In the same year Dermota made his début at the Salzburg Festival in a production of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, conducted by Arturo Toscanini.
He was a witness (and helped to save parts of the furniture) when the opera house burned down after an Allied air raid on March 13, 1945.
After the war he stayed with the company in its provisional lodgings at Theater an der Wien, and was one of the stars of the reopening of the original house in 1955 (as Florestan in Beethoven's Fidelio).
Anton Dermota sang as a tenor as Alfred in Die Fledermaus in the 1950 London Gramophone recording LLP 305.
A year later he sang the Shepherd in Carlos Kleiber's famous recording of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, sounding astonishingly young.