The Salzburg Festival Archive will open in the week from 7 to 10 February 2024
The Salzburg Festival Archive will open in the week from 7 to 10 February 2024
The Salzburg Festival Archive will open in the week from 7 to 10 February 2024 with open days in the villa building in the Riedenburg and with the resumption of the FAUST 2023 project in the Felsenreitschule.
“The history of the Salzburg Festival also represents over 100 years of European cultural history. This must be scrutinised again and again, told anew – this is what the new ‘living festival archive’ stands for,” says Markus Hinterhäuser.
The relocation of the Festival Archive from the Schüttkasten to the villa building at Neutorstraße 25 will not only make the holdings easier to use for science and research, but will also make them accessible to an interested public. As a place of remembrance and memory, the archive is intended to contribute to a lively socio-cultural discourse by not only preserving cultural history, but also communicating it and entering into a contemporary dialogue. The Festival Archive can therefore be seen as both a cultural-historical and artistic archive.
After extensive renovation and conversion work in the villa building in Riedenburg on the former barracks site by gswb and the official handover of the keys to the Salzburg Festival in September 2023, the relocation of the extensive archive holdings could begin.
Founded in 1962, the archive contains an extremely heterogeneous range of sources relating to the history of the festival. In addition to historical schedules, programmes, posters and various performance materials – director’s books, set and costume designs, incidental music, etc. – it also contains, for example, construction plans of the festival theatres, extensive photographic documents, minutes and correspondence. It is also home to a specialised library, (partial) estates of well-known Festival personalities such as Oscar Fritz Schuh and the holdings of the former Max Reinhardt Research Centre.
On the ground floor of the Festival Archive, a permanent exhibition offers insights into the eventful history of the institution.
The exhibition and archive can be visited from mid-February on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10:00 to 16:00 without prior appointment; visits by groups and/or individuals can also be booked at other times by prior appointment.
Contact: Archive of the Salzburg Festival – Neutorstraße 25 – 5020 Salzburg –
archiv@salzburgfestival.at
The reading room in the conservatory with the Everyman table is not only used for research work, but also for small-scale events.
Open days
We are celebrating the reopening of the Festival Archive at its new location in the Riedenburg with open days in the villa/new archive building. Interested parties can visit the archive premises on a one-hour guided tour from Wednesday, 7 February to Saturday, 10 February between 12:00 and 17:00. The number of visitors per tour is limited, which is why registration via the Salzburg Festival website is required:
https://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/p/salzburger-festspiele-archiv-fuehrung-2024
FAUST 2023 resumed
Parallel to the opening of the archive, the highly acclaimed FAUST 2023 project, which arose from the idea of a living archive, will be resumed. To mark the 150th anniversary of Max Reinhardt’s birth and 80th anniversary of his death, Max Reinhardt’s last Salzburg production, Goethe’s Faust from 1933 with a stage design by Clemens Holzmeister, was brought to life in a contemporary way in summer 2023 together with the Ars Electronica Futurelab using documents and materials from the festival archive, among other things. In performative guided tours, the legendary Faust city is brought to life in a virtual reality recreation on the Felsenreitschule stage.
Tickets for the performative tours, which will be offered from Wednesday, 7 February to Saturday, 10 February at the Felsenreitschule, can be booked via the Salzburg Festival website:
https://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/p/faust-2023-eine-performative-fuehrung-2024