Mozart Week

It typically includes orchestral and chamber music concerts and recitals as well as regular opera performances, featuring international orchestras and artists.

Suggestions of an annual event, inspired by the Bayreuth Festival, did not come to fruiting, chiefly for lack of funds as well as due to the inadequate local artistic resources.

[1][2] The Salzburg Festival was eventually created in 1920, but organised every summer independently of the ISM and, although putting an emphasis on Mozart at a time when the newly-standalone German-Austria was seeking to define its identity, open to a broader repertoire.

[3][note 1] Its original focus was to rediscover and revive little-known works from Mozart’s prolific production, especially the earliest of his 22 operas, with academic and critical concerns over interpretative practice, echoing the start of the historically informed performance movement as well as the launch of the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe in 1956.

[10] The first edition opened at the Salzburger Landestheater with a performance of La finta semplice (1769), staged by Géza Rech and conducted by Bernhard Paumgartner with the present Camerata Salzburg; they made the first recording of the opera, composed by a 12-year-old Mozart but withdrawn, and of which the first confirmed performance had taken place only in 1921.

Performances were conducted by Karl Böhm and Carl Schuricht with the Vienna Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan with the Philharmonia Orchestra, and Joseph Keilberth with the Bamberg Symphony, and among the guest singers and soloists were Géza Anda, Wilhelm Backhaus, Clara Haskil, Tatiana Nikolayeva, Igor Oistrakh, Wolfgang Schneiderhan, Irmgard Seefried, and Rita Streich.

[11] Starting in 2004, on an initiative of the new artistic director Stephan Pauly [de], they have increasingly featured later composers up to the present day, including commissions of new works and composers-in-residence.

During the COVID-19 pandemic in Austria, the 2021 edition was replaced with a reduced programme streamed online, as the updated government regulations on social distancing made it unpractical to plan 56 events in eleven days with enough certainly.

A number of conductors appeared with the Vienna Philharmonic for the first time at the Mozart Week, in the festival’s early decades because they shared its repertoire and approach, such as Sylvain Cambreling, John Eliot Gardiner, Leopold Hager, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Yehudi Menuhin, and Roger Norrington,[22] more recently Alain Altinoglu and Robin Ticciati.