Letter from Salzburg

Founded in the summer of 1920, the legendary Salzburg Festival will celebrate its first centenary this coming year. But in 1967, Herbert von Karajan, the Festival’s Director since 1956, started a highly prestigious sister festival encompassing the 10 days from just before Palm Sunday until Easter Monday. It was his own little Bayreuth featuring the Berlin Philharmonic rather than the Vienna Philharmonic, the summer Festival’s traditional resident orchestra. The first edition featured Die Walküre starring Canadian tenor Jon Vickers as Siegmund, Gundula Janowitz as Sieglinde, Régine Crespin as Brünnhilde and Thomas Stewart as Wotan. The Cycle would run from 1967-70 with stellar casts; the productions were staged by von Karajan himself.

Easter

From 1967 to 2012, the Berlin Philharmonic and its respective chief conductors were at the heart of the Easter Festival. In 2010, a scandalous period of fraud, deception and attempted suicide occurred under the general direction of Michael De Witte who was finally sentenced to three years in prison for embezzlement of Festival funds. Disastrous for its image, the scandal nevertheless ushered in a new era beginning in 2013 with conductor Christian Thielemann taking the reins, replacing the Berlin Philharmonic with his own Staatskapelle Dresden as the new resident orchestra.

This year’s Festival opened on Apr. 13 with conducted by Thielemann and directed by Jens-Daniel Herzog starring German tenor Klaus Florian Vogt as Walther von Stolzing, American soprano Jacquelyn Wagner as Eva, and German bass Georg Zeppenfeld in his role debut as Hans Sachs. Joining them were Sebastian Kohlhepp singing his first David, Vitalij Kowaljow as Pogner and