Andreas Hofer shares his experiences of the Salzburger Festspiele music festival, held in Salzburg, Austria, throughout the past month and one of the most sought-after summer events by classical music lovers

Sara Tamburini and Peter Simonischek in Der Sturm.

The Unesco World Heritage city of Salzburg would attract enough visitors to make most tourist destinations go green with envy. Towered by Europe’s biggest medieval castle, its sumptuous Baroque facades, steep gabled town houses, domes, spires and palaces outplay Hollywood’s Sound of Music with musical ease.

Yet, its Salzburger Festspiele music festival attracts an additional 250,000 paying opera and concert lovers every summer, to enjoy what are arguably the most high-profile performances of classical music. At least, its budget of €60 million for five weeks of singing is unmatched. What Bayreuth is for Wagner, Salzburg is for Mozart: his operas are the main focus, despite some attempts at modern composers like Riem, or Thomas Ades. Mozart’s birthplace, in the shopping mile of Getreidegasse, is a place of pilgrimage. Candy shops selling Mozartkugeln abound.

This year’s programme, yet again, shone with grand productions and big stars

The festival crowd, listening to the likes of Anne-Sophie Mutter, Ricardo Muti, Daniel Barenboim, Jonas Kaufmann, Cecilia Bartoli or Placido Domingo consists mostly of regulars. Paying up to €430 for good seats, they contribute half of the festival costs, with the rest financed by corporate sponsors and the city and state.

Alain Coulombe, Ildebrando D’Arcangelo and Ruth Walz in Don Giovanni. Photos: Salzberger Festspiele

These are demanding guests: a too controversial director or a weak singer is booed at without mercy. I have seen a performance of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte a few years ago, where singers were forced to stop the performance to let the malcontent leave the venue. Every morning at breakfast, the papers are skimmed for reviews and celebrity sightings. Guests can be at loggerheads about the fading voice of an opera singer; innkeepers may try to please their clientele by agreeing assiduously with their outlandish comments; or by promising to lodge an official protest when their patrons complain about ‘too modern’ a production, or question a daring stage design.

Photographers besiege the red carpet entrance to get a glimpse of celebrities, famous politicians, captains of industry and royals arriving in shiny limousines, from Ban Ki-moon to Angela Merkel, from Vivienne Westwood to Bianca Jagger pop the flashbulps. Grand robes and black tie, miles of organza, silk and tulle; jewellery worth a grand robbery; the festival’s three main venues – Haus fuer Mozart, Grosses Festspielhaus and Felsenreitschule, an open air venue carved out five stories high from the volcanic rock of the castle mount – burst in their seams with the rich and the beautiful.

Miriam Fussenegger in Jedermann.

When poet and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the composer and conductor Richard Strauss and director genius Max Reinhardt (his Salzburg palazzo featured in Sound of Music as the Von Trapp family home) set up the festival in 1920, few would have thought that their project would last unquestioned into the 21st century. Their legacy was in grave danger when the Nazis took over: Reinhardt and Georg Solti emigrated in haste and Toscanini resigned in protest at the persecution of his Jewish stars. In 1944 Goebbels had enough of Salzburg’s restive artists and shut down the festival. But already in the summer of 1945 opera aficionados could rejoice.

Four days before the official end of WWII the festival opened its doors again, under the auspices of US general Mark Clark. The opening performance of Mozart’s Abduction from the Sarail was broadcasted all over the US. After the war, the Salzburg-born Herbert von Karajan, playboy, bon vivant and most celebrated conductor of the 20th century, turned the festival into the international success story it is today.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Everyman, a medieval-inspired morality tale about a rich man facing love, death and the devil, could well be the world’s longest lasting drama production. Staged as an open air spectacle at the steps of Salzburg’s main cathedral, with actors playing on the roofs and cornices of the dome, it was Max Reinhardt’s most talked about production and is shown almost unaltered since 1920, attracting viewers like a funfair.

A too controversial director or a weak singer is booed at without mercy

Its high-profile cast changes regularly and pundits and regulars try to outguess the festival directorate about who should be the next Jedermann, who could be the most beautiful Buhlschaft and who will be the new devil dangling from the church roof.... Sitting after sunset in the packed scaffold amphitheatre the audience is regularly exposed to flooding downpours or stifling heat. The closed baroque square can reach up to 50 degrees in the evening, and I have seen people in the audience with electric fans and wine coolers over their wrists.

Julia Kleiter, Angela Brower and Ruth Walz in Cosi Fan Tutte.

Piotr Beczala and Ildar Abdrazakov in Faust.

This year’s programme, yet again, shone with grand productions and big stars. I saw two plays – Beckett’s Endplay, directed by Dieter Dorn, and The Tempest, put on stage by Deborah Warner. Both were highly successful productions, making good last season’s abysmal lack of drama quality. I marvelled at Anna Netrebko as Manon Lescault, who duetted with her new husband Yusif Eyvazov along Benjamin Bernheim, Armando Pina and Patrick Vogel.

Netrebko is not only the 21st century’s most celebrated voice, she is also the undisputed queen of Salzburg. Her dress, made from 150 metres of tulle and silk and encrusted with 26,000 blinding crystals was the talk of the town. ‘Don Giovanni’ Ildebrando D’Arcangelo and his Leporello Luca Pisaroni (who performed last year in Rosenkavalier with his very well-behaved dog on stage) provoked both standing ovations. Star conductor Franz Welser-Moest was celebrated for his conducting the Viennese Philharmonic Orchestra in the Strauss opera Die Liebe der Danae. Tickets for Charles Gounod’s opera Faust, for Le Nozze di Figaro or for Jules Massenet’s Thais with Berneim, were sold out since December of last year, although last minute cancellations are not unheard of.