Everyman expects a feast ... Festival in Salzburg – character and uniqueness

Neue Residenz – First floor

Mirrored room, LED signs, monitors, various overview plans

Statistics, data and facts are compacted into a spatial installation dealing with the character of the Salzburg Festival in the context of European festivals.

The Salzburg Festival started in 1920 with four official performances and two special performances of Jedermann / Everyman on Domplatz before some 14,000 guests. 100 years later, almost 240,000 tickets should have been printed for around
220 performances in 15 venues. The programme includes performances of opera, straight drama and concert. These have been the three pillars of the Salzburg Festival since 1922, still defining its special character today. Because the Salzburg Festival from the very beginning has restricted itself neither to one genre nor one composer, it differs from the early festivals that might have provided models for its establishment: the Munich Opera Festival (since 1875) and the Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth (since 1876). In the course of history, the Salzburg Festival itself developed into a model or point of reference for many newly established national and international festivals. Their number is scarcely calculable today. In Europe alone, there are some 90 festivals,
each attracting more than 20,000 guests per season. The exhibition room outlines not only the history, the key factors and the options available to festivals, but also the form, the programmatic policy and the artistic 345
agenda of the Salzburg Festival in particular. This also manifests its outstanding status as a cultural event with global impact.