The Festival opening celebration 2023 of the Salzburg Festival is an offer to all Salzburgers to get in the mood for the Festival summer. With 85 varied programme items, all age groups are invited to experience art and culture from a wide range of disciplines – free of charge.

Music, drama, readings, films, exhibitions, dance and guided tours at 31 venues: For two days on 22 and 23 July, Salzburgers and Festival guests will have the opportunity to get in the mood for the Festival summer at the Festival Opening Celebration.

In the 100th anniversary year of the Salzburg Festival in 2020, a Jedermann Gala was planned with a hundred actors and actresses from past productions and a selection of the stage music performed over the last 100 years. The project fell victim to the pandemic and will now be realised retrospectively. Hannes Löschel, musical director of the Jedermann production, takes us through the programme from the beginnings of the Salzburg Festival to the present in contemporary adaptations. (22.07.2023, 7 to 8.15 p.m.)

In 2020, the Salzburger Nachrichten published an opulent illustrated book on 100 years of the Salzburg Festival. Many of the protagonists featured in the book will be present at the Jedermann Gala on 22 July.

An insight into the rehearsal work for this year’s new opera production of Macbeth by Giuseppe Verdi after William Shakespeare is available at the Großes Festspielhaus. The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra will perform under the baton of Franz Welser-Möst. The director is Krzysztof Warlikowski, who most recently staged Elektra in Salzburg. (22.07.2023, 3 to 4.30 p.m.)

From project to opera stage

The talents of the Young Singers Project will give samples of their skills in the Great Hall of the Mozarteum Foundation. Accompanied on the piano by Edward Liddall, the 14 singers from nine nations will perform songs, arias and duets. Further public performances by the young artists will take place at the YCA concerts. (22.07.2023, 8 to 9.30 pm)

Ruth Walz (*1941) is a German theatre photographer whose collaboration with directors such as Pierre Audi, Peter Sellars and Peter Stein is legendary. Walz still works regularly for the Salzburg Festival. Here she met artists such as William Kentridge and Robert Wilson and found exciting perspectives in the imposing Felsenreitschule. The exhibition at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg now shows intensive photos of the great photographer at the Old Town location (Rupertinum). On the occasion of the festival opening, the Museum der Moderne invites you to an art walk through the exhibition. (22.07.2023, 2 to 3.30 p.m.)

The major project “Festival District 2030” refers to the planned renovation and expansion of the Salzburg Festival venues: Großes Festspielhaus, Haus für Mozart and Felsenreitschule. Commercial Director Lukas Crepaz and Technical Director Andreas Zechner give an insight into the plans. (22.07.2023, 11 am and 11.30 am)

Jedermann Remixed

On the first evening of the Siemens Fest>Spiel>Nights, Hannes Rossacher’s film “Jedermann Remixed” is on the programme. A performance of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s classic that has never existed in this form: Through the montage of various recordings from several decades, a Salzburg Jedermann ensemble appears on the screen, whose famous members have all performed on the Domplatz, but can only be seen together in this bold montage of diverse scenes across the performance history. Thus this ORF production in the 2020 version is a cultural-historical puzzle from Alexander Moissi to Tobias Moretti. The internationally renowned blues and roots musician Hans Theessink provides the specially created soundtrack. (22.07.2023, 8 pm)

This year’s readings deserve special mention. At Schloss Leopoldskron, among others, Valerie Pachner and Michael Maertens will read literary memoirs by his secretary Gusti Adler in addition to texts about Max Reinhardt’s former domicile. (23.07.2023, 3.30 and 5.30 p.m.)

Max Reinhardt, one of the co-founders of the Salzburg Festival, bought Schloss Leopoldskron in 1918 and lived there until his emigration to the USA. The festival opening celebration offers the opportunity for two guided tours of this place steeped in history. (23.07.2023, 12.15 and 2.15 pm)

Film fans will get their money’s worth at Kapitelplatz, among other places, where “Springtime in Amsterdam“, the first feature film by internationally renowned opera director Christof Loy, who staged Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridiceat the Salzburg Whitsun Festival this year – a new production that will be revived in the summer. (23.07.2023, 5.30 pm)

The festival opening celebration in 2023 goes back to the basic idea of the Salzburg Festival in 1920, two years after the end of the First World War. “The dream of a fairy temple in which people of all world nations can find their way back to each other,” said Hugo von Hofmannthal. And Max Reinhardt added “also granting access to the less fortunate audience”. This maxim will also be consistently applied by the festival opening in 2023.

11.000 Zählkarten (Count cards)

The special thing about the festival opening is that admission is free. For marked events, one can order free so-called counting tickets from 1 July. The ticket is a print@home PDF to be printed on a DIN A4 page or saved on a mobile phone and presented at the entrance. In addition, there are numerous free admission events. The counting card also includes free use of the trolley buses in Salzburg from three hours before the start of the event until the end of operations on the same day. (pege)

Festival opening 2023 of the Salzburg Festival 22 and 23 July 2023 at many venues. Click here for the complete programme.