The 2024 Salzburg Competition from 19 July to 31 August

172 Performances on 44 Days at 15 Venues in addition to 33 Performances within the Youth Programme jung & jede’r. For full particulars of the 2024 Salzburg Competition click on right here

Opera: LES CONTES D´HOFFMANN / THE GAMBLER / THE IDIOT / DON GIOVANNI / LA CLEMENZA DI TITO / HAMLET (live performance efficiency) / CAPRICCIO (live performance efficiency) / IL PRIGIONIERO & IL CANTO SOSPESO (live performance efficiency) / KOMA (live performance efficiency) / BEGEHREN (live performance efficiency)

Drama: JEDERMANN / STERNSTUNDEN DER MENSCHHEIT / DIE ORESTIE / SPIEGELNEURONEN / AI & ART · A PERFORMATIVE DISCUSSION WITH AN AI NAMED MORPHEUS / VERGESSENE STÜCKE / DER ZAUBERBERG / EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED AND WOULD HAPPEN / EIN MITTSOMMERNACHTSTRAUM / LESUNGEN

Live performance: OUVERTURE SPIRITUELLE Et exspecto / VIENNA PHILHARMONIC / GUEST ORCHESTRAS / SACRED CONCERT / Time with SCHÖNBERG / CHAMBER CONCERTS / SOLOIST RECITALS / SONG RECITALS / KLEINE NACHTMUSIKEN / CANTO LIRICO / MOZART MATINEES · MOZARTEUM ORCHESTERA SALZBURG / CAMERATA SALZBURG / HERBERT VON KARAJAN YOUNG CONDUCTORS AWARD / YOUNG SINGERS PROJECT / SPECIAL CONCERTS

jung & jede’r – Jugendprogramm der Salzburger Festspiele

MUSICAL THEATRE: Die Kluge / Zeitzone JETZT
DRAMA: Liebe Grüße … oder Wohin das Leben fällt
INTERACTIONS: Faculty Programme / From Abtenau to Zell am See / Competition Mentorships / Youth Tickets & Schooling Choices / Younger Buddies
YOUNG ART & ARTISTS: Opera Camps / Drama Camp / Salzburger Festspiele und Theater Kinderchor

Public Screening: Competition productions will be seen each day as a part of the Siemens>Competition>Nights from 26 July to 31 August on Salzburg’s Kapitelplatz.

Preface to the 2024 Salzburg Competition

Actions between heaven and hell join the works featured within the Salzburg Competition’s 2024 programme: conjuring up the innate fantastic thing about the immeasurable and the ‘demonic’ abysses hidden inside it, revealing infinite solitude and dizzying godless freedom.

Such are the lives lived by enduring archetypal figures whom we’re each keen and reluctant to observe. The harmful narcissist Don Giovanni, the relentless avenger Vitellia, the deluded traitor Sesto, the commendably lenient Tito, the feverish gambler Alexey and the impassioned artist Hoffmann are among the many characters to be discovered within the Competition’s 2024 programme, together with a shady femme fragile, perpetrators of patricide and matricide, a mysterious Dostoyevskian fool, a soulful singer, a rich grandmother, a ‘twisted, troubled man’, fickle dreamers, pining romantics and plenty of extra. Every one among them is a nomad on the trail between heaven and hell. Their tales communicate of the soul’s deepest longings, the delicate nature of life, ruinous extra and greed, harrowing self-destruction and hellish passions – whereas additionally providing a probably hopeful imaginative and prescient of the long run.

The sombre creations and character research you will notice are based mostly on works by writers whom Stefan Zweig referred to as ‘transgressors of boundaries’ in literature. Their literary fashions lengthen from the earliest Greek tragedies to the figures of Don Quixote and Don Juan; from myths each historical and trendy via to the good novels of excessive modernism. We delve into the fanciful phantasms of E. T. A. Hoffmann and the high-charged prose of Dostoyevsky, whom Stefan Zweig esteemed for having ‘the magnifying energy of a microscope and the clarifying perception of a seer’. The epic panorama spans even wider, totally inspecting the human situation in disaster: from Thomas Mann’s saga concerning the decline of the bourgeoisie and Zweig’s ‘Stellar Moments of Humankind’ via to a biblical narrative by Botho Strauss.

Composers as different as Mozart, Offenbach, Prokofiev, Weinberg, Georg Friedrich Haas and Beat Furrer provide a musical lens on the battle between the self and the world. These artists are all nice masters of storytelling. Via their compelling writing and highly effective music, they maintain up a mirror to our internal worlds, convey gentle into ominous depths, and seize the essence of common human experiences. The works on this programme additionally place us on the threshold of a turning level, richly evoking each an previous world within the strategy of dying and a brand new world not but born. In so doing, they level to the temporal nature of our existence, stretched between the previous, the current and the long run, between reminiscence, expertise and expectation.

One such turning level occurred in 1940, when the good Jewish thinker and author Walter Benjamin wrote – amid the Nazi atrocities and the Hitler-Stalin Pact – of an ‘angel of historical past’ drifting in direction of the long run whereas gazing again on a catastrophic pile-up of occasions: ‘However a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it’s got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can now not shut them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the long run to which his again is turned, whereas the pile of particles earlier than him grows skyward.’ Our expectations are sure to such an unknowable future within the 2024 programme of the Ouverture spirituelle, which can be contemplated musically with a mixture of concern and hope. Arnold Schoenberg believed that ‘solely the brand new, the unsaid is worth it saying in artwork’, and we are going to mark the a hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his beginning – an anniversary shared with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the creator of Jedermann – on this yr’s programme.

We warmly invite you to discover the wealthy tapestry of life and the ‘depths of the human coronary heart’ by immersing yourselves within the nice artistic endeavors being carried out on the Salzburg Competition this summer time. Be part of us in enterprise, as Stefan Zweig so eloquently phrased it, ‘wanderings over the icy ridges of the thoughts, descents into the hidden springs of the unconscious, ascents to the dizzy heights of self-knowledge’. For it’s by following those that ‘overstep all boundaries’ that we people are made extra conscious of ‘the mysteries of existence’.