News received directly from Salzburg:
The 2020 Salzburg Festival will
take place from 1 to 30 August, but in a modified and shortened form, due to
coronavirus containment measures.
This decision was made by the
Salzburg Festival’s Supervisory Board in its special meeting on Monday
afternoon.
The Festival directorate of Helga
Rabl-Stadler, Markus Hinterhäuser and Lukas Crepaz as well as Bettina Hering,
director of drama, and Florian Wiegand, director of concerts, presented a draft
programme covering 30 days as well as the outline of a security concept for all
performance venues.
Half an hour before the meeting
of the Supervisory Board, Minister of Health Rudolf Anschober and
Undersecretary of State for Culture Andrea Mayer presented the decree
determining important parameters for all presenters in Austria. This gives the
Salzburg Festival concrete indications of how to proceed.
Landeshauptmann Wilfried Haslauer
commented: “It is a great relief that this decree has provided greater clarity
for all presenters of cultural events. This enables us to present the Festival,
which is the artistic and economic motor of our region, after all. Fortunately,
it also gives the many smaller initiatives which constitute the cultural
diversity of our State a chance.”
The decree and the decision of
the Supervisory Board have enabled the Festival directorate to announce the
decision on the presentation of the Festival, originally scheduled for 30 May,
at this earlier point in time.
The summer of 2020 will not see
the implementation of the centenary programme announced with such joy and
received with such empathy by the audience throughout the world this past
autumn.
However, it will be possible to implement a programme which is
artistically meaningful and economically justifiable. Instead of 200 events
over 44 days at 16
performance
venues, there will be approximately 90 performances over 30 days at a maximum
of 6 venues.
All the productions of the
anniversary programme which cannot be shown in 2020 will be postponed to 2021.
The centenary programme is to begin with the opening of the State Exhibition at
the end of July 2020 and end with the closing of the Festival on 31 August
2021.
Of course, the centenary of the
founding play Jedermann will be celebrated on 22 August 2020. The
details of the modified programme will be presented by Artistic Director Markus
Hinterhäuser at the beginning of June.
After the cancellation of the
Salzburg Whitsun Festival and the refunding this necessitated, the Ticket Office
of the Festival now faces an even greater challenge. At the beginning of this
year, the Festival was proud to celebrate a new record in ticket sales. 180,000
tickets with a total value of 24.5 million Euros have already been sold.
The modified programme will
feature completely different dates and a significantly reduced number of
performances, which now forces the Festival to reverse and refund its entire
ticket sales. When assigning new tickets, those in possession of tickets for
the original programme will have priority. All customers will be informed
personally and in detail on the procedure during the coming days.
Markus Hinterhäuser: “It pains
me to be forced to cancel so many artists’ appearances for this year, as we had
developed special programme constellations with many of them. Still, I am glad
to have the opportunity to send a vibrant and powerful signal for the arts with
this new Festival programme.”
