra were invited instead for Whitsun, and the event found itself with little of an artistic line. [3] [6]
In 1998, the management passed to the Salzburg Festspielfonds, the organisation with puts out the summer festival, with Hans Landesmann, who was in charge of concert programming in the summer, as artistic director. Now called a Whitsun Festival and branded as Whitsun+Baroque, it was expanded to opera with a complement of concerts, with a focus on baroque music, which is not traditionally played at the summer festival but had gained new interest from mainstream musical institutions following the historically informed performance movement. One inspiration was the International Baroque Days held for Whitsun at Melk Abbey. [3] The first opera production was Francesco Cavalli’s La Calisto (1651).
That same year, the newly-opened Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, Germany’s largest opera house, created a Herbert von Karajan Whitsun Festival, with Salzburg’s agreement. [3]
The event relied on prominent guest conductors, orchestras and singers. As is common for a number of opera festivals, especially those which only give a reduced number of performances like the Easter Festival, the Whitsun Festival usually works in co-production, often with the summer festival.
Riccardo Muti
Starting in 2007, Jürgen Flimm, the new intendant of the summer festival, decided to entrust the artistic direction of each Whitsun Festival to an artist with a thematic carte blanche. The American baritone Thomas Hampson initially accepted to take over the 2007 edition, but withdrew a few months later due to other commitments. [7]
The first artistic director under the new system was the Italian conductor Riccardo Muti, a frequent guest at the summer festival. His project, initially for three years but extended to five, was a partnership with the Ravenna Festival, founded by his wife, to rediscover and revive the legacy of the 18th-century Neapolitan School, under the motto “Naples: A City in Retrospect”. The Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra (Italian : Orchestra Giovanile Luigi Cherubini), a youth orchestra he had founded in Piacenza with a summer residence in Ravenna, also took residence in Salzburg. The debut production in 2007 was Domenico Cimarosa’s Il ritorno di Don Calandrino , which had not been performed for two centuries. [8]
Opera productions:
- 2007: Il ritorno di Don Calandrino (1778), by Domenico Cimarosa
- 2008: Il matrimonio inaspettato (1779), by Giovanni Paisiello
- 2009: Demofoonte (1743), by Niccolò Jommelli
- 2010: Betulia liberata (1771), by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
- 2011: I due Figaro (1826), by Saverio Mercadante
Cecilia Bartoli
In 2012, the Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli became artistic director of the festival, where she had given one of her first professional performances in 1987, invited by Karajan for Bach’s Mass in B minor . [9] It was announced that the opera produced each year for Whitsun, with two performances, would then be revived at the summer festival a few weeks later.
Bartoli chose women as her broad spotlight, each year presenting “a new facet of femininity”, which she would embody herself as the female lead. [10] Although each edition has a particular theme, her overall direction displayed a less academic approach than her predecessors’, as her star appeal became the festival’s centre of interest, [11] echoing that of Karajan in its founding years and returning to what she called “the old recipe of organizing beautiful programs and inviting great artists”. [9] The operas put in production have been from her core personal repertoire ranging from baroque to bel canto , with several works of George Frideric Handel and Gioachino Rossini. She even chose the musical West Side Story in 2016 in order to sing Maria, drawing public reservations from the summer festival president Helga Rabl-Stadler over the vocal suitability of the cast as well as the use of a sound system. [10] [12]
Despite the initial plans for short-term artistic directions, Bartoli’s was renewed for several years, with her contract eventually running until 2026. [13] Les Musiciens du Prince, a baroque orchestra formed in 2016 at the opéra de Monte-Carlo with Bartoli as artistic director, became resident orchestra in Salzburg in 2017; Bartoli became director of the opera in January 2023.
The 2020 edition, with Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale , was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Austria. The festival returned in 2021, at half capacity that year. [14]
Opera productions:
- 2012: Giulio Cesare (1724), by George Frideric Handel
- 2013: Norma (1831), by Vincenzo Bellini
- 2014: La Cenerentola (1817), by Gioachino Rossini
- 2015: Iphigénie en Tauride (1779), by Christoph Willibald Gluck
- 2016: West Side Story (1957), by Leonard Bernstein
- 2017: Ariodante (1735), by George Frideric Handel
- 2018: L'italiana in Algeri (1813), by Gioachino Rossini
- 2019: Alcina (1735), by George Frideric Handel
- 2020: cancelled
- 2021: Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (1707), by George Frideric Handel
- 2022: The Barber of Seville (1816), by Gioachino Rossini
- 2023: Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), by Christoph Willibald Gluck
- 2024: La clemenza di Tito (1791), by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
