Salzburg Whitsun Festival

In 1998, production was transferred to the organisation which puts out the (summertime) Salzburg Festival, and augmented with an opera performance, with a focus on the baroque and classical periods.

The founder of the Salzburg Festival in 1920, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, envisioned extending it, with editions “every year in the summer, but also now and then at other times, such as around Christmas, or elsewhen in the winter, also at Easter and Pentecost”.

The new chief conductor in Berlin, Claudio Abbado, also became artistic director at Easter in 1994, restoring the close association of the Karajan years between orchestra and festival, but they did not came back for Whitsun.

That same year, the newly-opened Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, Germany’s largest opera house, created a Herbert von Karajan Whitsun Festival, with Salzburg’s agreement.

His project, initially for three years but extended to five, was a partnership with the Ravenna Festival, founded by his wife, to rediscover and revive the legacy of the 18th-century Neapolitan School, under the motto “Naples: A City in Retrospect”.

[10] Opera productions: In 2012, the Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli became artistic director of the festival, where she had given one of her first professional performances in 1987, invited by Karajan for Bach’s Mass in B minor.

[12] Although each edition has a particular theme, her overall direction displayed a less academic approach than her predecessors’, as her star appeal became the festival’s centre of interest,[13] echoing that of Karajan in its founding years and returning to what she called “the old recipe of organizing beautiful programs and inviting great artists”.

[11] The operas put in production have been from her core personal repertoire ranging from baroque to bel canto, with several works of George Frideric Handel and Gioachino Rossini.

She even chose the musical West Side Story in 2016 in order to sing Maria, drawing public reservations from the summer festival president Helga Rabl-Stadler [de] over the vocal suitability of the cast as well as the use of a sound system.