Salzburg Festival Halls

The Salzburg Festival is the largest and most prestigious classical music festival in the world, selling roughly 250,000 tickets across six weeks each summer. It was founded in 1920 by three men who wanted to use art to heal a shattered continent: theatre director Max Reinhardt, poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and composer Richard Strauss. The inaugural performance — Hofmannsthal's morality play Jedermann, staged on the steps of Salzburg Cathedral — was deliberately chosen to remind a post-war audience that culture could still matter. That play is still performed in the same location every single year, over a century later.

The festival complex is itself carved partly into the Mönchsberg cliff face. The first festival hall was built in 1925 on the site of the old archiepiscopal riding school. The Felsenreitschule — the rock riding school — retains its triple arcade of arches cut into the living rock, creating one of the most dramatically atmospheric performance spaces in the world. The Großes Festspielhaus, the main venue, opened in 1960 with significant input from Herbert von Karajan regarding the acoustic design. Its stage is one of the widest in Europe.

The Nazis attempted to co-opt the festival after the 1938 Anschluss, and several key figures — including Max Reinhardt, who was Jewish — were forced into exile. Reinhardt died in New York in 1943, never having returned to the institution he created. The festival resumed after the war, and its deliberate continuation of Reinhardt's vision became an act of cultural restitution as much as artistic programming.

Today, performances span opera, drama, and orchestral concerts, with the Vienna Philharmonic as the festival's resident orchestra. Tickets for premier performances can cost hundreds of euros and sell out months in advance. For many in the classical music world, this is the pinnacle.