Salzburg Festival 2024 - Schedule, Program & Tickets

Movements between heaven and hell trace the works of the 2024 festival summer; They tell of the elemental beauty of the excessive as well as of the “demonic” abysses hidden therein, of limitless loneliness - and the dizzying, godless freedom.
They are life trajectories of ever valid archetypes that we are eager and reluctant to follow
follow at the same time. The destructive narcissist Don Giovanni, the relentless avenger Vitellia, the deluded traitor Sesto, the virtuously mild Tito, the feverish gambler, the romantic artist Hoffmann, the dubious femme fragile, father and mother murderer, a mysterious idiot, a soulful singer, a rich one Grandmother and a “crooked, soul-sick man”, fickle dreamers, unhappy desirers – and many others we meet in the 2024 festival program. Each and every one of them traverses this very path between heaven and hell. Their stories tell of the deepest longings, of the fragility of life, of failure due to excess and greed, of torturous self-destruction, the hell of passions - but also of the hopeful expectation of what is to come. The night pieces and character studies that we present to you are based on works by “great literary border-crossers” (Stefan Zweig)
underlying: the literary models range from the old myths to those of modern times right up to the great novels of classical modernity; from the earliest Greek tragedies to the poems about Don Quixote and Don Juan, from the imagined phantasms of E. T. A. Hoffmann to the overwrought novels of Dostoyevsky, to whom Stefan Zweig attested “the power of a microscope and the luminosity of the clairvoyant”; The epic panopticon spans from Thomas Mann's description of the downfall of the bourgeois world to Zweig's great moments of humanity to a biblical story by Botho Strauss, which eloquently misses people in crisis and the conflict between self and world - and which composers like Mozart, Offenbach, Prokofiev and Weinberg, Georg Friedrich Haas and Beat Furrer set the music to music. They are all great masters of storytelling. Through their narrative and through their music, they draw mirror images of our mental states, they bring the uncanny and the abysses to light, they extract the essence of general human experience. The works also allusively refer to a threshold, that turning point at which an old world is dying and the new has not yet been born - and thus to the temporality of our existence, that between the past, the present and the future, between remembering, experiencing and expecting is stretched out.
In 1940, the great Jewish philosopher and writer Walter Benjamin - under the impression of the Nazi horror and the Hitler-Stalin pact - described the “angel of history” at such a turning point, driving towards the future, with his eyes turned towards the catastrophic events: “But one A storm is blowing from Paradise, which has become caught in its wings and is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him inexorably into the future, which he turns his back on while the pile of rubble before him grows towards the sky.”
Our expectation is directed towards such an invisible, coming time, which we will trace musically in the Overture Spiritual in 2024, which we look forward to with fear or hope. In the concert program we will also turn to the “new, unsaid, that is worth saying in art” with Arnold Schönberg, whose birthday - like that of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the poet of Everyman Morality - will be 150 years old in 2024.
We cordially invite you to explore the fullness of life and the “depth of the human heart” in the great works of art in the coming festival summer, with us “walks over the icy ridges of thought, the descents to the most hidden sources of the unconscious, to undertake the ascent to the dizzying peaks of self-knowledge” (Stefan Zweig). Because without the “transgressors of all measure, humanity would know less about its innate secret”.

Kristina Hammer · Markus Hinterhäuser · Lukas Crepaz
Directorate of the Salzburg Festival