Markus Hinterhäuser

Markus Hinterhäuser was born in La Spezia (Italy). He studied piano at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna and at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg and attended masterclasses with Elisabeth Leonskaja and Oleg Maisenberg, among others.

As a pianist, Markus Hinterhäuser has performed as a soloist and chamber musician at internationally renowned festivals and at the world’s major concert halls, such as Carnegie Hall, Vienna’s Musikverein and Konzerthaus and La Scala, Milan. He has appeared at the Salzburg Festival, the Lucerne Festival, Wien Modern, the Holland Festival, the Festival d’Automne, the Berliner Festspiele and elsewhere. In the field of Lieder interpretation, his long-standing collaboration with Brigitte Fassbaender is particularly noteworthy. Since 2014 Markus Hinterhäuser and baritone Matthias Goerne have performed the Lieder cycle Winterreise by Franz Schubert in a worldwide tour. This startling production, conceived in co-operation with William Kentridge, has been shown at the Sydney Festival, the San Francisco Opera, at the Cité de la Musique in Paris, in Amsterdam, Aix-en-Provence, New York, Seoul, and at the Singapore International Arts Festival and the Berliner Festspiele.

Markus Hinterhäuser has repeatedly participated in music drama productions staged by Christoph Marthaler, Johan Simons and Klaus Michael Grüber, including the Wiener Festwochen productions of Schutz vor der Zukunft (Marthaler, 2005; revived in 2006; numerous international guest performances) and Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared (Grüber, 2005).

For many years he has also focused on the interpretation of contemporary music, in particular of works by Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Morton Feldman, György Ligeti and Galina Ustvolskaya. Alongside numerous recordings for radio and television, he has also recorded the complete œuvre for piano by Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, as well as compositions by Morton Feldman, Luigi Nono, Giacinto Scelsi, Galina Ustvolskaya and John Cage. His widely acclaimed CD recording of Richard Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder with Asmik Grigorian (Laws of Solitude) was released in February 2024.

As a cultural manager, Markus Hinterhäuser won international acclaim as the co-founder and artistic director (together with Tomas Zierhofer-Kin) of the Zeitfluss series presented from 1993 to 2001 in the context of the Salzburg Festival. At the Wiener Festwochen, Markus Hinterhäuser and Tomas Zierhofer-Kin co-founded and co-directed the Zeit-Zone series, which was part of the Wiener Festwochen programme from 2002 to 2004. From 2007 to 2011, he was responsible for the concert programme of the Salzburg Festival, followed by his tenure as artistic director for the 2011 season. He was artistic director of the Wiener Festwochen from 2014 to 2016. In October 2016, Markus Hinterhäuser became artistic director of the Salzburg Festival. In April 2024, his contract was extended by the Supervisory Board for another five years, through September 2031. Following disagreements that arose in February 2026 over the appointment of a new head of drama, Markus Hinterhäuser and the Supervisory Board agreed to terminate his contract. ‘Due to irreconcilable differences of opinion, the Salzburg Festival and Artistic Director Markus Hinterhäuser have decided to part ways, effective immediately,’ the Festival’s Supervisory Board announced at the end of March 2026.

Markus Hinterhäuser was a defining presence at the Salzburg Festival from 1993 onward, contributing significantly to its international prestige. Over the ten seasons of his artistic directorship, he steered the Festival through a period widely regarded as among the most successful in recent decades, both artistically and financially. His tenure opened with profoundly moving and powerful productions of Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, and Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, outstanding in their musical realization as well as their staging. Under his stewardship, the Festival set new artistic benchmarks with a string of landmark productions, including Strauss’s Salome and Elektra, Enescu’s Œdipe, Janáček’s Káťa Kabanová, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Verdi’s Macbeth and Martinů’s The Greek Passion among others. The now-legendary 2020 pandemic production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte will be revived in the 2026 season, for which Hinterhäuser also planned the Festival’s drama programming. Equally renowned were his artistically inventive visions for the Ouverture spirituelle and the concert programming, each unmistakably bearing his personal signature.

In February 2024, Markus Hinterhäuser was awarded a Trophée Radio Classique in Paris for his artistic directorship of the Salzburg Festival. Most recently, he received the award of ‘Best Production of the Year, 2024’ at the OPER! Awards in Brussels for Salzburg Festival’s production of The Idiot, directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski.

In 2021, Markus Hinterhäuser was named Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. In December 2024 Governor Wilfried Haslauer awarded him the Badge of Honour of the State of Salzburg.