The Salzburg Easter Festival (, sometimes OFS) is a classical music and opera festival held every year over the extended week before Easter (Holy Week) in Salzburg, Austria since 1967.
It was created by the conductor Herbert von Karajan, and for most of its history featured the Berlin Philharmonic, of which Karajan was chief conductor; his successors in Berlin, Claudio Abbado and Simon Rattle, succeeded him in Salzburg as well. The orchestra and Rattle left in 2013, and were replaced between 2013 and 2022 by the Dresden Staatskapelle and Christian Thielemann. The Berlin Philharmonic returned as the resident orchestra in 2026, with its chief conductor Kirill Petrenko. Since 2022, the artistic director has been Nikolaus Bachler.
Each edition includes the production of an opera and a series of orchestral and choral concerts, as well as a complementary programme of performances in other formats.
The Easter Festival is independent from the organization which produces the (summertime) Salzburg Festival and the Salzburg Whitsun Festival.
History
Foundation The Salzburg Easter Festival was a creation of the conductor Herbert von Karajan. After his 1964 resignation as director of the Vienna State Opera, to where he would not return until 1977, he decided to no longer take charge of a traditional opera company, avoiding the constraints of having to deliver a full season and to oversee a large, conflict-prone organization. His intent, which he credits to a suggestion from Christoph von Dohnányi, was to produce opera in conditions which granted him complete control over music, stage direction, and management, and enabled him enough focus to achieve his designs with the highest possibly quality..
This was to be with the Berlin Philharmonic, of which he was the chief conductor since 1955. Unlike their counterparts of a number of major orchestras of the German-speaking lands which serve as the pit orchestra of their city’s opera house, for example the Vienna Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic exclusively performed in concert at the time.
According to Karajan’s recollections, he initially thought that the newly reconstructed Grand Theatre in Geneva was suitable for his enterprise. However, he realized during rehearsals of Boris Godunov for the 1965 Salzburg Festival that the large stage and modern facilities of the Grand Festival Theatre, recently built at his initiative, made it the ideal venue.. A Salzburg native, he lived with his family in nearby Anif.
The new festival was to fit into the “Karajan system”, under which he combined his several positions and partnerships for complete artistic and financial independence. It would work without government subsidy, and although Karajan would act as manager, producer, funder, sole conductor, and stage director, he would ask for no pay. For each edition, the opera would be recorded in studio in Berlin the previous autumn, for one of the three record labels with which Karajan was under contract (Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, EMI), and which he could put in competition in order to obtain the best possible terms. Commercially, this meant that part of the preparation work for the festival would be paid for by the label. It also enabled the orchestra to limit its presence in Salzburg in the middle of its Berlin season; being a corporation of the city-state at the time, it obtained the permission of West Berlin authorities, on the argument that it would promote the city’s international reputation. Artistically, this meant that the musical performance was fully ready long before the short festival, and that the conductor, orchestra and cast avoided doing the bulk of their preparation in a few hasty rehearsals immediately before the festival opened, and could concentrate on the staging when they reconvened in Salzburg. The singers left Berlin with a recording of the full orchestral parts, which enabled them to rehearse in the meantime with more precision and comfort than with a piano accompaniment. Karajan also used the studio tapes when he began to work on sets and stage effects at the theatre. The recording were released in the spring at the same time as the festival, both contributing to the promotion of the other...
The Easter Festival was in complement to the Salzburg Festival in the summer, of which Karajan was artistic director since 1957. The Vienna Philharmonic traditionally occupies the place of honour at the summer festival; the Berlin Philharmonic had first performed there only in 1957, brought in by Karajan. Karajan’s initial focus was the works of Richard Wagner, which were avoided in Salzburg in the summer due to a gentlemen’s agreement with the nearby Bayreuth Festival held at the same time. Karajan had conducted in Bayreuth in 1951 and 1952 when the festival reopened after the war, but found its working methods incompatible with the model of music-making he started to develop at this stage of his career.
The first edition opened on 19 March 1967 (Palm Sunday).
Karajan era
Karajan’s first endeavour was a production of Richard Wagner’s four-part over the first four editions, starting in 1967 with , the popular second part. The had already been his first stage production in Vienna in 1957, and this made it possible to negotiate a lucrative recording deal from Deutsche Grammophon, as the label was eager to compete with Decca’s recently-completed recording under Georg Solti, the first studio recording of the full cycle. This was Karajan’s first studio recording of a Wagner opera, after three decades conducting them..
