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”.
Karajan years conducting in the early 1970s. 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. 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.
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. Starting in 1983, Karajan, due to his degrading relation with the Berlin Philharmonic as well as to his declining state of 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. however, he died in July 1989.
1990s transition The Whitsun Concerts continued after Karajan’s death. The Berlin Philharmonic returned to the Easter Festival in 1991 after a one-year absence, but not at Whitsun, for which other international orchestras were invited.
Georg Solti, who served as artistic director at Easter in 1992–1993, also took over the Whitsun Concerts until 1994 with the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, of which he had been music director, sharing conducting duties with his successor
Daniel Barenboim. The new chief conductor in Berlin,
Claudio Abbado, also became artistic director at Easter in 1994, restoring the close association of the Karajan years between orchestra and festival, but they did not came back for Whitsun. Although the
London Symphony Orchestra was in residence for the next three years, the event found itself with little of an artistic line. In 1998, the management passed to the Salzburg Festspielfonds, the organisation with puts out the summer festival, with , 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. 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 (), 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 , which had not been performed for two centuries. Opera productions: • 2007: (1778), by
Domenico Cimarosa • 2008: (1779), by
Giovanni Paisiello • 2009: (1743), by
Niccolò Jommelli • 2010: (1771), by
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart • 2011: (1826), by
Saverio Mercadante Cecilia Bartoli starring as
Cleopatra in her 2012 debut production , staged by
Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier (summer revival) 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. 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. 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, 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”. Despite the initial plans for short-term artistic directions, Bartoli’s was renewed for several years, with her contract eventually running until 2031. 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. Opera productions: == Governance and funding ==