The festival reached budget balance on its first edition, even managing to turn a quasi-symbolic profit (given in different sources as 50schilling or 300schilling),. which Karajan took as his only fee. Another way to fund the festival was co-productions, reviving Karajan’s idea of a pool of major opera houses, attempted when he started a partnership between the Vienna State Opera and the Teatro alla Scala. The inaugural was announced as a co-production with the New York Metropolitan Opera; however, only and ended up performed in New York in the winter following the Salzburg premiere as expected, with Karajan in the pit with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. Due to a strike, Siegfried (1969 edition) was presented only in 1972 with the recording main cast, but conducted by Erich Leinsdorf..
The Easter Festival benefited from the star appeal of Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, which was at its highest during the 1960s and 1970s. As it needed to be privately funded, it heavily relied on an affluent international audience, to which it granted exclusive access; membership of the Association of Patrons was almost indispensable to obtain tickets, despite their high price. It was at the time the only opportunity to hear an opera played by the Berlin Philharmonic. Karajan conducted every single opera and concert performance for almost two decades, and also staged the operas himself, except in 1975 ( by Franco Zeffirelli) and 1987. The music critic Joachim Kaiser wrote of his original that it was “self-cast, self-financed, self-staged, self-conducted — that Wagner composed the piece almost seems like a blemish”. His wife Eliette von Karajan acted as an unofficial hostess at the festival, and was usually the last to take her front-row seat jus as the lights went down..
Wagner was the main focus of “Karajan’s counter-Bayreuth” (Robert C. Bachmann). in the first years of the festival. He ended up producing the entire Bayreuth canon, concluding in 1982, with the exception of , for lack of a tenor he felt suitable for the title role. All his studio recordings of Wagner’s operas, except for an earlier recording of , were part of Salzburg productions; he never recorded in the studio. He had initially envisioned that when the inaugural was completed, subsequent editions would enable him to perform two entire cycles, or one cycle and another opera for two or three evenings, with a few concerts in complement. In the event, it became customary to simply perform one opera at every edition. Apart from Wagner’s, these were from the core of Karajan’s lyric repertoire, especially by Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini, with a few revivals; however, operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Strauss remained reserved to the summer festival.. The orchestra and choral concerts featured works Karajan frequently conducted in Berlin or on tour, most by Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner, Mozart, and Strauss; this made it possible to minimize on-site rehearsals, and the concerts were sometimes preceded by a studio recording, as for the opera.
Karajan’s stagings favoured a romantic, naturalistic, illustrative style, which stood in contrast with the new interpretations and social criticism brought about in Bayreuth by Wieland Wagner until his death in 1966, and by the guest directors thereafter invited by his brother Wolfgang Wagner as part of the “Bayreuth workshop”..
In 1973, Salzburg Whitsun Concerts (now the Salzburg Whitsun Festival) were created by Karajan over Pentecost weekend, intended for people who could not obtain tickets for the Easter Festival. At the time, these were a short cycle of three concerts. They were taken over by the organization behind the summer festival in 1998..
Karajan, who was enthusiastic about new recording technologies and had started to film opera in studio, formed the design to produce his Salzburg . The orchestral parts for were recorded during the 1973 festival on the occasion of a revival of the 1968 stage production, but the shooting sessions could take place only five years later in a Munich studio, with a partly different cast. (Singers lip synced.) The project proved too costly to continue.
The Easter Festival was increasingly criticized from the mid-1970s, as the lack of appropriate singers and the rising costs delayed the production of new Wagner operas and forced the revival of productions from the summer festival, including the fifteen-year-old , leaving it with little of an artistic line apart from Karajan’s central presence.. His complete control decided René Kollo to leave over creative differences after his first performance in the title role of the 1976 Lohengrin, followed by Karl Ridderbusch.. Despite his initial insistence on independence, Karajan resorted to subsidies from the state and city government from 1969, which he defended by pointing out the benefits to the local economy. In the face of public criticism and as government representatives started questioning the management and future of the festival, he again renounced their support in 1982.. The music critic Reinhard Beuth lamented the “bankruptcy of an idea” in 1978: “The private company has to be subsidised, the Wagner festival became Italian , and festival standards sunk to repertory level. With the transfer of Verdi’s from the summer repertoire to next year’s Easter Festival, the last remnant of independence and significance will be gone.” Quoted by .
The world presentation of the compact disc (CD) took place during the Easter Festival on 15 April 1981, at a press conference of Akio Morita and Norio Ohga (Sony), Joop van Tilburg (Philips), and Richard Busch (PolyGram), in the presence of Karajan who praised the new format.
As Karajan’s health declined in the 1980s, he started delegating some of his many duties: one of the concerts had a guest conductor from 1985, starting with Klaus Tennstedt that year, and the 1987 production of Don Giovanni was staged by Michael Hampe.
Abbado and Rattle directorships